BROWN STONED BITCHIN

by Danielle Cowan

Top 5 Stories on Brownstoner This Week: A Bed Stuy Church Faces Demo for Apartments

Yo, bro can I codeswitch
And just bitch bout the comparatively rich
Cuz I high-key think this piece in the Brownstoner utter bullshit
Tell me why it cost the community a whole ass church for a Bedstuy block of expensive ass apartments
Maybe these canceled fried fish feasts where coconut cake recipes written in cramped  handwriting come through as a gentler form of generational wealth
ain’t mine to count
But this bum ass journalist out here jacking the space’s
Jeopardized pre-Civil War story
Like she finna bless the block
With some of that good grant-funded participatory placemaking glory
Like a  revolting remix with  alternate universe anything NOT for the culture Kendrick
Her bars broken up by
Compelling add copy, counting clout as
Antique crown molding, and picture rails which I never peeped
And probably wouldn’t know how to work
Pulls me back to my own crib
with the claw-foot bathtub that could be beautiful
Them thick ass prewar walls whose spackles put sharp ends to 10 year old skipping and 20 something Pilates pumping
We got a goofy ass Zillow page gassing up original gas fixtures
They been tryna buy us out
For some bread we would’ve bled
In  two years of local living 
Wising up with Newly rent unstabilized doubt
Shit started around the same time
Someone sued cause they seen
That unnecessary ass door knocking for landlords
instead of Power tight knocking out kingpin antics
Got Breonna Taylor dead.
Rest in peace Breonna and come back bro
My bad if you thought it was all bad
See they built these breakfast bars in the apartments upstairs
and now they be going for 5000 a pop
So I swear it was a scene
straight up from one of them papers with positive statistics
Paying respect to that low-income colored social capital
Legacies of beastie bachelors degree and first car funds lack
Sis who stay
holding 5K for them rent checks
But can’t hold doors
Switched up damn quick 
When she needed the Super’s number

Danielle Cowan is an NYC born and based, blind, queer and Blackarican native New Yorker dabbling in organizing, poetry and performance. Her work is fascinated with what it means for bodies and places to hold multiple, sometimes culturally conflicting identities and playing with ways to write and perform within shared histories and trauma. She has had poems published in Causeway Lit’s revolution issue, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, and elsewhere. She has read in The Rally Reading Series and received fellowships from More Art and Office Hours Poetry Workshop.

SOMETHING ABOUT WOLVES IN LOUISVILLE

by W. Barrett Munn

They hunt

as if they were four wolves,

a pack in pursuit of its prey.

When found they surround.

Fearsome, they isolate the young, the weak.

The black

night of the deserted moon masks

their padded steps but rapid hearts

and adrenal sweat unmasks

their stealth intent.

In silence they surround.

Less silent comes their rush:

Sudden. Sure.

They come as one

faceless, nameless, savage fury

until prey can only hope

survival of encounter

but this prey never had a chance:

judged and juried,

justified the pack brings down

its game, misguided hunger quelled.

In silence they survive

the questions; they

close the open net

no game escapes

no mistakes as

the righteousness of nature

nestles close.

Silence is a necessity

voices turn blue ischemic,

black and whites become necrotic.

But the smell won't fade in silence.

Stench always has a cost.

Silence as a weapon is

too weak when conscience speaks

too weak and unreliable when

other hunters—larger,

more powerful—

lay down their open traps.

W. Barrett Munn lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His poems have appeared in Copperfield Review Quarterly, Volney Road Review, Speckled Trout Review, and The Asses of Parnassus. He is a graduate of The Institute of Children's Literature where he studied under Larry Callen.

