2019

I could string him back up the tree, if you’d like.
        Return his skin’s meaning to an easy distance, coal dust, blaze
And Willie Brown him. You
        Love how the blood muddies the original,
The way it makes a stage of my speechifying, this leeching
        Capital from his dying,
Like an activist. I know

I’m not supposed to sing

Of his ringing
        Penetrability, some hole I open impose
On the form—but all I see is bullets, bullets discerning him,
        As years ago it was rope.
I could pull it tighter, finger each bullet deeper,
        If you’d like, an inch rougher,
Far enough to where becomes that second heat, erotic.

I could use the erotic,

If you’d like,
        So ungarish, baring not too frank
A mood, subtle so you need it.— Funny
        How some dark will move illicit if you close your eyes,
The way, say, my black
        Pleasure is named too explicit for a page, but this menace
I put in it is not.

I could yank and knot

The rope, if you’d like, him like a strange fragment
        In them trees,
And the word “again” spelled out about his neck
        Would be the rope’s predicate till let wild, patterned and
Fierce his moan.
        It is a tragedy. No. It is a sonnet, how I know
Already how he ends,

But I could make him

Her, if you’d like, regender them till merely
        Canvas for your “empathy,”
Soup for my mouth. Still, if I could but just get
        This blunt,
Burnt lynched body up
        From on
Out the pocket behind my eye

All trees could be themselves again, all sound.

Credit

Copyright © 2018 by Rickey Laurentiis. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 21, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem
“Next year commemorates one hundred years since 1919, a year of considerable global, postwar unrest and also, in the United States, the year of the Red Summer, which saw more than three dozen race riots pepper the nation. Vigilante or police violence resulted in hundreds of black casualties, including the lynching of Will Brown. Although we’re apparently given to an adamantly progressive interpretation of history—an eventual ‘bend toward justice’—it’s just as useful, I think, to consider regression, or how little, in fact, has changed. I wrote this poem in angry reflection.”
—Rickey Laurentiis