ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Jonny Teklit is a winner of the 2019 Academy of American Poets College Poetry Prize as well as the recipient of the 2019 Aliki Perroti and Seth Young Most Promising Young Poet Award. Currently a reader for The Adroit Journal, his work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, Lancaster Online, Mixed Mag, Dishsoap Quarterly, and Susquehanna Review.
Walter Scott Visits Jacob Blake in the Hospital and They Spend the Whole Night Hugging
I wanted this poem to be something surreal.
I wanted it to be soft, the tender haunting
of a dead loved one visiting you in a dream.
I wanted to write away this perennial wound,
trim it down to some semblance of a silver lining,
use this poem as a roll of gauze, knowing full well
that it would inevitably become heavy with blood.
The tenderness never came.
I cast my bucket into the well and it fell
forever, crushed beneath the boots of gravity,
the same way they were crushed
beneath the boots of the law, the hammer of the gun,
the probable cause of the white man’s fear.
There are no bandages for a wound like that,
no balms for their bloody backs, but
nevertheless, despite my failure of language,
I imagine them hugging —
brothers of the same trial by fire fire fire fire fire fire fire —
wrapped in the tight squeeze of community that only we know
how to give; the thick and enveloping pressure of love.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
