A website stutters numbers
about my town sheepishly
pushing them all the way
to the bottom
The percentage of residents living in poverty—8.5%
Then the parentheses:
(6% for white residents)
(9.6% for Hispanic residents)
(14.3% for Black residents)
I wonder why it is only the poverty statistic
that mentions race
Then I remember everything is about money
That in this cushy suburb racial bias loves to glare
back at you from the inside of a wallet
In this chunk of non-city
the people are proud
of their diversity
Even as the achievement
gap at my high school
glares at them
Back when the Chicago Tribune covered
the 1919 Chicago riots
they were overshadowed
by the streetcar strike which
inconvenienced white
people who had to find
other ways to get to work
I bet no Oak Park wife
looked toward the lake
and saw Black bodies
I wonder how many of their
children have done anything
other than cast problems under bottom lips
letting injustice sit with stale breath
Their “hate has no home here” lawn signs
resting in freshly trimmed grass
I can feel them eyeing me
questioning if I belong here
as I walk past
I think about pulling all the signs out
Telling my neighbors to learn their own statistics
Will they see me in parentheses?
A part of me hopes they don‘t
Is this why I straighten my hair
for every school picture?
So for those few minutes before class,
a teacher may see me as something
other than Latina
Is Oak Park the cut lawn
and the sign planted in it
or white women
standing proud behind their liberal yard signs?
Where does it fit in a world that would rather focus
on anything but the problems across the street?
I just hope that when Oak Park makes its choice
it will say it without muttering
Copyright © Kyla Pereles. This poem originally appeared in Respect the Mic: Celebrating 20 Years of Poetry from a Chicagoland High School (Penguin, 2022). Used with permission of the author.
For all we knew, there was no such thing as wealth
management internships sponsored by a father’s
Harvard roommate, or else some Fifth Avenue gig
running iced coffee for fashionistas an hour’s ride away
from where we stood, the darkest thing for miles,
trash collection claws extending from our sleeves
like some late 80’s cyborg fantasy. We were bored
out of our brains, unlettered, sharp enough still
to know our place in the grander proletarian scheme:
a pair of scholarship kids paid to maintain campus
while our peers tried their hands at college physics,
American industry, psychedelics and road trips
to the mid-west with friends, all while Devin and I
stood in our standard-issue jumpsuits, adding another
coat of white paint to the cafeteria walls without irony.
There were no small iron gods in our pockets then;
no machines to thread us into the invisible world, and so
we passed entire mornings listening to the ceremonies
of birds we couldn’t name as we traversed the sides
of the high-way, each step perfecting our soon-to-be
flawless technique, dodging carrion, dividing paper waste
from condoms and bottles of Coors, just the way Jay taught
us our first day on-call. I spent most breaks in the rift
between observation and dreams, pulling music from the filthy
tales each older man on the maintenance crew cast like a cure
into the mind of the other. Folklore filling the desolate
lecture halls where we took lunch, laughing as we traded
one tradition for another. No future worth claiming apart
from that broken boiler in the next building, blackbirds
trapped in the gutter-way, getting pipes fixed before fall.
From Owed (Penguin Poets, 2020). Copyright © 2020 Joshua Bennett. Used with permission of the author and Penguin Random House.
(for Uvalde, et al.)
in the neighbors’ churches the culture has
a strict cante ostinado of mass
shootings untimed to get over kind
of repetitive grief as beat vamp line
of strung out hearses down a street down
a got it run up in which being wound
into and around this getting even
going on revenges over to death its keen.
the culture always has it in the neighbors’—
not ours— itself a kind of hood that labors
not to any good understanding klan—
observance understood as separation plan
of identity rather than facing
your own is my own not mine to own this.
grieving. of which no dishing out can exist
when it is only one pool to be traced in.
not just one in the calibration
but them all capable any one
of them— full emotion all who’re there
have as the pool grief has brought here.
it is the water’s looking ink over itself
in hand writing the called of its face from the cliff
it is of the land. its water of tears its culture
from here such thing as next neighbor is a future.
when we say what goes ‘round comes around—
this is it— the autochthonous future
found in the strung out hearse down we have down.
rehearsed to continuity. the faced sure
as shit or called as face it all comes down to—
grief. the body
develops in continuity after a while
the jar the hit the disturbances line up
their toppling losses dissipated in as if
in the lilting distraction of the next
ongoing they develop a rocking sway
the lilting sails on the rolling triplet of swells
in an ocean of music— and a grand horizon
spills a windy vibration-less melody
of counterpoint human instrument longs out
its yearning persistence of survival the grand
balance of the dances on the tossing decks
the elegant up and down the dress designed
to drape the thrown shape a hand around the breaking
hip the hit into that somnambulant silence after song.
of death. that all time most popular going on
going on with it until something comes of it
its cante ostinado vamp of the one string hashished-
out caravan driver singing to—
god itself of— empty horizon.
Copyright © 2022 by Ed Roberson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 5, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
The gun—purchased legally
by our parents when I was ten,
shown to us, placed in our hands
that we might sense the weight, then placed
on a shelf any of us
could reach, though we did not, not yet—
pulled by our mother six years
later as I straddled her son’s
small body to stop his fists
from battering me—our mother,
misreading the scene, seeing
her youngest in danger, and me,
too large in her mind to be
handled any other way— our
mother holding the gun and
shaking the gun and crying, caught
in an act of betrayal,
not yet angry that I would run,
sock clad, to Sam’s Pitt Stop Fried
Chicken and Fish to tell Sam Pitt,
my boss from the last summer
to tell him with incredulity—
no, with something more naïve,
say, shock or hurt, that my mother
had just pulled a gun on me,
the good child, the obedient
child, and she, later, saying
she had no other choice
she had to save her boy,
the malt liquor on her breath,
the blue bull in her blood, remorse,
perhaps, in her voice as she
asked, without asking, for forgiveness,
the gun returned to the shelf.
Originally published in Tin House (18.4, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Donika Kelly. Used with the permission of the poet.
At a rooftop party, you dance near every edge.
Someone drops a ring in glass, in your head
the clink of a used bullet, still hot, and that fast
the rooftop is covered with wires, riflemen,
and you’re thinking about mutiny, MK-47s,
two cities clawing at each other’s bruised
throats while boys try to hold your hips,
keep dancing. The war is on your hips.
Your hands. You wear it all over. You wrap
your hair in it. Pluck it from your eyebrows.
The rooftop is wide and caring, too rained
or sometimes incensed, and you never once
think to be afraid of what could arrow a cloud
and kill it. You eat volcano rolls, pink pepper
goat cheese, and the war enters you. You stare
at Still Life with Flowers and Fruit
and the glade of roses scream
war. Here with a doctor and your pregnant
aunt who hasn’t yet learned English, only speaks
in war. Friends in Greensboro get picked up
by bored police, get beat up for no reason,
and those fists carry war. At a job interview,
you carve yourself into a white-known shape
and that renaming is a kind of war.
You take a passport photo, told to smile
without teeth, the flash a bright war.
You’re on the other side of mercy
with your meadows and fluffed spillage,
where nights are creamed with saviors.
Here everyone rests on roofs graduated
and sung, gazing at a sky that won’t
bleed them. At the beach, you’re buried
to the neck, practicing dead, snug in your
chosen tomb, gulls flittering on all sides,
waves fleshing closer, and that fast you’re thinking
of a grubby desert girl who placed small stones
in her scarf, shook it back and forth,
said, This is what the sea must sound like.
from The Wild Fox of Yemen (Graywolf Press, 2021). Copyright © 2021 by Threa Almontaser. Used with permission of the author.