After Robert Fuller

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor

Will the new aunt Jemima have dreads?
Why did Susan Smith kill her children and blame a black man?
Would a black man hang himself from a tree with his backpack still on?
Is it justice or revenge we are seeking?
What does justice look like?
What else can I do to feel safe?
Several times a day I stab my fingertips to threads
Looking for something more than blood as a reminder of life
An angry rain whips the window
We lay quiet in bed
Invite Kimiko Hahn to serenade us with her new poems
When she's done my lover says
Give me something something to munch on
I offer her my wrist.

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is the author of four poetry collections including, her most recent collection, Arrival (Triquarterly Books, 2017).

Themes

About Cheryl Boyce-Taylor >

About This Poem

“As a community, we were struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic when George Floyd was killed. I thought nothing worse could happen, but sure enough, a few days later Robert Fuller was found hanging in Palmdale, California. I felt angry and numb all at the same time. As a type one diabetic, I test my blood sugar numerous times a day to make sure that my sugar is steady and that I am still feeling and functioning. On this day, I became so filled with hopelessness, the only thing I could do was serenade myself with Kimiko Hahn’s new poems to keep functioning. Out of her voice came such passion and inspiration, I was guided to make a poem for Robert Fuller and in memory of all the young black men and women that we have lost in the past few years.”
—Cheryl Boyce-Taylor

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.

Rickey Laurentiis

2018

Poems

After Robert Fuller

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After Robert Fuller

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