Sartorial View: How to Dress for Success
Impression management is a requisite to performing on the social stage of life. To possess a keen sense of style provides the ability to wield power across settings by keeping an impeccable image. Author John T. Molloy asserted the importance of dressing for success in his books of similar name, outlining nearly fifty years ago…
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Butterflies Think With Their Feet
At twelve a woman whispered in my ear and told me caterpillars don’t always become butterflies. It’s dependent upon their environment and food, sometimes they become moths. The first crime performed against me decided my fate.
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Love in the Afternoon, Restoration
For the first time, I read a poem of mine (written in real time at the workshop) for an audience. Love in courage, I share my piece:
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Babies
Poetic thought on the blessing coming prior to the maturity. Sometimes we postpone decisions or run from opportunity because we feel ill-prepared and lack faith; fear clouds the path to good stewardship. And in parenthood? Is one ever truly ready? Psalms 127:3 “Children are a gift from the Lord. They are a reward from Him.”
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Role Call
Roll Call by Margery Hannah I am only a person tall and plain, tongue maimed long ago when cow bells were ringing. I was in love with those big eye chocolates reminding me of me.
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A Note on Dark Matter
I was just thinking about dark matter, how powerful it is, how it is the beginning of us all, the mother, the Eve, thee eve. Dark matter is undetectable, yet robustly influential on the universe and evolution, and black holes let nothing escape–not light, not stars, not galaxies. At the latter’s edge, time appears to stop…
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Taboo Brown and Blue
Genetics dictate we are a 50/50 split of our parents, and researchers have identified various cycles that continue from one generation to the next. But how similar are we really to our parents and how do we become our own person–and what loop will we become in the chain of familial tradition?
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Killeen Sky
by Margery Hannah There is an ocean largeabove Texas where copper flickers ivory fish ribs scale the expanse like veins in overgrown leaves and a skeleton man smiles downat me Where clouds paddle near eternity And I inhale and swim intermittently Where from one small lightgenerations are born And stars salute as soldiers to respectable…
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Median
Monday meter from #theliterarypurveyor: An avenue named for the state and its best city is the median for two juxtaposed neighboring communities—Crown Heights and Brownsville—and the setting for today’s #poetry
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A Hero is More than a Sandwich
The stumble I don’t recall, only the image of the tall, lean nanny named Jean standing at the top of the basement staircase looking down at me, unmoved by my cries, navigates the hippocampus.
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The Welcoming Committee
The Welcoming Committee asked me to present a thirty dollar poem. Like sun-sweet honey make it, they say, coruscate and luke-warm.
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Crystal White
I’ve lived at twelve o’ four Clymouth street for over fifty years. I’ve seen people move in and out and trees grow from saplings into fat telephone poles with umbrellas that shade the streets like canopies. Don’t ask me what kind of trees—I don’t pay much attention if they don’t yield fruit. Lord knows I…
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Storms
I look forward to them the way I once wet-tongued over cotton candy as a child. Neon afro-sugar melting in my mouth, what is sweeter than that?
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Shard in the Eye
Recently, I reflected on my birth order and whether I fit the associated stereotypes. I am the baby of the bunch: my dad, a young widower nearly ten years my mother’s junior, had two beautiful girls (eight and nine years my senior) when he met and married my mom. My mother had given birth to…
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Orange Can of Kerosene
I stood out back, with an orange can of kerosene in my right hand, looking at the overgrown grass, hanging tree limbs, and corroding nails through the roof shingle lying at my feet. All times when walking in the yard I was careful; the fallen shake multiplied daily and soon the roof underlayment would be…
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Fox and Sand Rats
A sly fox uses a secret to build an empire that includes a pack of sand rats.
