KNOW THE VICTIM; KNOW THE SHOOTER

by Laura Lindeman

I know the victim!

knew…

Time in suspension 

For his extravagant antics:

Bouncing down the halls,

Bouncing words at teachers,

Bouncing a few punches 

off the faces of his peers.

But his smile races through a room 

Like lightning!

Dreads dancing on his head with the energy of a

Superbowl halftime show…

He was mischief and enthusiasm and zest!

But living in danger

His speed and agility 

Weaving through the violence

Not enough to protect him from the turbulence

Of generations of white oppression’s

Black destruction.

Armed by his family

False security in his sagging waistband.

At sixteen—just smart enough 

To make irrational risk 

Look adventurous.

Maybe this is why there used to be curfews?

Reasoning of the prefrontal cortex not fully formed 

For another half dozen years;

Which he won’t experience.

His unique weapon—fancy firearm

Not a secret.

Proudly waved 

Like a flag…

Or a dare.

During the next news cycle

I realize

I also know the shooter.

He took the dare;

Captured the flag.

Wanted the weapon of his friend.

Like two-year-olds in a sandbox

Tussling over a Tonka Truck.

What did they say?

“Mine.”

“Mine!”

“Give it!”

Bang…

Silence.

I know the shooter.

Smart, articulate

First year in middle school

Studying with headphones—Beats he called them.

Asking deep questions

Seeking complex answers

Quoting Tupac and Jay-Z

But survival on his block

Translates school as

“White people shit”.

Only slick, stark self-preservation

Was rewarded there.

The Seventh Sense

Of street survival.

Cutting classes,

Cursing teachers,

Curtailing disrespect from peers

At all costs.

Take what you want!

Command the room

      the block

      the bitches

      the boys.

So when he wants his bro’s gun,

He takes the weapon;

Takes the shot;

Takes the life.

Takes the arrest,

The parole violation.

Takes his OG’s soul

Her head in her hands in the court room.

Takes residence in a cell

No bail.

Taking traded for youth, freedom and “potential”

Barely a teenager

Playing adult games 

And losing.

Losing high school,

And chess club.

Losing a driver’s license and 

The right to vote.

Losing his siblings and 

His chance to age.

If tried and convicted as an adult

He’ll be incarcerated 45 to life.

Either way, life will be the sentence.

For the rest of his years, days, hours and moments

He will be dogged by the memory and 

Haunted by the choices 

He didn’t make:

To walk away,

To let go of the gun,

To put friendship over face-saving

And laugh at his own pretension

Stuck at fourteen forever.

Trauma imprints

Even if denied by bluster

He can’t out-run

out-shout

out-shoot

or fake out

His own fledgling soul.

I knew the victim;

I know the shooter.

Again.

Laura Lindeman is a new poet who has just decided to submit some poetry for publication with the help of a friend. This poem is a political poem focusing on gun violence, and as you will read, is based on her knowing, as a teacher, two teenagers before they became shooter and victim in a real-life tragedy. The poem speculates based on material revealed in news reports, but the poet has no first-hand knowledge of the crime itself.

VERDICT

by Donna Katzin

Demonstrators march towards Boston Police Headquarters to protest the police-perpetrated killing of 16-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant who was shot by Columbus Police on April 21, 2021. This march was initially organized to celebrate the life of George Floyd following the verdict of Derek Chauvin. Credit: ANIK RAHMAN / NURPHOTO via GETTY IMAGES via TRUTHOUT

There’s a reason why so many activists have insisted that the Derek Chauvin verdict — though it offers a measure of solace for George Floyd’s family — isn’t justice. Our current way of thinking about and doing justice does not and cannot meet the moment. If anything, the Chauvin verdict achingly demonstrates that justice as we know it is wanting. It’s time to imagine a new justice that does and can…  It’s about reckoning with and disrupting entire histories, legacies, and systems of racial terror and white supremacy that, like monsters who we think are dead but keep coming back, relentlessly replicate and reproduce themselves. —Fania E. Davis, Truthout, May 9, 2021

After a year of protests,

witnesses, testimonies, videos,

this time we see the scales balance --

a white perpetrator in blue found guilty

of squeezing the life out of a Black man.

 

For a moment the weight of planets

lifts from our backs, shoulders,

necks, and we can stand

a little straighter,

breathe again.

 

But still we hear

the ripping of the land

as more Black bodies fall, blood

oozing from crevasses

too wide to heal.

 

In the streets, the howl

of the original sin refuses to die,

roots like a relentless, toxic weed

in its shallow grave, waiting

to show its face again.

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. 

WHITE TURNS TO BLACK

by Mary Clurman

i.

don’t know Black

don’t think Black

don’t speak Black

but like to listen

hear the sharp breaks

twists and turns

White is privilege.

In COVID

we garden

        cook

 think bitter thoughts

await a different regime.

ii.

Hasn’t changed yet!

Not for better:

Made the ballot secret 

  Blacks can’t vote if they can’t read—

can’t win anyway—

  Don’t even try!

  Only eggheads need good schools

   and what do eggheads know?

 Bus ‘em!
     so what,

      got no brains to think with anyway.

Then came jazz.

Music changed.

Boys of Summer

black, winning

Shut the doors!

  Keep ‘em out!

basketball 

Blues 

Hip-Hop

Thurgood Marshall Martin King Anita Hill

strong black middle class

iii.

Who was it

Packed the court,

just stacked ‘em in!

forgetting

           They still get to serve us coffee

coughing 

while our white blood flows as red as it can get. 

It’s time Whites learn from Black.

Mary Clurman, Princeton, NJ, retired Montessori teacher, struggling with the virus news and changing what I can.

GOOD FOOLISHNESS

by Michael L. Ruffin

We've been through

some bad foolishness

the last four years.

