Love Cake
The first time I heard Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's poetry was in a song on Lal's 2008 album Deportation. The track, "Your Body Could Start a War," is about airport security post 9/11. It starts with an eerie warped bass which crashes into a loud and steady beat, followed by an urgent piano to the climax of Piepzna-Samarasinha's vocals: "my lover's tits are explosive -- hips are illegal -- my lip gloss it a bomb and so is my hijab -- we are terrorists for crossing these lines on a map no one but them can see."