ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Justin Davis earned his BA in Literature & Creative Writing from Rhodes College, where he received the Anne Howard Bailey Prize in Poetry. A 2018 Pushcart nominee, his poems and fiction are published or forthcoming in Apogee, FreezeRay Poetry, BOAAT, and decomP. He works as a community organizer in Memphis, Tennessee.
On a Quote by Jesse Jackson, Overheard in a Crowd
“When we vote, we make Heaven happy.”
When we vote, we make white men (un)happy.
When we make Heaven happy, what happens?
When we dream, it’s often deferred.
When we steal, we end up dead.
When we don’t steal, we end up dead.
When we vote, maybe an angel gets its wings.
When I have questions about Heaven, I ask Joseph.
When I have questions about white people, I ask Joseph.
When I think of Heaven, I think of Blanche Bruce.
When we vote, we make Blanche Bruce happy.
When we run, sometimes we win these days.
When we run, sometimes we end up dead.
When we rap, we compare ourselves to shit.
When we the shit, we know it.
When we sleep, we meet the cousin of death.
When we Fred Hampton, sleep brings his cousin over.
When we vote, we get post-grandfather-claused.
When we vote, we get gerrymandered.
When we read, we get fake news and shit.
When we read, we get poems and shit.
When we breathe, we end up dead or black.
On the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination, I watched Jesse Jackson speak to a huge crowd on the site of the former Lorraine Motel. Those words needed to be interrogated: there are complex, often systemic reasons for why we vote, and why we don’t.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
