Dying Cleopatra
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Dying Cleopatra*
She reached into the ground with saw and sluice, chiseled me down from mountainous until I was almost mortal, perched me in the throne of Death’s promise to Life, and fashioned me a legend unlocked from Earth’s history. Her brown hands bore me alabaster smooth from rubble to royalty, birthed me into the breach of my last breath, baptized me in the burn of her sweat over my every ripple and curve to teach me love like the blows of a million small hammers in search of the stillborn heart. And while she polished my demise with pumice and her slow, grinding worksong of muscle and scrape, I learned the labor of a queen robbed of country, of a Creator who carves her story into the face of all she beholds and bids it shine until it comes alive.
Tyehimba Jess, a Detroit native who is both a poet and fiction writer, is author of leadbelly, which won for him the 2004 National Poetry Series. He is an assistant professor of English at the College of Staten Island in New York. His poetry has appeared in such anthologies and periodicals as Angles of Ascent, Beyond the Frontier, Roll Call, Bum Rush the Page, Complex Slam, American Poetry Review, Mosaic, Indiana Review, Ploughshares, and Callaloo. He has received a number of honors for his work—e. g., a Winter Fellow (2004–2005) at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. A graduate of the University of Chicago, he received his MFA from New York University.
Footnotes
* after The Death of Cleopatra (1875) by Edmonia Lewis [End Page 540]
