JR Mahung
*Winner of the Spring 2018 Goblet of Fire competition*
jr explains the immigrant hustle in the mode of rara
everyone know me as jrfrom in the streets. i’m just a lil nigga from the southside i grew up outta that shit. used to be tweakin. every day i get why you ain’t got no money? say that nigga don’t be putting in no work. shit. i got a daddy who out here struggling pay bills every day. young nigga like me was out here tryna check a bag woo woo. shiiiit. but everybody got their own ways to things. my daddy call me like big guy(he call me big guy) chicago got a problem. all them shorties that ain’t got no way damn but i never cried. my eyes mighta looked like it was glary but i never cried in my life. anyways daddy had that buzz, he had that click you know what i’m sayin? that nigga been selling insurance since fucking. . . i don’t know when! workin in the office and shit rhe man really is what he is, you feel me? At the end of the day we all chicago and all trying to make a way to all eat and understand that you feel me? that’s how i look at it. chicago gon know food. we gon know food. We gon know food feel me?
micros for immigration & the Belizean flag OR how a name changes in transit
1.
mahung meant something bout some king in cantonese
n stopped meaning nothing at customs
british honduras
at the time belize now the flag just the same though
two men one belong to the other
n neither belong to the land they stand on
2.
daddy say a man could cut grass with just machete
n i know cuz he showed me chop
chop the sound of one blade as it cleaves
another
3.
the game is called football where my people from
two Os open like a field n all the air
above it
4.
everyone tell me bout daddy playing ball
lone kid on the national squad boy
got whupped ‘gainst mexico 4-nil
n that was their b squad if even that
but he was good almost
good as garrincha nobody can tell
what he would have been had he stayed
5.
i don’t know belize’s national anthem but i know its songs bwai
stop mek noise you see grandma on the phone chuh!
when she speak phone cards dem
like instrument dey
Something playing the sound of home
6.
daddy say home where family is at n i tell him
no it be where my people gather the cookout
cypher a pot of rice a plate stacked with plantains
pickups at the park wherever my name calls from
a mouth dark as my own or darker
7.
daddy say the smell of grass cut fresh the nicest he know
i say i agree n somebody say the smell is the plant
letting fear into surroundings this is what it does survive
JR Mahung is a Belizean-American poet from the South Side of Chicago. He is an MFA Candidate at The University of Massachusetts Amherst and a 2017 Emerging Poet’s Incubator Fellow. His poetry is published or forthcoming in Cosmonauts Avenue, WusGood, Winter Tangerine and elsewhere. JR is also on the organizing teams for Louder than a Bomb MA youth poetry slam and The Plantain Collection, a poetry reading and conversation series for writers of diaspora. His second chapbook of poems “Since When He Have Wings” is forthcoming on Pizza Pi Press. JR’s mixtape is not for sale but he’ll ask you to buy it anyways. Tweet him about rice and beans @jr_mahung.