Poetry

Barry Stock photo

By

Asante Keron Hamid

Box News (or, Tomi Lahren for Those Who See Color)

I fidget over concepts

of lawless silhouettes

puzzling together blood sport

in young black snow

Clean black snow.

Somewhere in the soil of

a concrete jungle, I was

clean black snow

Pulp fiction

is to be colored

in faded tones —

be yourselves, sisters and brothers; be our worst fear

—

Flickering wrist: The shot goes glass,

it rims out of the basket in through the

spine of a brother. Bold black life cracked

open, his flesh smatters the ether

It made Fox News and

no one cared for it either, but a

Knicks’ losing streak is what will

scare forth ire

We trap our brothers and sisters

when we think we’re imprisoned.

Coming to you live

from a peephole in the system

Corner Pocket

I see dead people.

I see children in a red sea. I see

concrete in blood tint. I see bullets

in a hail of confetti celebrating the

end.

I see so many dead people.

I see mouths curl to undress

mental health in design of a perpetrator. I see

lips bend up the alley of “thuggish

behavior” in colonizing others.

When you pull his face up to the screen

by the collar of his crime and you coddle him

by calling him a “lone wolf,” or

“mentally ill,” or

“traumatized as a child,” you free him

from the weight of what he did.

You free him

from an added layer to a prison cell you’d

hope he found within his mind. You inspire

the next wave of Dylan Klebold and Eric

Harris; you ask that Dylann Roof not be removed;

you beg for Adam Lanza to initiate the vigils

where we bathe in candlelights.

You ask that

people die out in the street, die before their

proms, leave for candy with a hoodie on and never

make it home. You ask that people pay the fee

and never see the film. You ask that students say

they never left grade 12; that semi-autos turn

Heaven into grade 6.

Lord, I pray that there’s a God, though

I sway back and forth like ocean under a log

when I wash myself in questions to an interview

in silence that may never see response, as a siren

in its own silence does become a bomb.

Which of the almighty wrote in stone

that we must see children die by unholy hands? Why

have You devoid the world of unwavering law, firm

enough to take the fire from our arms? Why, oh why,

is the white guy on ball teams most often the designated

long-range, three-point

shooter? Why.

Asante Keron Hamid

Born and raised in the grit of Brooklyn, NY, Asante Keron Hamid is a college English major while tripling as a socially-conscious poet, all-purpose writer, and music enthusiast. His poetry will be published in The Ibis Head Review, as well as on The Perspective Project, both forthcoming, with a website of his own on the way.