Lament Lullaby in Reverse
for the justice system and
Cochran, Georgia—44 miles away from Ahmaud Arbery’s death site.
.
It’s the dead of night.
You’re a pale vulture
craving black nectar
but you can’t seem to stay hidden
behind your police badge.
With sky-scraper limbs
you stand over me,
glaring me down to
ashes. Oh, how I know
these lament lullabies,
the sounds of grief
before black boys get
gathered into a grave.
Can’t you smell the truth
on my breath or am I too
alone for you to recognize it?
Sir, I’m just driving from work
back home to the dorms.
It’s blacker than black
out here and what you
have on your hip ain’t
helping. You’re the only
spec of whiteness, but far
from the holy kind. How come
I can’t see if my taillight
is out? Is that a crime
like cocaine, or robbery,
in this small country town?
Your narratives are as sharp
as thorns but I forbid myself
to be vacuumed into
nothingness, sealed
into a stampless envelope
and not go beyond this point.
There’s a grocery store
down the street that sells
deep red roses and they won’t be
for my funeral; they’ll be for
you, so you can smell
the sweet innocence peeking
out this Honda Civic.
Poet and theater instructor Oak Morse was born and raised in Georgia. He was the winner of the 2017 Magpie Award for Poetry in Pulp Literature as well as a Semi-Finalist for the 2020 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Awarded the 2017 Hambidge Residency, Oak’s work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Pank, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Menacing Hedge, Cosmonaut Avenue, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere. Oak has a B.A. in Journalism from Georgia State University and he currently lives in Houston, Texas where he teaches creative writing and performance and leads a youth poetry troop, The Phoenix Fire-Spitters. (@oak_morse)
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