September 17, 2024
Two of Forty-Six Strangers Talk About Their Racial Experiences Through Prompted Questions
By Susan Truxell Sauter
Background About Artistic Rendering of Poem
Susan Truxell Sauter’s poem “Two of Forty-Six Strangers Talk About Their Racial Experiences Through Prompted Questions” was included as an art installation piece with 23 other mostly graphic art pieces exhibited throughout West Virginia as part of the Listening for Racial Understanding project organized by Morgantown’s First Presbyterian Church in 2022. Susan worked with West Virginia University retired graphic design professor Eve Faulkes to execute the art form version of the poem. Explaining choices made for the art installation piece, Susan says this, “Eve devised the color scheme based on the mention of peach/chocolate in the poem, and she photographed and placed images of TL and B in the background. I wanted the paper panels to be free-floating (they hang from an adorned rod) so that the pieces might shift with wind/air movement possibly made by the viewer, wanted the deckle edge (representing ‘torn’ as we are in this country over ‘Race’), and wanted the parts of the poem to be hung next to each other/overlapping since the topic of Race and the lived experience of ‘Race’ are everchanging.” To view a text version of the poem, click here.
Susan Truxell Sauter’s poems have appeared in many anthologies and in Apalachee Review. Part of her poem from the collection Fracture—Essays, Poems, & Stories on Fracking in America was published as a song. She has read her work in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, and The Allegheny Front twice featured her poetry and once her work as an organic farmer. Susan is retired from a diverse journalism career, holds a B.A. in Communications from Ohio State University, and lives in West Virginia.
Editors’ Note: Susan Truxell Sauter read “Two of Forty-Six Strangers Talk About Their Racial Experiences Through Prompted Questions” during the virtual poetry event In This Together. 2024. See the event recording on the Poets Against Racism & Hate USA YouTube channel here.
August 28, 2024
Memphis Vintage and My Father’s Hearing Aid
By Scott Ruescher
Memphis Vintage
Heading back to town after gawking at bales of cotton
Stacked on skids on warehouse docks, I followed a street
In the industrial district, parallel to the railroad tracks,
Where antebellum runaway slaves and Dust Bowl hobos
Strummed broken guitars and sang the country blues
By boxcars at bonfires on the bluff above the Mississippi River,
Until I found, on a downtown side street, a junk shop full
Of fossils from that city’s southern crossroads culture.
In a black plastic milk crate, I leafed through out-of-print guides
On getting right with Jesus, planning the perfect wedding,
Understanding atheism, combatting Communism,
And making your own moonshine, all worth collecting
For bathroom reading at the house back home in Boston.
I glossed a yarn-bound portfolio of paint-by-number genre pieces
That someone had salvaged from a dusty attic
Featuring a towheaded toddler teasing an orange kitten,
A pre-Raphaelite redhead in a diaphanous gown
Under a rainbow waterfall, and some tendrils of blue phlox
Crawling over the ledge of a moss-softened stone wall.
In a cardboard box of recordings, I scanned the liner notes
Of a Village Voice critic on the tattered jacket of a 78 rpm album
By W.C. Handy, the father of the blues, and chuckled
At the incredibly kitschy cover of Elvis Presley’s Blue Hawaii—
The ukulele, yellow-flowered lei, sunglasses, and red floral shirt—
And learned more from five minutes with these artifacts
About American music than I might have known before.
I flipped through dated editions of Field and Stream, Playboy,
And Popular Mechanics, and I glanced at cardstock postcards
Of the Mardi Gras festival and the St. Louis World’s Fair,
Like those of Niagara Falls and the Empire State Building
That my mom brought home to Columbus from a car trip East
With three other women after the bombings of Hiroshima
And Nagasaki, three days later, ended the World War.
By a dusty bin at the back of the store, I winced
At a framed caricature of a little Black girl, once known
As a picaninny, with bulging eyes and exaggerated lips
As red as her red bandanna, looking from the doorway
Of her log-cabin to the vanishing point on the cotton-row horizon
While a field hand in overalls, with gunmetal skin,
Huge hands, and very high hips, doffed his straw hat
And bowed to the white folks in silk gowns and linen suits
Drinking mint juleps on the veranda of the plantation house.