We'll go through

more foolishness

the next four. 

We'll see efforts to do

foolish things such as

expand health care,

address climate change,

deal rationally with pandemics,

address systemic racism,

follow science, and

seek economic fairness.

Such efforts will

face resistance,

confront opposition, and

be labeled radical.

They'll make progress.

We'll make progress.

Get ready 

for more foolishness,

for necessary foolishness,

for meaningful foolishness,

for compassionate foolishness

for positive foolishness,

for helpful foolishness

for hopeful foolishness.

Get ready 

for good foolishness.

Michael L. Ruffin is a writer, editor, preacher, and teacher living and working in Georgia. He posts poems on Instagram (@michaell.ruffin) and prose opinions at On the Jericho Road. He is author of Fifty-Seven: A Memoir of Death and Life and of the forthcoming Praying with Matthew. His poetry has appeared at The New Verse News, Rat's Ass Review, 3 Moon Magazine, and U-Rights Magazine.

BALTIMORE HAS MORE POTHOLES THAN BEVERLY HILLS

by Valerie Frost

Graphic from Rolling Stone, June 28, 2020

"I think there's racism in the United States still but I don't think that the law enforcement system is systemically racist.” —William Barr on CBS Face the Nation, June 7, 2020

“There’s overwhelming evidence that the criminal justice system is racist. Here’s the proof.” —The Washington Post, June 10, 2020


I am lost in a sea of
Lily Pulitzers
with their miniature Matilda Janes
and matching hair bows
twice the size of their heads.
Can’t tame my frizzy
Shea Moisture mane
paired with brandless denim pants
from Macy’s Last Chance
Clearance rack.
An ex ruined my 720-score credit
when he co-signed my name
on his gray Impala without permission.
Now I’m raising our kids in public housing
alongside pill abusers and meth addicts.
It’s hard to be financially stable
with two children all alone.
No family to help, can’t own a home.
I have a master’s degree
but that doesn’t mean a thing–
when your digitus medicinalis lacks a ring
they see a pariah, a painted liability.
If I get a raise above subsistence,
strain to put food on the table.
Quick to strip your stamps,
if you dance over
their basic assistance.
They say they don’t see color,
systemic racism is a myth.
Tell that to someone in the struggle,
my white friends don’t live like this.
All lives matter–
only if you’re silent.
When they sold you
that achievable “American Dream,”
they were lyin’.

Valerie Frost lives and works in Central Kentucky with her twin three-year-olds. Her poems have appeared in the Eastern Iowa Review, Headline Poetry and Press, and Dissident Voice, and she has forthcoming pieces elsewhere. 

TWO WORLDS

by Shelly Blankman

The Hill, March 14, 2019

You gross millions in the public eye,
ride us on roller coasters of tears
and laughter at every jolt, get paid

to crusade for the starved, the sick --
lost souls left behind by war and hate
who blanket the globe while you snuggle

under your cozy quilt. You strut the red
carpet in your glitzy gowns and stilettos,
flashing your porcelain smile for the cameras

as crowds echo your name. But you never
let us see you without your makeup, did you?
We never saw you after the credits had rolled,

We never saw you play the role of a lifetime:
A thief who could buy your kid’s way into
a school for the elite. We saw you lounging

in bistros, sipping your lattes, chatting with friends
while a world away from Hollywood, an Ohio woman
sits in jail. She is Black. Poor. Alone.

She was led there hunched, shackled,
in a black-and-white striped uniform.
She sobs for her daughters, the ones she registered in

a better school using her father’s address. A father
with whom she once lived. No bribery. No money.
No bistros. No lattes. Nine days prison. Three years probation.

No fan clubs to rally around her.
No rich lawyer to let her go.
Just tears. Just tears.


Shelly Blankman is an empty nester who lives in Columbia, MD with her husband, foster dog and 3 rescue cats. They have two sons who live in New York and Texas. Shelly's career has spanned public relations and journalism, but her first love has always been poetry. She has had a number of poems published in journals, such as Praxis Online Magazine, Poetry Super Highway, Ekphrastic Review, and Social Justice Poetry.

NO LOVE IN THIS LABOR

by A. Miller

Awards season wouldn’t be complete without the requisite number of controversies, and it got an early one last week when Universal announced it would submit the thriller “Get Out” for a Golden Globe in the comedy category. The film’s writer-director, Jordan Peele, immediately communicated his disappointment, tweeting, “‘Get Out’ is a documentary.” Although he later moderated his reaction, he maintained that to categorize his directorial debut as a comedy is to fatally misunderstand the seriousness of the movie, in which a young African American man is existentially threatened by a Stepford-like liberal white family in the suburbs. “The reason for the visceral response to this movie being called a comedy is that we are still living in a time in which African American cries for justice aren’t being taken seriously,” Peele explained in a statement. “It’s important to acknowledge that though there are funny moments, the systemic racism that the movie is about is very real. More than anything, it shows me that film can be a force for change. At the end of the day, call ‘Get Out’ horror, comedy, drama, action or documentary, I don’t care. Whatever you call it, just know it’s our truth.” —The Washington Post, November 23, 2017

You start to believe this is your fate
Harassment and abuse
Murder and beatings, lynching—we are skinned
To be worn like the fur of animals
Stripped of everything that makes us human
We reek of slave labor, blood, sweat
They kill us so they can be us
They want to absorb our resilience
They pave our roads to the grave with imprisonment
If these walls could talk
They wouldn’t because
They are traumatized by how much violence
Black bodies have seen
You start to believe this is your fate
When you are persecuted and used the day you are born
And God’s ear has gone deaf to our silent screaming


A. Miller is  studying teacher education in the Midwest. Miller's work has been featured in Aois 21 publishing, and makingqueerhistory.com.