by Tom Bosworth // May 29, 2020
Was going to write about Chromatica or Bon Iver, or maybe another album, but it all that seems a bit pointless right now. Instead I have some poems. I’ll share a little excerpt from each, as well as a link. A lot of these poems were tweeted by @KavehAkbar and @BenPurkert.
John Murillo, “A REFUSAL TO MOURN THE DEATHS, BY GUNFIRE, OF THREE MEN IN BROOKLYN“
To breathe it in, this boulevard perfume of beauty shops and roti shacks, to take in all its funk, calypso, reggaeton, and soul, to watch school kids and elders go about their days, their living, is, if not to fall in love, at least to wonder why some want us dead. Again this week, they killed another child who looked like me. A child we’ll march about, who’ll grace our placards, say, then be forgotten like a trampled pamphlet. What I want, I’m not supposed to. Payback. Woe and plenty trouble for the gunman’s clan. I’m not suppose to. But I want a brick, a window. One good match, to watch it bloom.
Gabrielle Calvocoressi, “Praise House the New Economy”
...I love the Orioles. Old Bay on all my shrimp. And justice. And cities burning if people need to burn them to get free.
America, ignore the window and look at your lap: even your dinner napkins are on fire.
Danez Smith, from “summer, somewhere”
paradise is a world where everything is a sanctuary & nothing is a gun.
Jericho Brown, “Bullet Points”
...I promise if you hear Of me dead anywhere near A cop, then that cop killed me. He took Me from us and left my body, which is, No matter what we've been taught, Greater than the settlement A city can pay a mother to stop crying, And more beautiful than the new bullet Fished from the folds of my brain.
Nikki Giovanni, “For Saundra“
so i thought again and it occurred to me maybe i shouldn't write at all but clean my gun and check my kerosene supply perhaps these are not poetic times at all
Tiana Clark, “800 Days: Libation”
who was there who was there & now everyone is watching your life from inside but I’m afraid to watch them beat you watch torture throbbing dry & long with ache & blue-black bruising so I don’t & another black body is blown out smoking wick
Ta-Nehisi Coates, from Between the World and Me
But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.