Wednesday, January 1, 2025: Pam Ward's " Contemplating Baldwin Inside Café de Flore"

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                                                                 Photograph of James Baldwin from the Carl Van Vechten Collection


Writer/designer, Pam Ward just released her poetry book Between Good Men & No Man At All, World Stage Press. She’s published two novels, Want Some Get Some, and Bad Girls Burn Slow, Kensington. A UCLA graduate, recipient of a California Arts Council Fellow, and Pushcart Poetry Nominee, Pam has published in Chiron, Calyx, Voices of Leimert Park and the LA Times and is currently writing a novel about her aunt & the Black Dahlia Murder.


Contemplating Baldwin Inside Café de Flore        

  

“For every James Baldwin, there are a whole lot of corpses, a lot of people who went under.” -“James Baldwin


Baldwin almost did it, once. 

But decided to write a line

A poem 

A passage

A stanza about demise

Stopping the suicide lodged in his brain.

This poet, this prophet of decomposed rhymes

Imagined a rope around his throat 

A private lynching by his own design 

Watching his knives conspiring with handguns

Hunting for temples or wrists

Hoping to end this chronic despair.

Now, I’m here, sitting in Baldwin’s same chair.

Sipping cafe au lait, imagining

The expats discussing life.

Langston, Delaney, “Quality of Hurt,” Chester Himes. 

“If we must die, let it not be like hogs,” Claude McKay.

A rat-pack of blacks abandoning the states for better lives.

Ditching the field hands, the busboys, being the doorman of swine

A grave-digger to just stay alive.

Searching for morsels 

a metaphoric slice of the American pie.

Sipping wine or long-gone-too-cold café

And I see James, and same ol’ noose inching towards me

wondering “if life would give me a reason 

to mean,” like Giovanni said.

Dodging bullets

Washing blood from my bedclothes, again

Learning how Baldwin and those cats did it

This dance with escape

Picking a pen instead of a blade.


© 2025 Pam Ward

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