JANUARY 20, 2021 / DATE POEM

by Ethan Thayumanavan

Born November 20, 1942.

Inaugurated on January 20, 2021.

 

Born June 14, 1946.

Inaugurated on January 20, 2017.

 

Ruby Bridges: Born September 8, 1954.

First day in a white classroom on November 14, 1960.

 

Angela Davis: Born January 26, 1944.

Became the third Woman on the fbi’s most wanted list on August 18, 1970.

Released on bail after 16 months of incarceration on February 23, 1972.

Acquitted of all charges by an all-white jury on June 4, 1972.

 

Marsha P. Johnson: Born August 24, 1945.

Stonewalled the nypd on June 28, 1969.

The nypd ruled Marsha’s death a suicide on July 6, 1992.

 

Martin Luther King Jr: Born January 15, 1929.

Had a dream on August 28, 1963.

Went to the mountaintop on April 3, 1968.

Assassinated by white supremacists on April 4, 1968.

 

Emmett Till: Born July 25, 1941.

Whistled at a white girl on August 28, 1955.

He was two years older than

 

Tamir Rice: Born June 25, 2002.

Murdered by a white man with a badge on November 22, 2014.

 

jim crow: Born Juneteenth, 1865.

just won’t fucking

die

 

I imagine that mista past president has sat

underneath palms in the Middle East

but has never tasted the warm sweetness

of a date

 

can’t bring himself to put his lips on

Worn Leather and Scar Tissue and Age Lines

and Exhaustion and Folk Music and Survival

 

classrooms shove dates down my throat

put their hands over my mouth

so I have to swallow

don’t even prepare ‘em right

 

leave pits in my stomach

forget the date came from the tree

came from the seed

came from the pit

came from the date

 

which is to say that linearity and

history are both constructed.

what is a date

without person and place?

time does not march forward

unless we do

 

I hold a date in the palm of my hand

sink my teeth into it

bite down into the gooey, sticky sweetness

savor the moment

write my own History

write my own poem

call this a radical act

Ethan Thayumanavan is an aspiring poet of Indian descent, from Amherst, Massachusetts. He is a full-time student at Columbia University. His exploration of poetry began when he joined a collegiate spoken word poetry team, but his love for the written word has influenced his transition from performance to writing.

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.  

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.

TAMIR

by Diane Vogel Ferri

Every time an unarmed black man
falls to our videoed fears and white failures

I see Tamir’s face, so many times, too many times,
the face that I saw in my classroom one year.

Yes he was tall, yes he liked attention,
neither are reasons to be given two seconds

to respond to an adult, neither are reasons
to be on a list of martyrs to America’s shame,

neither are reasons for his twelve year-old
face to be frozen in time on tv, the news,

on the never-ending list of lost black men,
not a reason to be famous or dead.


Author’s Note: Tamir Rice was my student in 2012.

Diane Vogel Ferri is a teacher, poet, and writer living in Solon, Ohio. Her essays have been published in Scene Magazine, Cleveland Stories, Cleveland Christmas Memories, and Good Works Review among others. Her poems can be found in numerous journals such as Plainsongs, Rubbertop Review, and Poet Lore. Her previous publications include Liquid Rubies (poetry), The Volume of Our Incongruity (poetry), and The Desire Path (novel). A former special education teacher, she holds an M.Ed from Cleveland State University and is a founding member of Literary Cleveland.

AGAIN, A GUN

by Akua Lezli Hope

As Stephon Clark’s death shows, we live in a time when the term “unarmed” is becoming inconsequential—and, for a black man in certain settings, meaningless. —Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker, April 5, 2018. Photograph by Max Whittaker / NYT / Redux via The New Yorker.

Whose cell phone is a gun
Whose frown is a gun
Whose toy is a gun
Whose today is a gun
Whose smile is a gun
Whose tomorrow is a gun
Whose wallet is a gun
Whose loud is a gun
Whose soft is a gun
Whose CDs are a gun
Whose silence is a gun
Whose protest is a gun
Whose stop is a gun
Whose go is a gun
Whose yes is a gun
Whose no is a gun
Whose pipe is a gun
Whose hand is a gun
Whose stand is a gun
Whose advance is a gun
Whose retreat is a gun
Whose plea is a gun
Whose kneel is a gun
Whose showerhead is a gun
Whose question is a gun
Whose answer is a gun
                         is a gun
                         is a gun

Akua Lezli Hope is a creator who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, handmade paper and wire to create poems, patterns, stories, music, adornments, sculpture and peace whenever possible. A paraplegic, she has founded a nonprofit paratransit firm. Her poetry collection Them Gone will be published by The Word Works Publishing on June 1, 2018.

