the louderARTS Project

Photo courtesy of D.R. Lee

Thomas Sayers Ellis

Thomas Sayers Ellis was born and raised in Washington, D.C., co-founded The Dark Room Collective; and received his M.F.A. from Brown University in 1995. His work has appeared in The American Poetry Review; AGNI; Best American Poetry (1997 and 2001); Boston Book Review; Boston Review; Callaloo; Fence; Grand Street; Hambone; Harvard Advocate; Harvard Review; the Kenyon Review; Ploughshares; the Pushcart Prize 1998; the Southern Review and The Garden Thrives: Twentieth-Century African-American Poetry; Tin House; Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers; American Poetry: The Next Generation and Wax Poetics. He has received fellowships from The Ohio Arts Council, The MacDowell Colony, The Fine Arts Work Center (in Provincetown) and YADDO; and in 1993 he coedited On the Verge: Emerging Poets and Artists. Mr. Ellis is a contributing editor of Callaloo and his first collection The Good Junk (1996) was published in the Graywolf annual Take Three. He is also the author of a chapbook The Genuine Negro Hero, (Kent State University Press, 2001); and the forthcoming The Maverick Room (Graywolf 2005). An Associate Professor of English at Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, Ohio) and a faculty member of The Lesley University low-residency M.F.A program (Cambridge, Massachusetts), he is currently compiling and editing Quotes Community: Notes for Black Poets.

www.tsellis.com
www.graywolfpress.org

The Return of COLORED ONLY

One of these badass,
glorious days,
the signs and negative sounds
that worked against us

will all begin their tenures
of service, their holy and complex repentance.
It has already begun with
"Nigger" and "Bitch"
and for this we have young folks to thank,
their disrespect and fearlessness.

Naturally, this will scare
the civil rights out of some
and, for a mad-moment, empower
a great many wrong-cultured others.

To this "The Return..."
will either code switch or hood ornament,
drama-drumming both––a cult-nats matrimony
of the vernacular re-mix: ain’t studin’ you,
nommo no more nommo,
stop studin’ us.

All yall who tell yall hearts Art,
your Bama Hour is, again, up-struggling
as we (credits and debits alike)
hang and unhang the old slanders ourselves

--not as segregationists
(although that wouldn’t be
that bad, given...) and not as Air Februarians
(.., given…) but as identity repair-people,
faders of trick moves, trope-a-dopes
and okey dokes,

laying our dice down like (          ) we love us.

© Thomas Sayers Ellis