In 2018, we released a limited edition of Cheryl Clarke’s chapbook, TARGETS. To purchase the 2019 reprint of the physical edition, visit our web store (note that shipping is currently delayed due to COVID-19) or stop by Blenheim Books in Hobart, NY (where you might be able to buy your book from the author herself!) We have now made TARGETS available as an e-book (epub or pdf).
This download is free of charge, but we invite you to make a donation (suggested: $3) toward costs for the print edition and for future Bushel editions.
Download ebook (epub / pdf) | Make a donation
Cheryl Clarke is a black lesbian feminist poet and the author of five books of poetry: Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1982), Living as a Lesbian (Firebrand Books, 1986), Humid Pitch (Firebrand Books, 1989), Experimental Love (Firebrand Books, 1993), most recently By My Precise Haircut (Word Works Press, 2016), and the chapbooks Your Own Lovely Bosom (2014) and Targets (2018). She retired from Rutgers University in 2013. Since then, she has been one of the co-organizers of the annual Festival of Women Writers in Hobart, NY, the Book Village of the Catskills. She resides in Hobart, where she and her partner operate Blenheim Hill Bookshop, one of five independent bookstores.
from TARGETS:
‘no after until we pray for all the dead’ (Mattawa)
pray for all the dead you say?
what about get even for all the dead?
for all the dead? I don’t want to pray
after all the dead.
too many desecrated and
mass graves
ashes and
incineration over
high places:
praying for all those burning
jumpers
from
sky
scrapers.
how can what I pray save those
caught in a church bombing
or shot there
or sunk in a river
Can there ever be an after?
Can there ever be all the dead?
Must I identify my dead child by his dead father’s
ring?