FOUR SONGS OF MURDER

by Richard Lawson

BRUNSWICK, Ga. — Prosecutors in the trial of Ahmaud Arbery's accused murderers filed a flurry of new motions in recent days, including 15 in just the past 24 hours. Among them, the state's District Attorney's Office is asking the judge to allow a three-hour closing argument (an hour longer than allowed) and to show jurors cell phone video of Arbery's killing during opening statements. Arbery was shot to death on Feb. 23, 2020, after three men chased him through the coastal Georgia neighborhood of Satilla Shores. Travis and Greg McMichael are charged with first-degree murder along with their neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, who joined the chase and recorded the incident on his cell phone. All three have pleaded not guilty. … The state has filed previous motions seeking to keep out evidence of Arbery's diagnosed mental illness or his prior run-ins with police. The judge has not yet ruled on any of the motions. The next court date is July 22 at 10 a.m. —First Coast News, July 2, 2021

1. I Sing For Ahmaud

I sing for my sanity 

At night when I cannot sleep 

When the darkness plays an endless loop 

Of yesterday’s tragic news  

And I sing for the young black men 

Daily dying in our bleeding streets 

And I sing and pray for the mothers 

Whose tears stoke the flames of justice  

Now I sing and I pray  

Try to understand the fear the killers feel 

Why they grasp the coward’s last line of defense 

The trigger of a gun  

Yes I sing and pray that they’re something more 

Than the heartless, mindless head at the White House door 

Greeting millions marching for justice 

With tear gas and vicious dogs  

I sing for my sanity 

And pray for a savior like Dr. King 

To heal this deeply wounded world 

With wisdom, peace and love  

Yes I sing for the martyrs 

That their blood will finally cleanse this world

And slake the thirst of hate  

For now and all-time  

Now I sing and I pray  

Try to understand the fear the killers feel 

Why they grasp the coward’s last line of defense

The trigger of a gun  

 

I sing and pray that there’s something more

That the mindless, heartless head at the White House door

Greeting millions marching for justice

With tear gas and vicious dogs

Yes I sing, I sing, I sing

I sing for this country’s sanity

                                                                                  

2. Chanty For Ahmaud

The sunbeams and shadows thread through the Spanish moss

As the young men run under the live oak trees

It’s 1820 and all is well 

Cause young black men know where they should be 

At work for the master crushing shells from the beach

Making tabby all day, yes that’s their play

Hang your head low and shuffle your feet

Building master’s big house on Satilla’s white shore (and they sing)

“Ho, Ho. Scrape and pound.

Happy at work for the master

Ho. Ho. Yes scrape and pound

Crushing shells for tabby to build Master’s house.” 

 

Now it’s two thousand twenty, see what we’ve lost

Young black men forgot their place in this world

They dare to run on Satilla’s white shore

Without a white man to set their course

Sorry to say it had to be done

Lesson well-taught with an old shotgun

Soon we’ll forget and go back to our ways 

When young black men knew their place (and they’ll sing)

“Ho. Ho. Scrape and pound.

Happy at work for master

Ho. Ho. Yes I scrape and pound

Crushing shells for tabby to build Master’s house.” 

3. Black Lives Matter 

Black lives matter 

Finally a cause worth dying for 

Black lives matter 

Finally a chance to do what Jesus would do 

Do you know Jesus 

He used to run every Sunday down in southeast Georgia 

Then one day two white men shot Jesus dead in the street

Crucify! Crucify! Yes they crucified Jesus again 

Do you know Jesus 

After dying in Georgia, she moved up to Kentucky 

Asleep in her own bed the police shot her dead

Crucify! Crucify! Yes they crucified Jesus again 

Black lives matter 

Finally a cause worth dying for 

Black lives matter 

Finally a chance to do what Jesus would do

Do you know Jesus 

Dead in Kentucky, on up to Minnesota 

Policeman put a knee on his neck, he died

Crucify! Crucify! Yes they crucified Jesus again 

Black lives matter

Do you know Jesus

4. Little Jimmy’s Eatin’ Some Crow Now

Awake this morning before the cock crowed             

I worry, worry, worry bout my battered soul                       

I can’t stop seeing that black child’s blood

Puddled neath his body and his toy gun

2020 air still stings my eyes

It’s summer 21, now who will die

Don’t know why some folks continue to hate

And take delight in passing it along

It’s the damnest way to live in this world

Bowtie man telling cute jokes

“Why’d the little negro bring his toy gun to town?

To give police some target practice.”

“Whooowee,” says the bowtie man, “...that little Jimmy’s eatin some crow now.”

