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Jacqueline Johnson

A Kind of List Poem

We stand in restless clusters at United Nations Plaza,

Union Square, or Washington Square Park.

Police rapt with cameras across their chests,

plastic ties, guns snug around hips.

I stand with my chest pressed into blue wood of a divider.

What war is it? Whose children’s

children are up for slaughter this time?

Does it matter if they are Black?

Palestinian? Iraqi? Syrian? Ukrainian?

Their life price will be oil, water and land rights.

In Iran, it is an old, western war,

boorish American super bombs on constant repeat.

II.

Soft light of a wintry dawn,

children bustling to school.

A man walking down the street

wearing his bed clothes, clutching a newspaper.

And me skidding across ice—hoping

there is no new war in the world today.

This America

Soft leaves of a real spring

bursting free on every branch.

So glad to be a part of creation.

Seven artists sitting in a semi-circle

each a lit flame. We don’t have

all the answers our people crave,

but together we can create something

we can survive with courage.

Savor sister in white, smudging

sage over policemen in riot gear.

What mojo do we need for this new time?

Here protestors are framed as terrorists and

this week, we are asked to believe a

lone Black man broke his own

spine in three places?

How do we arm and protect

ourselves in this America?

Los Desaparecidos*

Santiago your desk is now a crime scene;

filled with whatnots – colored pencils, rubber snakes

and piles of blue and red clay dough.

Rumors and dulled, blank stares of coworkers fill the air.

“I didn’t think they would go that far.”

You now do a cameo as the missing in your own life.

Fourteen years teaching the children of privileged,

foreign and the poor ones; grandchildren of gran

elder women, wearing tall, tan Peruvian hats.

Santiago, you already reaped promise once hidden

in your student visa, now faded with regret.

For too long there was no need to renew it,

no pressure to become a citizen in a place

you had a permanent visitor status.

In the end you have been given ten days

to leave the U.S. deported back to Guatemala.

*The Disappeared

Jacqueline Johnson is a multi-disciplined artist creating in poetry, fiction writing and fiber arts. She is the author of A Woman’s Season, on Main Street Rag Press, and A Gathering of Mother Tongues, published by White Pine Press, and is the winner of the Third Annual White Pine Press Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, Dear Yusef, Essays, Letters, and Poems for and About One Mr. Komunyakaa, Baby Suggs and A Purple Butterfly, and Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era, Routledge 2020. She is a Cave Canem fellow and Black Earth Institute Senior Fellow. Works in progress include Golden Lady, a poetry manuscript, The Privilege of Memory, a novel, and How to Stop a Hurricane, a collection of short stories. She is a graduate of New York University and the City University of New York. A native of Philadelphia, PA., she resides in Brooklyn, New York.

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