My son likes to stay in hotels because they have great pools, but what I like is ironing a shirt with the iron the hotel supplies on the board that folds into the wall, with the TV low, and whatever weather is going on outside in its most intense and local phase, and what I feel in those moments is both anonymous and myself, not father, not son. My mother was full of warnings about hotels. One warning was never leave a glass beside your bed, or you may fling out your hand and slice your wrist. And so I don’t. But then my son, back from the swimming pool, says if you die wearing glasses your ghost will wear glasses. I like to take off my glasses entering, then go to the window and look out.
"'The Iron' is the last poem in 'Travelers Leaving for the City,' setting compressed pleasure alongside magnified worry. I never iron at home, but do things differently away. The book’s first poem speaks of a terrified vision in a hotel room that unsettles me to this day, and the book’s central event is the murder of my grandfather in a hotel. Hotel rooms are metaphors; metaphors are adjacent rooms."
"Trethewey challenged her friend to write about his whiteness, as she had written about her Blackness, and it prompted him to spend years investigating the lynching of a man named Robert Edwards, in 1912, and all the violence that followed: church burnings, house bombings, and night raids that forced out the nearly eleven hundred African-Americans who lived in Forsyth County at the time."
Resources for Supporting and Uplifting the Black Community
Black Women Radicals: "Black Women Radicals (BWR) is a Black feminist advocacy organization dedicated to uplifting and cultivating Black women’s radical political activism."
Center for Black Equity: "The Center for Black Equity is the National leader in connecting members of the Black LGBTQ+ community with information and resources to educate, engage and empower their fight for equity and access."
The Innocence Project: "The Innocence Project's mission is to free the staggering number of innocent people who remain incarcerated, and to bring reform to the system responsible for their unjust imprisonment."
Poetry Daily stands with the Black community. We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality. We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter.
"Early in my encounter with poetry 'The Fish' taught me that description has the ability to consecrate and even transubstantiate what’s being looked at, especially if it’s an object or thing, like a fish. In Bishop’s poem, the moment of consecration takes place as the speaker considers his eyes and notices among other things how 'They shifted a little, but not/ to return my stare.'"