In the same dusty bin, there was a black-and-white photograph,
From 1965, of Martin Luther King marching with John Lewis
And others in movement across the Edmund Pettis Bridge
In Selma, Alabama, just before the troopers attacked—
And that other photograph, not as famous as the one that won
The Pulitzer Prize, but taken an hour later by the same photographer,
Moneta Sleet, from a respectful distance across the empty aisle,
Of Coretta seated in her mourning veil at the end of the pew
Comforting her two attentive children in a confidence
That continues to be our duty as citizens to protect.
My Father’s Hearing Aid
1
I didn’t think he’d heard me say it, sitting there
With his glass of vodka, in his green upholstered chair
By the faux-mahogany end-table, near the living-room couch
Where a week of the Columbus Dispatch and two months of People
Drifted like leaves under the ash tree in the front yard,
Regarding a colleague who reminded me of him—
“He’s small and tough like you, Dad, as easygoing
As they come, and great to talk to, too, when I visit him
In the stockroom of The Harvard Educational Review.”—
I thought he’d been giving his undivided attention
To the Buckeyes’ pre-game football show—to the new coach
At Ohio State, who, like Woody Hayes before him,
Was assuring the television audience of true believers
That these fine young men to his left and right, one Black
And one white, were doing fine in their courses, yes,
Doing all right, and that they were maintaining
Wholesome community standards still in place back then.
Since surgeries failed to mend what a birth defect
And the din of a factory shed had broken at the lathe
Where he bent metal sheets for the fenders, hoods, and bumpers
Of coal mining machines ravaging Appalachia,
I wasn’t surprised that my father hadn’t heard me say it,
Even though I’d practically shouted it to him, as all of us
Had had to do in conversation all along for him—
That a friendly older Black man at my workplace,
A jazz aficionado who’d moved north to Boston
From Birmingham in the 1950s, during the Great Migration,
To work on the production line for the Polaroid corporation,
Put me as much in mind of him as the white guys he’d worked with
For thirty-some years down at the shop, guys like
Ed Thatcher, Ray Thomas, Red Beery, and Freddy Garrett.
2
The Buckeyes’ new coach, asking the same sort of questions
Of the sleek young running back majoring in business
And the beefy defensive end hoping to be a high school coach
And an evangelical preacher at his neighborhood church
That Woody had asked of their predecessors in the 1960s—
“James, is it true that your father played ball in the 1940s
For the Michigan Blue? And Troy, was your mom really
The Corn Queen of Coshocton County in 1952?”—
Was getting the same replies as Woody used to get
From the likes of Rex Kern, Archie Griffin, Mike Tomczak,
And Jack Tatum: “That’s right, Mr. Hayes, he really did.”
“Y-y-y-yes, s-s-sir, Mr. Hayes, as a matter of fact, she was.”
My father, who could carry a tune with Sinatra
When he sang along in his better moods, hadn’t bothered
To look and lean my way, as he did when I had something less
Significant to say, and he hadn’t clicked the volume down.
In lieu of using his hearing aid, he had just kept cupping
His calloused right hand to his damaged right ear
To hear what the players of the week always said better
Through demonstrated action on the football field—
That we should just play together to get the race thing right.
3
In clear view of the department-store reproduction
Of a woodland setting, and of drapes that were drawn
Against the autumn day, there was nothing I could do
But keep watching the interview from my mother’s swivel chair,
Near the shut front door, by the cherry-veneer bookcase
Crammed with the historical fiction of James Michener novels
And the World Book Encyclopedia edition of 1964.
I wasn’t going to add, even if my father had been listening,
That this friend at work, holding down a part-time job
To keep from turning to drink like my father recently had,
Had a sweet familiar mixture of machismo and tenderness,
A small man’s proud heart, and a blue-collar understanding
That it’s usually a matter more of class than of race.
