Driving at Night
For Laquan McDonald
I think it’s quails lining the road but it's fallen Birchwood.
What look like white clouds in a grassy basin, sprinklers.
I mistake the woman walking her retriever as a pair of fawns.
Could-be animals. Unexplained weather. Maybe they see us
that way. Knowing better, the closer they get. Not quite ready to let it go.
Copyright © 2020 by Rio Cortez. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 8, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I wrote this poem after driving in Utah, late at night, seeing beautiful things I did not really see. I was thinking about imagination, dangerous imagination, and about the Claudia Rankine quote ‘Blackness in the white imagination has nothing to do with Black people.’ I was thinking about how often that imagination cuts down Black life, and how it is not an accident, it is unforgivable.”
—Rio Cortez
Rio Cortez
Rio Cortez is the author of the author of Golden Ax (Penguin, 2022); I Have Learned to Define a Field as a Space Between Mountains (Jai Alai Books, 2015); and The ABCs of Black History (Workman, 2020). Born and raised in Salt Lake City, she now lives, writes, and works in Harlem at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.