from Forgetting Willie James Jones

By David Tomas Martinez It's not water to wine to swallow harm,
though many of us have,
and changing the name

Anchorage

By Joy Harjo This city is made of stone, of blood, and fish.
There are Chugatch Mountains to the east
and whale and seal to the west.

By Franny Choi How'd you get so slice?
Razor pinch all flat-like? All puff
& sting? What's your allergy?

By Brenda Cárdenas This body always compost--
hair a plot of thin green stems
snowing a shroud of petals,

By Danez Smith one is hard & the other tried to be
one is fast & the other was faster
one is loud & one is a song

By Tess Taylor The ridge a half mile down from Monticello.
A pit cut deeper than the plow line.
Archaeologists plot the dig by scanning

By Natalie Diaz In the Kashmir mountains,
my brother shot many men,
blew skulls from brown skins,

By Daniel Nathan Terry There are oaks that remember
what we would forget--the burn of the rope,
how a body takes on more weight

By Derrick Weston Brown Your brown skin is not a bomb.
Your brown skin does not mean bomb.
Though they doctor pictures.

By Reginald Harris Get off here. This is a story you've
been told: these streets before the trash,
the rats, the crack-heads nodding to ghost