Why? Why? Why?... Hell, I don’t know

And he laughs and laughs into the online sky

Bowtie man with the crazy eyes

Living to spread hate as far as he can

He’s the darling of every other Christian man

“When should a black man jog down the street.”

“If he’s in south Georgia... never. “

“How do you celebrate Black History month.”

“Watermelon, breakfast, supper and lunch. Whooo Weeee.”

It’s the damnest way to live in this world

Bowtie man telling cute jokes

“Why’d the little negro bring his toy gun to town?

To give police some target practice.”

“Whooowee,” says the bowtie man, “...that little Jimmy’s eatin some crow now.”

The work of Richard Lawson of Brunswick, Georgia has been published in Fine Lines.

TORNADO SIREN

by Julie L. Moore

Unmoored from its original empirical underpinnings, particularly with respect to African Americans...  ‘Blackness’ has become the symbolic assailant. 

—Jeannine Bell, Indiana University Maurer School of Law

 

Each Saturday at noon they practice the drill—

shrill shine in spring air like a child’s high-

pitch whine in a public sphere 

where everyone can hear—

so when the real storm

arrives, we’ll fly down 

basement steps or insulate

ourselves in inner rooms,

to save ourselves—

but what horn warned 

John Crawford III

                             that fiddling with a bb gun 

in the middle of a Walmart aisle 

while chatting on his cell

               would be his sirens’ song 

full of sound and fury signifying

assailant, that 9-1-1 wouldn’t 

bring aid but grave 

in a half-second flat? 

What bell rang 

for Breonna Taylor, 

who climbed into bed, reaching 

for her beloved, for a good night’s 

rest, not knowing it’d be eternal

& irredeemable?  

                                                          O, something wicked that way 

came, & keeps on coming: 

It knows no caution & hides 

in plain sight. Sly & slick,

it slithers through amber

waves of grain, through the rocks

of ages. Did you see it 

funneling all its strength 

as it chased 

Ahmaud Arbery 

on the road, 

nipping at his heels, 

mowing him down?

And after, 

did you see 

its twisted tail 

slide across his fallen 

flesh & hear

its overdue alarm 

roar like Chimera

used to snort, 

sense its 

white-

tipped tongue

wagging 

as it left?

Author's Note: The epigraph comes from Jeannine Bell’s article, “Dead Canaries in the Coal Mines: The Symbolic Assailant Revisited,” Georgia State University Law Review, vol. 34, no. 3, Spring 2018.

A Best of the Net and six-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Julie L. Moore is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, Full Worm Moon which won a 2018 Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award and received honorable mention for the Conference on Christianity and Literature's 2018 Book of the Year Award. Her poetry has appeared in African American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Image, New Ohio Review, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and Verse Daily. She is the Writing Center Director at Taylor University, where she is also the poetry editor for Relief Journal.

BELLY OF THE BEAST

by Donna Katzin

                                             

 

The violence was barely visible to law-makers                                                 

when police squeezed out George Floyd’s last breath

with a knee to his neck, shot their way

into Breonna Taylor’s home,

left her dead on her floor, clicked off

the too-short lives of Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin

with flicks of a trigger.                                        

 

They scarcely discerned it in the eyes of children     

ripped from fathers’, mothers’ arms,

caged at the border, never to see

their parents again.

 

It was not obvious to them when 350,000 souls—       

disproportionately black and brown, immigrant, indigenous—

were extinguished by the virus

the president heralded as a “hoax,”                      

as ICU’s, hearses, morgues choked on bodies

and ambulances were ordered not to stop

for “low-probability” passengers.                                    

 

It took broken glass and guns at the Capitol,

ghost-faced rioters in MAGA hats, banners, swastikas,

sporting toxic slogans spawned and spewed

by the Commander-in-Chief.

 

It took hordes single-minded as Atilla the Hun

or shock-troops of the Third Reich storming

up the marble stairs beneath idyllic landscapes,

portraits of iconic heads of state,

pushing past police who never imagined 

the possibility of a white mob

forcing their way into chambers constructed,

polished to protect the rule of law,

wielding shotguns and rifles,

wrapped in bullet-proof vests.

