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timothy veit jones

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I.
my fiance is 29.

in an effort to make sure
we live a long life together,

she got me
                taking vitamins
                drinking smoothies
                and eating my fuckin vegetables

she be side eyein me
i always leave those green thangs
                                                                                                                                                on a small corner of my plate
                                                                                and eat them dead last

We find ways to keep costs low,
gentrified neighborhood and all,
so we buy meats and perishables in Long Island
and get all our produce from a CSA

CSA
sounds like one of those alphabet soup
law enforcement agencies that pumped
enough crack into communities
to transform them into a paradise of kale
carrying bodegas

II.

First CSA Order

E-mail from Nexdoorgainics
6/15/2015

Bag contents:

1 lbs Green Beans                                         she’s gonna need to force feed me these
1 head Broccoli                                              i can handle that.
1 each Ginger Carrots                                  never thought to combine those.
1 bunch Rainbow Chard                              these ain’t collards.
1 lbs New Potatoes                                      aight. I can cook these.
1 bunch Bushwick Greens                          the fuck? Do they grow on the J train?
1 each Green Tomato                                  like that old movie with white ladies fryin em?
1 each round Zucchini                                 greaaaat. a giant green veggie dick.
2 each Cucumber                                         make that 3.

they threw in artichoke, beets, and rutabaga
cuz our homie works there and is the plug

She picked up the bag
and left town for a conference the next day

I opened the bag, had no idea
how to cook half of what was in there

So I shoved that bag
in the back of the fridge
and ordered a pizza

The fuck I look like cooking a rutabaga?
I can’t even spell rutabaga.

Purple cabbage. Blue carrots. Sunchokes. Them long tall ass onions (scallions).
It’s a bag of confusion that taunts me from the back of my cold ass fridge
while I eat my pizza watching Narcos.

III.

I fall asleep watching Narcos because I ate a full sicilian pie.
There is no way to stay awake after eating that much food.

My food dream was a story my future father-in-law told me.

I’m in a giant mouse maze running
at one end of the labyrinth is a food dish filled with cocaine

                                                                                                    this is why you shouldn’t overeat and watch Narcos

the ground shakes, a white
sandstorm pounds metal

I run, jittery, ticking
turn corners in a blur and stumble

into another dish, metal,
overflowing with sweet white

IV.

My future father-in-law told me sugar is more addictive than cocaine. The proof is in the Coca-Cola. They took the caine out. We still drink it. The proof is in the Arizona. I know adults who hate the taste of water and prefer iced tea. We be overdosin on sugar, eat sugar till joints swell
and limbs are amputated. If we gotta choose between diabetic shock and eating the Oreos stashed under the couch, it ain’t even a choice.


Timothy Prolific Veit Jones is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for March 2018.

Timothy Prolific Veit Jones a poet, educator, and organizer whose creative work operates in the continuum of the Black Arts Movement, using a multi-disciplinary approach rooted in Hip-Hop culture as an African Diasporic folkloric praxis. He has performed his poetry at a diverse variety of venues, from Cornell University to Rikers Island to STooPS in Bed-Stuy. He has been published in African Voices, 12th Street, the graphic novel Gunplay, the Penmanship Book anthology 30/30 Vol. 2, The Ferguson Moment, and YRB Magazine. Through his former publishing company, Andre Maurice Press/Indelible Books, he edited and released Blackout Arts Collective’s One Mic: A Lyrics on Lockdown Anthology and Peuo Tuy’s Khmer Girl. Tim was a Riggio Fellow at The New School, and is a fellow at The Watering Hole. He is the author of Musaic: 40 Days, 40 Nights and the forthcoming ethnographic book of poetry titled Water + Blood. Timothy is the Visioning Partner (VP) for Institutional Culture at PURPOSE Productions, teaches Kuumba/Integrated Arts at Ember Charter Schools, and is the co-founder of the Rebel Waters publishing and performance collaborative. He is from Uniondale (Long Island), and lives in Bed-Stuy.

Featured image via Pixabay.

There is a coarseness to the English language that makes it almost unpalatable for African tongues. These words make us cough up the bones of our indigenous languages. We were told to chew and digest them to become the ideal workforce – cheap and silent. We swallowed them whole with the hope that one day they would emerge from our bellies and live free. Sometimes they escape in fragments. Make no mistake about it, indigenous words are knives. Eyes widen when the new tongues they strangled our old ones with rebel with clicks and sounds they thought were beaten or bred out. Bodies wince when the sound punctures their eardrums. They fear we will slit throats with these fragments, and suspend the carcass of a game named servitude.