MY PTSD, or 558 AND STILL COUNTING

by Akua Lezli Hope




Each new report reopens old wounds:
time we pulled off the Jersey highway to nap
police lights blinding as husband yanked me
awake that night, fear and fury urgent in his voice
uniforms on both sides yelling, you can’t rest
on this white shoulder, threatening me back
to 16 with sweet baby sister on the subway
the short uniformed man’s hand on his stick
did it matter that we were on our way to Natural History
that she was only four like Lavish Diamond’s
girl made to witness violence and her protector’s
vulnerability?  We thought no, no, never again
when grandmother Eleanor Bumpurs was shot
at home for no good reason, never again be killed
for art, for its denial, or repression like Michael Stewart
never again when Abner Louima was broomsticked
and never again when Amadou Diallo was drowned
in a hale of 41 mistaken, misguided missiles and before
that did we think ourselves lucky, nothing permanent
when it was only a night stick upside Doug’s head
at the protest, only blunt force trauma,
not a noose in a lonely cell like Sandra Bland,
not spine-severing vehicular lynching like Freddie Gray,
not bullets, bullets, bullets as in Delrawn Small,
a father angry at being imperiled, bullets for preteen
Tamir Rice playing alone in the park, bullets
in Alton Sterling selling CDs, number 558
to be shot and killed by police this year
and I tremble remembering, remembering
all the insults hurled, the bullets I’ve dodged

Author’s Note: Eleanor Bumpurs was an African-American woman who was shot and killed on October 29, 1984 by New York City police. Michael Jerome Stewart  was a graffiti artist, beaten into a coma by New York City Transit Police for graffiti on a subway station wall  and died September 28, 1983. Abner Louima, was tortured by Brooklyn police (1997) and won $8.75 million dollars. Douglass David Walker was the founder of Alien Planetscapes and an activist. Amadou Diallo a West African immigrant was shot 41 times by 4 policemen in the doorway of his apartment building (1999). Sandra Bland died in a Texas jail cell after a traffic stop. Lavish/Diamond, the girlfriend of Philando Castile, broadcast the aftermath of their deadly traffic stop. Delrawn Small, a 37-year-old father of three, was killed in front of his family at a traffic light by an off duty Brooklyn cop while on their way to see July 4th fireworks this year. See “The Counted” at The Guardian.

Akua Lezli Hope is a creator who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, and metal, to create poems, patterns, stories, music, ornaments, adornments, and peace whenever possible. She has won fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Ragdale, Hurston Wright writers, and the National Endowment for The Arts.  She is a Cave Canem fellow. Her manuscript Them Gone won Red Paint Hill Publishing’s Editor’s Prize and will be published in 2016.

I KILLED THE CHILD

by Jay Sizemore

Young black men were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police officers in 2015, according to the findings of a Guardian study that recorded a final tally of 1,134 deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers this year. —The Guardian, Dec. 31, 2015. CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY EDUARDO MUÑOZ / REUTERS / LANDOV via The New Yorker: A protest on the Brooklyn Bridge, December 28, 2015.

I killed Tamir Rice.
So what.
This is what you wanted.
Blood runs like red mercury
off this silver umbrella shield.
My heart is impenetrable,
oblivious to innocence.

I kill Tamir Rice every day.
I wear your list of signatures
like a cape while I fight crime.
You send your children to schools
like dreams sent to die.
I am the killer of those dreams
and you hired me to kill them.

Your rage is hilarious in its hyperbole.
Thousands of candles lit on a stage,
each one destined to fizzle out
and signify nothing.

The residue of gunsmoke
left on your fingers—
Swirl it in your coffee
before you drink it down.
That’s the taste of bitter truth,
a violence wound like wire
around the vocal cords
struggling to cry out
for change,

while a crescendo of gunshots
punching holes in the sky,
only pauses to reload.


Jay Sizemore hates when you call writing a hobby. His work has appeared in print and online. He just released a short story collection, as well as two poetry chapbooks this past year.

MEN OF COLOR

by Phyllis Wax

Image source: The Sentencing Project

Prison has replaced the plantation                

Pick him up for loitering                              
Handcuff him for a driving offense              
Jail him when he can’t pay his fine              
Harass, kick ass so he knows his place        

Young men rant in solitary
Molder for penny-ante crimes        
Or felonies they didn’t commit
In private prisons
Profitable enterprises
The public chooses not to see
                                                     
The bullet has replaced the rope      

New York, Saginaw                        
North Charleston, Cleveland
Sanford, Milwaukee

Amidou Diallo, Trayvon Martin
Walter Scott, Dontre Hamilton
Tamir Rice, Milton Hall

Black bodies in their own foyers
Chalked on sidewalks
Slumped in stairwells            
Bodies sprawled in city streets

Cheap lives, death at a discount


Phyllis Wax writes on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, WI.  Her work has appeared in many anthologies and literary journals, both online and print, among them Out of Line, New Verse News, Verse Wisconsin, Ars Medica, Naugatuck River Review, Your Daily Poem. When she’s not writing you might find her escorting at a local abortion clinic.

THE FALL

by Jan Steckel

Tamir Rice memorial. Source: NBC News.

I don't want to be Joan of the Narrative Arc here,
wielding my flaming sword of story to drive you out
of my personal bleeding-heart-liberal paradise, BUT
here's a prompt: write a poem using the words
grant, bell, garner, brown, ford, and rice.
Employ a light touch, no sing-song or doggerel.
No sentimentality, please. No rants.
Attention to form but not formality.
Invoke all the senses. Let me see, hear, feel
what the twelve-year-old saw, heard, felt
waving that BB gun around the park.
The gold and orange leaves of Cleveland.
The smell of them rotting in rainwater.
The black-and-white pulling to the curb.
The crack. The pavement rushing up.


Jan Steckel's poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a Lambda Literary Award. Her poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, The Bellevue Literary Review, Yale Medicine, American Journal of Nursing, The Pedestal Magazine, and elsewhere.