Kopkind Colony

Anyone’s Son

Tara Skurtu

— for the family of Trayvon Martin

This poem wants to write itself backwards.

Wishes it were born memory instead, skipping

time like a record needle stuck on the line

of your last second. You sit up. Brush not blood,

but dirt from your chest. You sit up. You’re in bed.

Bad dream. Back to sleep. You sit up. Rise and shine.

Good morning. This is the poem of a people united

in the uniform of your last day. Pockets full

of candy, hooded sweatshirt, sweet tea. This poem

wants to stand its ground, silence force

with simple words, pray you alive anyone’s

son — tall boy, eye-smile, walk on home.

Tara Skurtu, a Florida native, currently lives in Bucharest. The recipient of two Academy of American Poets prizes, a Marcia Keach Poetry Prize and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, she is the author of the chapbook Skurtu, Romania and the full poetry collection The Amoeba Game. In 2020 Tara founded the online arts initiative International Poetry Circle. She’s also on the steering committee of Writers for Democratic Action. “Anyone’s Son” was originally published by The Huffington Post, July 14, 2013, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman. It is the final piece in Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence.

The twinned images appeared in different forms after February 26, 2012, and gave way, with the years, to others, multiples. The image below, by Brooklyn artist Dáreece Walker, was reprinted by The Nation in March of 2020. The twinning calls to mind another poem, by the great Gwendolyn Brooks, from her 1960 book, The Bean Eaters. Readers are encouraged to see also a companion poem by Brooks, “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon.”

The Last Quatrain of Emmett Till

    after the murder,
    after the burial

Emmett’s mother is a pretty-faced thing;
    the tint of pulled taffy.
She sits in a red room,
    drinking black coffee.
She kisses her killed boy.
    And she is sorry.
Chaos in windy grays
    through a red prairie.

Gwendolyn Brooks was born in 1917 and lived most of her life in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. Her many other books include A Street in Bronzeville, Annie Allen (for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950), Maud Martha and In the Mecca. She was the US Poet Laureate in 1985-86. The Morgan Library in New York City has a wonderful exhibition called “Magnitude and Bond: The Work of Gwendolyn Brooks in Community,” now until June 5, 2022.

On February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin went out on a drizzly night in Sanford, Florida, and never came home. This week we’re commemorating Trayvon’s life and the upsurge sparked by his death, mostly through poetry included in Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence, a collection of writings, documents and poems on Martin’s case and related ones, edited by Kevin Alexander Gray, Jeffrey St. Clair and JoAnn Wypijewski, with contributions from many Kopkind alums and friends.

Trayvon, Redux

Rita Dove

It is difficult/to get the news from poems /yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there./Hear me out/for I too am concerned/and every man/who wants to die at peace in his bed/besides.

– William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower”

Move along, you don’t belong here.
This is what you’re thinking. Thinking
drives you nuts these days, all that
talk about rights and law abidance when
you can’t even walk your own neighborhood
in peace and quiet, get your black ass gone.
You’re thinking again. Then what?
Matlock’s on TV and here you are,
vigilant, weary, exposed to the elements
on a wet winter’s evening in Florida
when all’s not right but no one sees it.
Where are they – the law, the enforcers
blind as a bunch of lazy bats can be,
holsters dangling from coat hooks above their desks
as they jaw the news between donuts?

Hey! It tastes good, shoving your voice
down a throat thinking only of sweetness.
Go on, choke on that. Did you say something?
Are you thinking again? Stop!— and
get your ass gone, your blackness,
that casual little red riding hood
I’m just on my way home attitude
as if this street was his to walk on.
Do you hear me talking to you? Boy. 
How dare he smile, jiggling his goodies
in that tiny shiny bag, his black paw crinkling it,
how dare he tinkle their laughter at you.

Here’s a fine basket of riddles: 
If a mouth shoots off and no one’s around
to hear it, who can say which came first—
push or shove, bang or whimper? 
Which is news fit to write home about?

Rita Dove is a former US Poet Laureate (1993-1995) and recipient of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her book Thomas and Beulah. Her poetry collections include Sonata Mulattica and American Smooth, and she was sole editor of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. She is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia. “Trayvon, Redux” originally appeared on The Root, July 16, 2013.

