THE COVER UP

by Charles Rammelkamp

After the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921, whole neighborhoods such as the Greenwood district were destroyed. Photograph: Universal History Archive/Getty Images via The Guardian, May 30, 2021.

“Every year it was one of the most stolen books from the Tulsa library system. Every year I would send them a new box.” —Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921

In the late fifties I was teaching history 

at Booker T. Washington High in Tulsa 

when I told my students 

about the massacre in 1921.

“The whites came over the tracks,

machine guns blazing, wiped out Greenwood,

probably more than three hundred dead.”

In fact, I told them, they’d used this building,

Booker T. High, as a hospital for colored folks.

“I don’t believe that!” one of my students shouted,

a pool hustler named Don Ross.

“How come don’t nobody know nothing about it, Mr. Williams?”

But I remember. I was sixteen,

fighting next to my father,

trying to save our building, our business,

Williams Confectionery, down the block

from our other business, Dreamland Theater,

corner of Greenwood and Archer.

The whites finally overwhelmed us.

They marched me down Greenwood,

my arms reaching for empty sky.

I watched a white boy running from our house,

a fur coat belonging to my mother 

clutched to his chest like the pelt

of some animal he’d just killed.

Next day I showed Don Ross the pictures,

charred corpses and burned-out buildings,

took him to meet other survivors.

How come don’t nobody know nothing?

I told Ross: “Because the killers

are still in charge of this town, boy.”

Author's Note: My source for the true story of W.D. Williams is Tim Madigan's "American Terror" in The Smithsonian.

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. Two full-length collections were published in 2020: Catastroika from Apprentice House and Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books. A poetry chapbook, Mortal Coil, was published earlier this year by Clare Songbirds Publishing.

AFTER FOLKLORE

by Mark Danowsky





Coming around
not knowing
love was
near arrival

Such joy
is discovery
your magic
arrow missed

My heart
filling deeper
rises gently
fresh struck

Deft archer
snags me
narrow fellow
gone delicate


Mark Danowsky is a Philadelphia poet, author of the poetry collection As Falls Trees (NightBallet Press), Managing Editor of the Schuylkill Valley Journal, and Editor of ONE ART poetry journal.

FOR THE REPOSE OF SOULS

by Carol Alexander

A Berkeley, CA vigil held to remember the victims and families of the Newtown, CT, massacre. Photo: Jeremy Pollack/Creative Commons

A pair of peafowl floats down from the trees,
the wan hen and florid cock picking their way
while the river slowly slips back in its banks.

The boy in his tall wading books creeps after,
licking rust from the muzzle of his gun.

The juddering of a turquoise fan perhaps will be
as close to flame of phoenix  as spirit will draw.
But we were born in fire, and to fire will come.

The woman with the small communion dress
rocks in her chair in her ordinary room
room with its proportions rudely skewed;
shocked feathers of the peafowls gently float down.

With their saintly calendar of woes,
country men and women walk in sober twos.

Still the shops stay open; trees blink red and green,
children dash across the street, cars swerve,
we hear the Morse code of the coming snow,
birds in starry park all the news that we can bear.

A pallid smoke in its helix twists and frays,
as if to question who to go and how to stay?
You mummers in a masquerade of death
shoot off your pop guns, begging cakes and ale.

Neither the country nor the quiet grave where we lay
our old ones down in the lightness of their years,
is this cold town where we have just begun to pray.

But unicorns and little maids remain entwined
(in sable trees an archer waits and strings his silent bow).


A writer for trade and educational publishing, Carol Alexander has authored numerous children’s books, served as a ghostwriter for radio and trade publishing, and taught at colleges around the metropolitan area. In 2011-2012, her poetry appears—or is scheduled to appear-- in literary journals and anthologies published by Avocet, Boyne Berries (UK), Chiron Review, Cave Moon Press, The Canary, Danse Macabre, Earthspeak, Eunoia Review, Fade Poetry Journal (UK), Fat Daddy’s Farm Press, Fried Chicken and Coffee, The Mad Hatter’s Review, Mobius, Numinous, OVS, Red Poppy Review, Red River Review, River Poets Journal, Sleeping Cat Books, The Whistling Fire, and Write Wing Publishing.