4
The coach and his players were discussing the challenges
They’d face that afternoon in the Notre Dame game
When my father said, with a characteristic grimace of pain
On his pleasant but nervous face, without entirely taking
His eyes off the screen, “Sonny, I don’t give a damn
What they say about the Blacks, and you know I can’t hear
A goddamn thing. But didjya see that tailback run
In that clip from last week’s game? I’m sure your buddy
At work would agree. Man, they can really play football.”
Scott Ruescher has been writing poems on social justice themes, including descriptive poems illustrating issues of race and class in central Ohio, for many years. Some of them appear in his 2017 book Waiting for the Light to Change (Prolific Press), and more will appear in his next book, Above the Fold, in 2025. Born in Columbus, Ohio, and raised in the Underground Railroad town of Westerville, Ohio, Scott writes publicity for an affordable housing nonprofit and helps teach ESOL and citizenship classes in the immigrant communities of Boston. Find out more about Scott at https://www.scottruescher.com/.
Editors’ Note: Scott Ruescher read “Memphis Vintage” and “My Father’s Hearing Aid” during the virtual poetry event In This Together 2024. See the event recording on the Poets Against Racism & Hate USA YouTube channel here.
August 2, 2024
The cocked gun guards the baby’s cradle and Vignettes
By Ruchi Chopra
The cocked gun guards the baby’s cradle
The last snow of the April
banishes the marsh green fields.
Barbed fences on either side of the
rows of houses with unkempt lawns,
evicts their tenants.
A sleuth, a grin harvested in a marigold vase
moved towards the west,
its hips swaying like a serpent dancing on
perils of tune of a snake charmer.
Next full moon night, the snow, the
pail of moonbeams harvested from the
gallows: tongues blue with venom
cold steel gunpowder on my tongue; I taste
advances on my sheer curtain
to nudge me softly but not to wake me up,
for it would be impolite.
alone in the darkness of the dawn
like an empty conceit (shell/cartridge)
I sleep, baby snoring, the pail of trinkets
over the cradle, half-moon clutched in my cold palms
The cocked gun guards the baby’s cradle.
Soon, the rays, the moonbeams,
will wade off, diminish, and vanish
into the dawn. Snow will melt, devour
the silence, the cocked gun.
The barbed fences will rattle, making a sound
of a baby rattle
Trapped inside a shadow, a silhouette of a dream,
tugged from unkempt lawns to wild peace.
Then, it would just turn-and-turn-about,
guarded by a cocked gun.
Vignettes
1.
shadows congregate in a city with brazen graffiti swarming onto the sidewalks of a busy NY street, un.mind.ful of the lantern’s flies swarming the city like hitchhikers they congregate around the mold, sawdust, and moist debris within the walls of a newly constructed housing site meant for the prospective homes for the freshly arrived trunk luggage.
2.
they all left hurriedly to their cocoons and hives after watching the 10-minute assault on humanity; no one wanted to stay past their curfew time in a city with brazen graffiti.
3.
charbroiled pavement, the city’s ardor, and noise,
Hate? With a pungent stink puffed up on the streets
From Harlem to Manhattan to Connaught Place to the Himalayas to fenced playgrounds, thistles and nettle leaves harvested from our backyard, bitter, broiled with linseed oil
Thousands of thistles and nettle leaves wedged on a shadow without respite in a city with brazen graffiti.
Ruchi Chopra is a former journalist, an artisan jewelry designer, a part-time teacher, and a published author. Her writings draw on her experiences as a South Asian with ancestry rooted in India’s pre-Partition era. She grew up in India and now lives in Ohio with her family. Ruchi is passionate about poetry and storytelling as a medium for creating awareness of sociocultural, human rights, gender, and environmental issues. Her work explores longing, hope, resistance, diaspora, and exile themes and draws inspiration from the migrant’s roots. Her poetry is a lived experience from oral storytelling, lineages, photographs, memories, traditions, and community and family longing through the lens of a South Asian woman of color.
Editors’ Note: Ruchi Chopra read “The cocked gun guards the baby’s cradle” and “Vignettes” during the virtual poetry event In This Together 2024. See the event recording on the Poets Against Racism & Hate USA YouTube channel here.
