ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Cameron Bynum is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he majored in Communications Studies with a minor in Creative Writing Poetry. He is the former poetry editor of Cellar Door. He is a recipient of the Phillips Travel Scholarship where he researched differences between spoken word poetry in the United States and Europe. He has served as coach and director of the UNC-CH national poetry slam team. He is from Rutherfordton, North Carolina.
Cops and Robbers
My white brother puts me in the scope
of his nerf gun. I grab his candy and lope
down the hallway, past daddy watching Cops,
avoiding my mom yelling stop. I hop
over a coffee table and quietly crouch,
hoping to not be seen behind the couch.
But when he finds me peering over the armrest,
My brother puts six bullets into my chest.
I die like I’m supposed to. He stuffs a few
of the stolen skittles in his mouth, chews
and squints through police aviators. Get up.
He says slowly pulling each of his suction cup
darts out of me. He reloads his gun.
He takes aim again, and again I run.
As a mixed person I always felt growing up that I existed in a liminal space. I have a fully white mother and a fully white brother, and while there wasn’t much tension between us within my house, it certainly existed in the world around me. For me, a large part of growing up was discovering the ways in which racism had been innocuously embedded within my home despite our best efforts. My brother was treated differently and seen differently than me by the world, and part of this poem is in conversation with having kinship with someone with more privilege. The other main inspiration was the era of police violence especially the murders committed during 2016 when this poem was written. I have always been interested in games such as “Ring-a-round the rosie” or “cowboys and indians,” because these games reflects the violences our culture has normalized to the point its able to be played with. So I wanted to juxtapose these games with my own family’s dynamics to describe the ways racist violence has become invisible to the point of being playful.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
