The Big House

Rita moved into the Big House on Alcatraz and winked like a fox
in a chicken coop at the fading mirage of Redbone. She patted her
belly, smiled at his mother, cooed at his father like a blues juke
joint brewed in her blood. She sat on the stoop of Alcatraz, the
biggest house painted like the sky, sitting spread eagle in the middle
of Berkeley’s intersection. The Big House was named after the
penitentiary reckless enough to have its own island. Rita sat on the
sprawling white teeth of the stairs and dreamed. She dreamed there
was no color red—only Bam and Rita and babies. She dreamed she
was always pregnant and the walls caved in and curved out. She
dreamed the waves of babies flushed themselves in reverse from her
past mistakes and into her patient arms. Her breasts swelled warm
with the idea. The heat unfolded in her chest dashed quickly across
her sternum before spreading dense through her belly. The fire
rumbled through her body causing a wretched tear to shoot from her
throat. She lay her head, heavy and spinning, on the white wood and
felt the hot rush, like the Oakland Hills brushfire, dance around her
belly and settle calmly in her lap. Her eyes flickered. She could only see
the babies, all of the tight-eyed babies surrounding her feet, she was
too busy dreaming to notice all the blood.


BY MAHOGANY L. BROWNE

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Cave Canem Fellow Mahogany L. Browne is the author of several books, including Swag and Dear Twitter: Love Letters Hashed Out On-line, recommended by Small Press Distribution and listed as About.com Best Poetry Books of 2010. She has released five LPs, including the live album Sheroshima. As co-founder of the Off Broadway poetry production, Jam On It, and co-producer of NYC’s 1st Performance Poetry Festival: SoundBites Poetry Festival, Mahogany bridges the gap between lyrical poets and literary emcee. Browne has toured Germany, Amsterdam, England, Canada and recently Australia as 1/3 of the cultural arts exchange project Global Poetics. Her journalism work has been published in magazines Uptown, KING, XXL, The Source, Canada's The Word and UK's MOBO. Her poetry has been published in literary journals Pluck, Literary Bohemian, Bestiary, Brown Girl Love and Up The Staircase. She is an Urban Word NYC mentor, as seen on HBO’s Brave New Voices and facilitates performance poetry and writing workshops throughout the country. She is the publisher of Penmanship Books, a small press for performance artists and owns PoetCD.Com, an on-line marketing and distribution company for poets. Mahogany is the Nuyorican Poets Café Poetry Program Director and curator of their famous Friday Night Slam.