the louderARTS Project

Melissa Christine Goodrum

Melissa Christine Goodrum moved to NYC to gain an M.F.A. in poetry at Brooklyn College. Her work can be found in The New York Quarterly, The Torch, The Tiny, Rhapsoidia, Can We Have Our Ball Back?, Transmission, and Bowery Women: Poems, and A Harpy Flies Down by Other Rooms Press. This poet is an active member of the poetry community everywhere she goes. Some of her wacky endeavors include: co-president of the Cambridge Poetry Awards, administrative director of Bowery Arts & Sciences, and the recipient of a Zora Neale Hurston Award from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. She wears many, many masks—poet, translator, scholar, editor, photographer, and writing teacher in the New York City Public School system.

A Lullaby for Kensington

In Kensington, Jésus pushes

his leaky ice-cart over the breaks

in the sidewalk and hard-melted

bubble gum past Lotto-playing

outside yellow grocerías,

below rusted-red fire escapes

while mamí and her niñas

play caged in black iron fence.

Mamí bitches softly about heat,

"Aye, Dios!"

& slow banana colored buses 

groan on by.

© Melissa Christine Goodrum