 

It took the legislators in lockdown

little time to detect the pattern,

crouching behind their chairs, calling

loved ones, clutching gas-masks,

as they were herded to hidden locations

while the president’s minions lounged

in their offices, read their mail,       

trashed their papers, took selfies.

In the fray below five people died.

 

It took them only hours to declare a breach,

recalibrate the rules, call for silencing,

impeaching the author of the action

to pluck out the bad seed.

 

But still, in the white wilderness of our minds,

tiptoe home-grown terrorists nurtured                  

with our blindness, lethal legacies,

assumptions of supremacy—             

the hate so deeply sown                                     

in our own hearts.

Donna Katzin is the founding executive director of Shared Interest, a fund that mobilizes the human and financial resources of low-income communities of color in South and Southern Africa.  A board member of Community Change in the U.S., and co-coordinator of Tipitapa Partners working in Nicaragua, she has written extensively about South Africa, community development and impact investing.  Published in journals and sites including The New Verse News and The Mom Egg, she is the author of With the Hands, a book of poems and photographs about post-apartheid South Africa’s process of giving birth to itself.  

IT IS DIFFERENT IT IS NOT DIFFERENT

by Sarah Sarai

32 mug shots of
Freedom Riders

arrested 24 May
1961 and jailed

Jackson
Mississippi.

John Lewis is
third from right

top row.
CT Vivian second

row
second from left.

In
Louisville KY

435 mug shots
of

as many protestors
jailed

saying her
name

(Breonna
Taylor)

are not yet
released.

Add 400
more

Freedom Riders.
I can’t

find them
all,

those
solid of will.

Sarah Sarai’s poems are in DMQ Review, The Southampton Review, E-Ratio, and others. Her second full-length collection is That Strapless Bra in Heaven (Kelsay Books). She lives in New York.

GEORGE FLOYD ELEGY

by KP Liles 

German artist Eme Freethinker has painted a portrait of George Floyd on what used to be the Berlin Wall to honour the unarmed black man killed May 25 by a white Minneapolis police officer, who knelt on his neck for almost 10 minutes.

George Floyd
George Floyd
George Floyd

And so many
buried unheard
we now cannot unhear

Nor can we ignore
revolutions’ anthem
I can’t breathe

Impossible to unsee
George Floyd
that pressing knee

Ahmaud Arbery
jogging Glynn County
Georgia George Floyd

Breonna Taylor
sleeping Kentucky
Less than a meme’s life apart

Eric Garner New York City
Michael Brown Ferguson Missouri
Nia Wilson George Floyd

Oakland California Trayvon
Martin Sanford Florida
Tamir Rice Cleveland Ohio How

many George Floyd George Floyd
until name becomes flood
spilling all the killed Black folks

into brightly lit kitchens
until the dream’s ghost
upends breakfast table

until No
No Some risks George Floyd
do not resolve in mind

So if it is not for me
to lift your body or name
let mourning

be pallbearer
to token grief
minstrel solidarity

Head bowed shouldering memory
let us at long last George Floyd
carry outrage ‘cross that bloody river

end this procession
where we face off
the uniform night

KP Liles has penned two poetry collections, Singing Back the Darkness (NYQ Books) and Spring Hunger (Plain View Press). He currently lives in the New Orleans metropolitan area.

SAY HER NAME: BREONNA TAYLOR

by Peter Witt

The Painting of Breonna Taylor was done by Linnea Tobias, a Spokane artist. It is used with the permission of the artist.

Eight bullets riddled her young body
in the dead hours of a Louisville night
she didn't have to die that way

When demanding police reform
remember to say her name
she didn't need to die that way

Police refuse to release their files
yet from all we know to date it's clear
she didn't need to die that way

Search revealed no suspected drugs
men police sought were already in jail
she didn't need to die that way

Another mother is left to ask why
a young EMT was killed in a spray of bullets
she didn't need to die that way

Charged boyfriend with shooting at police
thinking they were home invaders
she didn't need to die that way

Now three officers under investigation
charges against boyfriend dropped, police chief fired
she didn't need to die that way

Add Breonna's name to the list we chant
at endless rallies demanding change
she didn't need to die that way

Peter Witt is a retired University Professor and 2020 Poet Laureate for the International Poetics Foundation.