Featured Poet Angelique Zobitz
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Angelique Zobitz
Angelique Zobitz, Poems
Angelique is a poet, raised on the South Side of Chicago. She’s a recent transplant to the intersection of agriculture and academia in West Lafayette, Indiana. Born to a dope-ass, teen mom, word nerd, punk rock singer in the early 80's, she was raised at the knee of farm folks from Louisiana who'd joined the military and moved North during the Great Migration to work in factories. Thus, she grew up with a soul full of lyricism and an eye for detail.
Angelique is the culmination of many phenomena but none so much as being raised by her extended family and assorted kinship networks to believe, “You your own best thing” (in the words of Paul D to Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved).
She’s a farmers market lurker, slow food lover, hip hop head, trap and country music enthusiast, party planner, second generation word nerd, and delightful contradiction. You'll find her with family, friends, books, poetry, and coffee, rocking cowboy boots from her extensive collection, protesting, volunteering on boards and committees, pondering the simple, the unique and the divine.
Her poetry has been published in The Journal, Sugar House Review, The Adirondack Review, Obsidian: Literature & Arts of the African Diaspora, Yemassee, Anomaly, Glass: A Journal of Poetry's Poet Resist Series, Poets Reading the News, So to Speak Journal, SWWIM, Rise Up Review, Pretty Owl Poetry, Rogue Agent, Psaltery & Lyre, Mortar Magazine, The Midwest Review and many others. She was also a 2020 Best New Poets nominee, a 2019 two-time Best of the Net Anthology nominee, and a Spring 2019 Black River Chapbook Competition Finalist.
Her chapbook Love Letters to The Revolution is forthcoming from The American Poetry Journal in October 2020. Love Letters is a tender exploration of revolution, revolutionary mothering, breaking lineal chains and fulfilling ancestral visions. It affirms the experience of inheritance, expectation, and anxiety of the womxn-mother-daughter-sister-cousin-aunt-goddess-witch-bitch multitudes contained within each Black womxn.
She lives in West Lafayette, Indiana with her husband The Silver Fox, daughter The Revolution, and a wild rescue dog The Honorable Jack LeBron Zobitz. She can be found on Twitter and Instagram: @angeliquezobitz and at angeliquezobitz.com. Pre-order her book on the American Poetry Journal site.
Aide-Memoire
I am falling back on the familiar comforts— black eyed
peas with ham hocks, coquito, mango and sticky rice,
crave to eat heat, forget that my stomach has grown
maladapted to the richness of such food, feel stomach
pains to connect with my yam and sharecropping roots,
eat roots, but first fill my belly with hot bowls of grits
or cornbread and collard greens, pig tails sucked down
to the bone, pot liquor broth, full of flavor drank until
the ancestors vibrate a tuning fork to my teeth.
I am surprised by the urge to clean deeply,
purge, winnow, and thwart the encroachment of dust, fix
roots, ward off evil, clean the house with Florida water,
tired of not tasting air, cleanse the corners, the patch
work rug sprinkled in glitter spills, the wiry shed hair
of the Black Lab who finds delight in rolling across the floor.
I am thrumming with restlessness, frantic as the child
who leads and expects us to follow. I open all the windows,
degrease every inch of the stove, clean like our lives depend
on it, mop as if blessings will be found near baseboards.
I find myself speaking roots, a miniature of my mother,
humming old r&b tunes, jill and erykah wailing out for sweet
as summer rain, lush as grass, croons as sticky and salty as taffy.
The air is pungent as honeysuckle, as salty as blues, is sweat
within the juncture of my thighs, d.angelo crying how does it feel—
sinuous affirmation that the body is flesh imperfect yet whole here
now made for slow soft worship, good and worthy as gospel
resilient as negro spirituals sung next to the one you love.
If You’ve Ever Been to a Pentecostal Tent Revival, Then You Know
despite a deep fear of
burning a young sanctified girl somewhere was rocking
an Anita Baker hair style and hoping to impress
the pastor. Convince him she’s good enough
for his son, even while the grown folk
is whispering about her sexing him
up like his agency was subsumed
by hers. As if she alone is sexual.
Temptress. Devil. Delilah.
Jezebel in knee length
polyester
like
my young
ears couldn’t hear the way
envy spiraled like a fresh press
and curl past my shoulder blades in
bounty. The old men’s guilty postures
and the trembling rage in the old women
who missed all that young, furtive, fumbling,
excited, loving, fucking. All of them wishing and
forgetting he was waiting for a moment to be let free
and saved by someone who was braver than judgment
so he could be baptized into new.