Chocolate Waters

Chocolate Waters Poems

Chocolate Waters Biography

Chocolate Waters has been writing and publishing poetry for over four decades. During the second wave of feminism, she was one of the first openly lesbian poets to publish and her contribution has been documented in Feminists Who Changed America 1963-1975 (U of Il. Press, Barbara Love, Ed.) . Her first three collections: To the man reporter from the Denver Post, Take Me Like A Photograph & Charting New Waters are considered classics of the early women's movement. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in Poetry, a fellowship from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and IN 2006 was awarded a ‘‘fruitie'' for the best poetry performance in the Fresh Fruit Festival held in Manhattan. Her poetry, which has won many individual awards in addition to being nominated for several Pushcart prizes, is widely published & anthologized. Currently hailed as the ‘‘Poet Laureate of Hell's Kitchen, '' Waters is also a pioneer in the art of performance poetry. She has toured throughout the United States, but makes her home in Manhattan where she teaches poetry workshops, runs a submission service for serious poets, tutors individual clients and is often a participant in the New York City poetry circuit. Her latest collection, Muddying the Holy Waters, was published by Eggplant Press in 2021 and is now available on Amazon. Her website www.chocolatewaters.com is up and running.)

The Best Poem Of Chocolate Waters

We're All Allowed To Have One Hokey Thing About Us

(Dedicated to all the women in the world who were able to give up every man in their lives except Elvis)

I wouldn't tell this to many people
but from the time I was eight years old
I have been a raving
screaming
knock-over-chairs leap-over-buildings come-in-the-pants
Elvis Presley freak...
Well, I never really screamed
but I did
see LOVE ME TENDER 32 times
collect 3,000 black & white & color photographs
belong to 25 Elvis Presley fan clubs
and have
in my possession
(encased in a small gold box)
a piece of an Oak tree which Elvis himself
was reputed to have leaned against
in Tupelo, Mississippi.
In the fifth grade I slicked back my hair
practiced Presley's grin
lifting up my upper lip/thinking to myself that I was him.
I don't think it was
his millions
or his pink Cadillacs/or his motorcycles/
or his Graceland mansion.
I think it was
all those lovely women/always at his fingertips
and yes
there's nothing hokey
about that.

From Take Me Like A Photograph, Eggplant Press,1977

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