Your Chaos, My Flow

This image takes me back to my Bronx roots, circa 1980-1981 - some years before Hip-Hop became a worldwide phenomenom. Graffiti was everywhere (I mean, everywhere) and everyone rocked their own style. I was still a child, then, but heavily influenced by the unfettered imaginations and the artistic anarchy.
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DIRTY FREEDOM

Dirty Freedom

There was a dirty freedom in the 1980’s
when grafitti was written on the walls of our brain
and we rode the train
on the laps of people stoned and dancing,
killing and cursing.

Bibles were thrown way up into the air
and they later came down and crushed good, beautiful people
already concentrated into volcanic ghettos-
humans covered in disease and debris
blowing away-
from every last immigrant parade,
every last existential blowing, hollow
empty flag.

All colors slink and shine in this dark universe
of individual universes
who move slowly with the weight of their culture and color,
trying to remember
to forget
that assimilation becomes a cellular duty-
survival of the filthiest.

How do you arrange the fragments
that make up the puzzle that is you,
to arrive at some sort of honest human picture,
as you walk through what is left
of the hollow recesses of your dying culture
scattered throughout the terrain of your
broken borough’s mind?

by Tiffany Osedra Miller

Moving Pictures - A Bronx Hip-Hop Bio-Collage-Take 1!

Moving Pictures

Catholic High School
a backdrop
my brother wears a flat top
with an arrow crowning his head.
My best friend’s brother shot in the face,
dead.
A girl goes crazy in McDonald’s
And breaks a mirror,
Fast food circus floor
Covered with shards of glass,
girl fights in front of Zaro's Bakery
females whooping ass.

Community College applications,
Voguing at Emerald City
and the Palladium, dancing
Joints thrust between my lips,
Head rushes from Indian cigarettes,
Grown men feeling my tits.
Locking lips with Chinamen,
locking lips with brothamen
fading bruise around both eyes
virginity was a holy gift to me,
protecting, controlling light
blinding my guilt
and my eyesight.

City Island Blues
in a horny young man’s Hyundai Excel,
my mind too busy to mend
never denying my thirst as I ran from
the perils of pleasure
with broken running shoes
filled up rum bottles with water
after I drank the booze.

My mother slipped my feet in heels
for a Coming of Age Debutantes Ball.
That was my first fall,
winners were ones who knew how to raise money
and had no new ideas or poise at all.

Too lazy to run
sneakers and heels tied anyway,
tried anyway
to go away
to college
which I did,
17 just a kid,
still just a kid.
Bone straight hair touching the back
of my upright broken chair,
my cubic circonian engagement ring
thrown at a moving car
on the Bruckner Express.
Outside my mouth pretty
inside my words a mess.
Martinez and her generous mother,
her dead, very young brother
lived with her Puerto Rican Grandmother
who loved me but saw me as a nigger
separate from her,
another.

In the early 90’s there was a jungle in my head
2008,
The jungle is my bed.
Years before I would smoke a Jay,
I would fantasize about going back to Cali
With L.L. Cool ‘J.’
His full lips
a chain around my neck.
He need love, I need love
he would whisper to me in his
pre-concert microphone check.
L.L. Cool ‘J’
Teen magazine page away,
body on my dirty, paint peeling wall
worshipping fantasy because
reality was weak to me,
imagination always wins overall, y’all-
CUT!

by Tiffany M.

Gangsta Lean - Tip that 40 or that Unsweetened Iced Tea to Someone's Memory

I keep hearing the song 'Gangsta Lean' by DRS in my head. It reminds me of heat, innocence, violence and hustlers at my school in Louisiana in the early 90's. It reminds me of this year of great loss, and trying to fill an unimaginable void. It reminds me of the stigmatized borough (the Bronx) I grew up in and people who are incarcerated, ill, or have passed away. As a nurse, My Mother used to tend to many of these people, most of them young and poor. She made them laugh through their suffering and subsequent deaths. She heard the stories of their lives and witnessed their premature deaths and this broke her heart. She worried about her own children getting 'caught up.' Growing up in the Bronx in the 1980's and seeing so many young people die, one of my Mother's major fears for my brother and I was that we would become drug addicts or get infected with AIDS. At the end of her life, she had many nightmares of this. Particularly of us becoming drug addicts. I hope that she gained some peace about this before she left this world and came to realize that the only thing my brother and I were addicted to was her love.

Hug your homey even if they're caught up in something you do not have any control over. Cuz your homey is human, too.