//

the English language
tastes like sandpaper,
embraces speech organ
like a boa constrictor

there is no freedom of tongue,
ability to speak shackled in a ship’s belly
chained to the stench of death

speaking English
smells like surviving
a slaughterhouse

we speak it soaked in bloody remains

every now and then we cough
up a remnant, nouns coated in sinew,
adjectives embraced by tendons,
verbs pulse the phantom arteries
of dismembered language families

this quilt we speak
is sewn with blood
patched memory
born of shea and ceiba trees
as much as pine and mahogany

they call it broken
because their backs
could never endure
welts and scars
and still take weight

they call it broken
because their esophagi
are too sensitive to tolerate
being scraped by bones
with the utterance of every word

we call it survival


Timothy Prolific Veit Jones is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for March 2018.

Timothy Prolific Veit Jones a poet, educator, and organizer whose creative work operates in the continuum of the Black Arts Movement, using a multi-disciplinary approach rooted in Hip-Hop culture as an African Diasporic folkloric praxis. He has performed his poetry at a diverse variety of venues, from Cornell University to Rikers Island to STooPS in Bed-Stuy. He has been published in African Voices, 12th Street, the graphic novel Gunplay, the Penmanship Book anthology 30/30 Vol. 2, The Ferguson Moment, and YRB Magazine. Through his former publishing company, Andre Maurice Press/Indelible Books, he edited and released Blackout Arts Collective’s One Mic: A Lyrics on Lockdown Anthology and Peuo Tuy’s Khmer Girl. Tim was a Riggio Fellow at The New School, and is a fellow at The Watering Hole. He is the author of Musaic: 40 Days, 40 Nights and the forthcoming ethnographic book of poetry titled Water + Blood. Timothy is the Visioning Partner (VP) for Institutional Culture at PURPOSE Productions, teaches Kuumba/Integrated Arts at Ember Charter Schools, and is the co-founder of the Rebel Waters publishing and performance collaborative. He is from Uniondale (Long Island), and lives in Bed-Stuy.

Featured image via PublicDomainPictures.net.

Grandmothers, Ancestors, Orishas, Most High God,
please help me read the shells of my fractured lineage to know from whence i/we come

The answers to my/our origin
are not in ether or entropy
but in the shells, in the husks,
in torn skins and seeds
and plants and seasonings and split
infinitives and beats
and rhymes and lives                                                                                                             (RIP Phife)
and movements and lessons

Let the congregation say Amen
            Blessed be Grandma Claire’s greens*
Let the church say Amen
            Blessed be her carved bird
Let the church say Amen
            Blessed be the yams, candied (Grandma Claire’s) or otherwise (Mama Anna’s)
Let the people say Amen
            Blessed be the rice
                                                 and beans
                                                 and peas
                                                             jolof / jambalaya / jolofalaya
                                                                                             arroz con errythang (errybody loves arroz)
Let the saints say Amen
            Blessed be the grits (with butter and cheese and salt or sugar but never ketchup)
                          be the porridge
                          be the fufu

Amen            Amen            Amen            Amen             Amen
        Amein                        Amon                        Amonhetep                        hetep                        hetep

May the peace of the Most High that be everlasting rejoin
this coconut, transfigure it into a chariot to carry we home

 

*The refrain “Blessed be…” is inspired “The Hairmaid’s Tale” from The Rundown with Robin Thede, S1E2


Timothy Prolific Veit Jones is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for March 2018.

Timothy Prolific Veit Jones a poet, educator, and organizer whose creative work operates in the continuum of the Black Arts Movement, using a multi-disciplinary approach rooted in Hip-Hop culture as an African Diasporic folkloric praxis. He has performed his poetry at a diverse variety of venues, from Cornell University to Rikers Island to STooPS in Bed-Stuy. He has been published in African Voices, 12th Street, the graphic novel Gunplay, the Penmanship Book anthology 30/30 Vol. 2, The Ferguson Moment, and YRB Magazine. Through his former publishing company, Andre Maurice Press/Indelible Books, he edited and released Blackout Arts Collective’s One Mic: A Lyrics on Lockdown Anthology and Peuo Tuy’s Khmer Girl. Tim was a Riggio Fellow at The New School, and is a fellow at The Watering Hole. He is the author of Musaic: 40 Days, 40 Nights and the forthcoming ethnographic book of poetry titled Water + Blood. Timothy is the Visioning Partner (VP) for Institutional Culture at PURPOSE Productions, teaches Kuumba/Integrated Arts at Ember Charter Schools, and is the co-founder of the Rebel Waters publishing and performance collaborative. He is from Uniondale (Long Island), and lives in Bed-Stuy.

Featured image via Pixabay.