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A Long Way Home
Humility breeds optimism, so we had assurance in loads. Still, it pained me to go. The heartland, like the heart, is sick and deceitful; it cannot be trusted. The heart is what kept us in Wichita for two long years and had I continued to follow it, the girls and I would still be some…
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Before I paved still air
to my place of bread I was unpleasant unpleasantly duressed by lack of water I could wash neither body nor favorite dress nor feed my yielding inedible plant, nor swallow it 240 minutes waterless
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On Pride, Not Prejudice
I’m a cocky son of a bitch. Instead of heeding to the eternal wisdom of God, humbling myself under His mighty hand so at the proper time He might exalt me (1 Peter 5:6), I’ve been busy luxuriating on a delusional high horse. I’ve got the heart of integrity and the blood of the enslaved…
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Harlem Shuffle
And the time came to let go of my white people on a residential rooftop view and waterfront backyard with a baseball field on the side. With all its man-buns, diverse restaurants, bars, Polish culture and consignment shops, Greenpoint couldn’t compete with uptown Manhattan, where a renaissance of black excellence ascends history at more counts…
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Prosperity
Prosperity By Margery Hannah Sand falls to the platter of dry branches resting in a baby cardboard box I bless you and lower my gaze wipe greased palms on linen white Drop it in the box Chant, “Prosperity, prosperity, prosperity” Match the platter with burning light Now, spit upon the flames You are now a…
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We Are Stardust
We Are Stardust By Margery Hannah I killed a star last night. With my fist I threw a rope, summoned a lasso and snatched him from the sky.
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Sister Twisted
Sister Twisted By Margery Hannah by Margery Hannah I look in the mirror and see my spine twist
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Still Life
Still Life By Margery Hannah A snow globe is where I am A world where white snow falls without freezing. The house always stands untouched and happy in warm hands of what is living and real.
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Fig Trees
Fig Trees By Margery Hannah I want to be the red dot beaming on canvas bleached The Son I am to ears bright of faces without teeth The Tupac of despair, the Pryor of fears laughing at tears dried by Martin’s dream
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Go For Yours
In A Revolutionary Life, John Lee Anderson wrote Che Guevara had a sense of security only trust fund beneficiaries understand. Recently, I came across decade-old letters and emails I’d sent the administrator of my now dissolved family trust that made me both cringe at my audacity and smile at my courage. Funding requests for an…
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Revisiting The Canterbury Tales: Arveragus’ Defense
What non-Biblical book competes with Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales? I discovered Chaucer’s masterpiece back in Honors English 102 at WSU, courtesy of Dr. William Woods, and the lessons of honor, integrity, knighthood, and class have since with me remained. From its poetic prowess to its cultural notations, The Canterbury Tales is a medieval kindle still…
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Home Beyond Lodabar: From NYC to Wichita, Kansas and Back
How are the imaginations of New York City children fostered without the ability to look up and see stars? Perhaps the New York City skyline sufficiently espouses the greatness of man, placing a seed in the mind of its youth that all things are possible; maybe it is the sheer beauty of the lights sustaining…
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Milo Baughman and Such Relics
By the time I began visualizing what kind of sofa to manifest for my Moving On Up home during my divorced-in-my-mid-twenties years, mom announced she’d found it. “I saw your sectional at King’s,” she said during a standard unannounced drop-in, beckoning me into her Ford pick-up truck, bought with a secret appeal of on her…
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Storms Are But A Memory
This memory (or is it a feeling or act?) of fear as instructed by the Almighty God telling me I MUST do what is right–right, a simple thing convoluted by either fleshly desire or the other thing, that much lesser thing roaming the earth to and fro looking for whom to devour, goes back as…
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“There is a relation between the hours of life and the centuries of time.”
Psychology Today heralds the gut as something that must be trusted for three reasons: 1) Your intuition is shaped by your past experiences, and your existing knowledge which you gained from them; 2) Your intuition is encoded in your brain like “a web of fact and feeling”; 3) Your intuition connects you with all the…
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On the MFA – Creative Writer, I See
In short, an MFA in Creative Writing & Literature is not recommended. It’s nice networking— many of your instructors will have taught some of the greats and will in fact be some of the greats, but like all creative spaces there is a fantastic degree of subjectiveness to which the weak hinge their self-worth. A…
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By Interior Design – A Classic Russian Read in the Time of Corona
Iván Ilych wasn’t so bad. He beat neither his wife nor children. Every day he worked, and provided a home for his family while fairly prioritizing his children’s education. So he didn’t like to be home. How was he to cope with a nag? He lived beyond his means, too, but so does the average…
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For the Writers – Little Matters
And so it’s stated in the first page of Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing, the most important arguments are within. Great; in this I’m well versed. It’s been the substance of procrastination for many a day and it’s the general recipe of chaos versus control. Aren’t poets known…
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The best of Harlem, day and night
“Home sweet home” is more than a phrase mumbled by the oft traveler, or announced by the long laborer, or sang by the prodigal upon passing though the threshold of–irreverent of humble or grand–abode; it is a return to the crawl in need of one’s soul, a womb-like sanctuary sheltering us–in happy homes–from the world.
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