Lynne Thomson
(USA)
On Michael Brown Visiting His Grandmother
in Ferguson, Missouri, August 2013
Reason help me. the laws
are wrong and unjust laws. the system
a wrong and unjust system. But, somehow, I have got
both.
The
plank bed, loathsome food, the hard ropes shredded into oakum till
one’s finger-tips grow dull with pain,
the harsh orders
the silence, the solitude, the shame—each and all of these things
There is a single
degradation of the body which I must make into a
soul.
“On Michael Brown” is an erasure from De Profundis.
“On Michael Brown, Visiting His Grandmother in Ferguson, Missouri, August, 2014” was previously published in the anthology Rubicon, Words & Art Inspired by Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis (Sybaritic, Press, 2015) edited by Marie Lecrivain.
Post-racial race train
full the train the third or fourth carriage an empty seat
all the white faces
Ridiculous,
amazing, given all this time, how alarmed she still was at the sight of white faces.
She moved quickly noticing only what
concerned her not a single black face
all the other seats, except the one beside her, filling up; the furtive eyes at her,
then someone without a choice sitting next to her
Post-racial race train” is an erasure from Dionne Brand’s Sans Souciand was previously published at festivalwriter.org
Trace
To unearth what came before, ask
how did they come? when?
*
Around one hundred years before Daddy
left Barbados for New York, the schooner
Irene arrived in Havana,
1822, guns mounted. Two hundred eight-
eight of the three hundred thirty-one free
people put on board at Bonny disembarked
as slaves run run
Of his surname—Thompson—think: former
owner
last owner names
lost run away
official records (State & church) run
baptism marriage oral history maps
registers masks
(run) wills & archives
run away away
slave complaints, debts, laws, (former slaves
as owners of slaves)
RUN
auctions away
*
They entered here
____________________________________________
BIO
Lynne Thomson is the author of two full-length collections, Beg No Pardon and Start With A Small Guitar, as well as three chapbooks. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Ecotone, Ploughshares, Room, and the African American Review, as well as the anthologies Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, Coiled Serpent, Poets Arising From the Cultural Quakes & Shifts of Los Angeles, and Resisting Arrest, Poems To Stretch The Sky. A 2015-16 City of Los Angeles Fellow, Thompson is Reviews and Essays Editor for the literary journal, Spillway.