Excerpts from an Interview with Metta World Peace aka Ron Artest aka the Pandas Friend by Eve L. Ewing

yes, I am the Red Storm. that’s why I made your eyes hurt.
that’s why your shirt is that color now.

Queensbridge is me. I am the stone path over the water
from one monarch to the next,
trodden by ladies-in-waiting with rubies for eyes.

because the old world order was trash. next question?

175. 193. 167. 69. 298. 29.

an elbow is just a bent arm with some ambition
and if you can’t handle that why are you playin ball?

because in the 1920s, right before the crash,
they knew what we didn’t about the hiss
of things, the buzz of things, how to catch the noise
between noises and that telepathy was real.
and that comes through in their music,
do you know what i mean?
that music that comes from right before you fall
and land hard.

...

Eve L. Ewing is a Chicago-born poet and essayist. Her work has been published in Poetry, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, Union Station, Bird’s Thumb, and Blackberry, and the anthology The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop(Haymarket Books). She has been a Pushcart Prize nominee and a scholarship recipient for the New Harmony Writers Workshop. Eve is an editor and staff writer for the website Seven Scribes, an organizer of the Louder Than A Bomb youth poetry slam in Massachusetts, and one-half of the poetry duo Echo Hotel, alongside Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib. She lives in Boston.

Photo by Sofia V.