On February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin went out on a drizzly night in Sanford, Florida, and never came home. This week we’re commemorating Trayvon’s life and the upsurge sparked by his death, mostly through poetry included in Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence, a collection of writings, documents and poems on Martin’s case and related ones, edited by Kevin Alexander Gray, Jeffrey St. Clair and JoAnn Wypijewski, with contributions from many Kopkind alums and friends.

cartwheel on the blacktop (Trayvon Martin 2.0)

Alexis Pauline Gumbs

he has wings in his shoes

Trayvon yawns and stretches in the crook of the tree. Slept til dark again. Shrugs. Stretches out his retractable shoe gliders and hangs a slow swinging backflip out of the branches. Into the world again. Blows a kiss at one leaf. Turns to face home.

a rainbow in his mouth

Notices he is on tilt two-thousand. Off-balance more than the sway of waking up. Sugar low. Annoyed to have to hunt for convenience and its stores of chemical fructose. This is a manicured neighborhood. No fruit in these trees but him himself at twilight.

he has sweet tea time travel in a can

Sweetness reloading he blinks at the mission message in his eyelids. Find the little brother. Teach him about sugar. Teach him that he too can fly as nonchalant as hammock rope. Give him one swift hug and then return to the future to plug in his fingers. Banjo music a much better charge than this watered down fuel. Can’t wait to get home. He slept into dark. On this world of all worlds. Right during the time of the nightvision nearsightedness. Sigh. He might be late. His shoes brush the sidewalk.

his hooded sweatshirt forcefield threaded through with angel kevlar

Behind him the loud machine for the heavyfooted hunter slows down. He has been detected. Will his teenage camouflage help him or hurt. He sighs. He is so young. Only four hundred years old. He shakes his head and looks back. Remember how they used guns. Remember how they never felt safe enough to breathe or whole enough to listen. Overslept. Over. He sends one telepathic message to the little brother waiting. Quickly embroiders it with sweetness. Love.

At the moment of the explosion the sweatshirt flickers hieroglyphics. Blue light math. He squeezes the can. Liquid sprays everywhere. Hands to the pavement. He wonders if the little brother will understand what he must do.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a queer black troublemaker, a black feminist love evangelist, a prayer poet priestess with a PhD from Duke University. Her books include Dub: Finding Ceremony, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals and 101 Things That Are Not True About the Most Famous Black Women Alive, among others. She is co-editor of a volume on legacies of radical mothering, This Bridge Called My Baby. 

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On February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin went out on a drizzly night in Sanford, Florida, and never came home. His killing at the hands of George Zimmerman marked the beginning of the contemporary movement for black freedom and against police violence, vigilante violence and shoot-first laws like Stand Your Ground. This week we’ll be commemorating Trayvon’s life and the upsurge sparked by his death, mostly through poetry included in Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence, a collection of writings, documents and poems on Martin’s case and related ones, edited by Kevin Alexander Gray, Jeffrey St. Clair and JoAnn Wypijewski (Kopkinders all). We begin with a bit slightly adapted from the book’s introduction.

We didn’t gather up the voices here to settle what must remain unsettled, unsettling. What dissonance there is among the offerings, what gaps in the story, is the story – of life, of death – and no neat tie-up would bring comfort, or that insipid concept closure, or let Trayvon live again.

Trayvon Martin, as bell hooks says here, was “just being a regular teenager,” walking in no particular hurry, chatting on the phone, on his way home during halftime of the NBA All Star Game – “anyone’s son,” to echo the title of Tara Skurtu’s closing poem, and he is dead. That ordinariness is partly what sparked the viral commemorations, the “million hoodie marches,” the countless symbolic and material remembrances, of which the artwork in this book, from a mural in Oakland, is a signal example. Mimi Thi Nguyen, who has written about the hoodie’s symbolism for Signs, catalogued some of those memorializing acts in a public talk:

In mourning, militancy and mimicry, posed hoodie photographs – most often consisting of a simple frontal snapshot of a person in a hooded sweatshirt, hood up – proliferated in the aftermath of Martin’s murder. Tweeting the widely propagated photograph of the NBA’s Miami Heat – hoods raised, heads bowed and hands clasped – LeBron James tagged it: “#WeAreTrayvonMartin… #Stereotyped #WeWantJustice.” In addition to photographs of celebrities in hoodies (Common, Jamie Foxx, Sean Combs, Wyclef Jean, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, New York Knicks’ Carmelo Anthony, Arsenio Hall, CNN contributor and journalist Roland Martin, LeVar Burton, US Representative Bobby Rush, the list goes on), others too sought solidarity through the same, seemingly simple act, including Harvard and Howard law students in front of ivy-covered buildings; elementary schoolchildren lined up along a wall holding bags of Skittles; “moms in hoodies”; New York state senators Kevin Parker, Bill Perkins and Eric Adams; New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn; former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm; attendants at vigils and marches; black-and-white drawings of a range of humanity published in a special issue of The New Yorker; even professional portraiture as protest art. Thousands more appear on Facebook pages like A Million Hoodies for Trayvon Martin and on Tumblrs (often tagged with #MillionHoodies), including I Am Trayvon Martin, featuring photograph after photograph – often snapped with webcams or mobile phones – of persons with their hoodies up. One well-trafficked photograph depicts a pregnant black woman in a hoodie gazing upon her bared stomach, marked with the words “Am I next?”

Ubiquitous and implicating the living with the dead, those photographs, Nguyen observed, “gesture toward a serial murder, the continuing threat that is realizable at any coming moment.”

They gesture toward something else as well: a refusal to be next.

Watch this space all week for more.