July 15, 2024
Black Like Me and What My Black Son Taught Me
By Dawn Shields
Black Like Me
“The Negro. The South. These are details. The real story is the universal one of men who destroy the souls and bodies of other men (and in the process destroy themselves) for reasons neither really understands. It is the story of the persecuted, the defrauded, the feared and detested. I could have been a Jew in Germany, a Mexican in any number of states, or a member of any ‘inferior’ group. Only the details would have differed. The story would be the same.” —John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me
Never be afraid to question…
Place the white man in the ghetto
Call it home
Deprive him of education
Nothing to own
Divide and decide where he can reside
He would, after a time
Assume
The same characteristics that you attach
To the Black
Distill his life to a struggle just to fulfill
Basic instincts for self-respect
Give him little physical privacy
With no agency
To change his condition
Regardless of his conviction
He is merely a people without power
Who live on a planet without possibilities
These characteristics don’t spring
From whiteness or blackness
Not from his condition
But from his conditioning
The depths of his despair
Come from disparity
And atrocity
From peril and pain
That he lives with every day
You will see
It is his legacy
Let us say
Today
That I see this not as a white man
Not as a black man
But as a hu-man
With the same family cult
That cultivates the same ideals
Let us not just try
But tri-umph
So not just a few
Will have a future
But all people will stand
And withstand
Will resist
And persist
It may be hard
It will be huge
But let us choose
To respect
And protect
Because night is coming to our world
And it will be Black Like Me
What My Black Son Taught Me
Now I know the painful history
Turn back pages of the past
See the shameful transportation
Of bodies strong and black
This is not a distant relic
With no impact on today
Rhythms pounding so compelling
Their blood throbbing in your veins
Cloaked terminology
Now criminology
War on drugs their incantation
Social control their true intention
Prejudice and politics
Strange bedfellows entwined
Nefarious the notion blacks were not on their mind
They targeted their neighborhoods
State sanctioned race control
Can’t keep them in the cottonfields
So send them all to jail
Incarcerate then denigrate
Prisons overflow
More than any other nation
Even though our crime rates low
What is this new rhetoric
To quell race equality
Why it’s really law and order.
Does that help you sleep at night
Noble words on your lips?
Black sons sit in prison
While white boys taking hits
But there’s profit to be made
Marijuana plants arise
Let’s make this weed now legal
White businessmen apprise
Nevermind the ones in prison
Their sentences extensive
They’re poor, unrepresented
They will get out in time.
Finally released
Into second class status
You’ll never My black son taught me.
Mine when mama
My name became
Same name my white son said
Now bred with different meaning
Careening to fear
Fear because black is not white
Prejudice not privilege.
My black son taught me
Baby, toddler
Toddler, man
With sinewed legs so fast he ran
Don’t leave the track,
Might not come back
“Maud” my mind screams, “God!”
Just a jog
Targeted, chased, shot, killed
Carnage cause his skin was black
My black son taught me
Check your Car before you drive
Inspected? Repaired?
Trashed? Flashed?
Not too, not too nice
Anything to make them look twice
Obey traffic laws
But not flawless
Lest the cops stop
Too fast, too slow, just right
Who knows
Sandra Bland would understand
If she were here to
Turn signal to taser to trial
These are things my black son taught me.
Hands up, hoodies down
Do not run, turn around
Yes sir, No sir
May I tell you something, sir?
Shoot
Cracks his answer.
Lifeless, breathless, on the ground.
These are things my black son taught me.
Upending, Uprooting, UpChucking
Complicit in ignorance
Ignited in inference
Determined no deference
Mass importation
Incarceration
Devastation
These are things my black son taught me.
Dawn Shields is a freelance writer who believes the written word is a powerful tool in implementing social change. Her focus is educating the public about Black history in the United States and how it perpetuates injustice today. She passionately reveals the disguised suppression and control that is mass incarceration. At the same time, she celebrates the strength, intelligence, beauty, and contribution of a great people. Dawn is the mother of six and grandmother of nine. Her youngest two children were adopted from Haiti.
Editors’ Note: Dawn Shields read “Black Like Me” and “What My Black Son Taught Me” during the virtual poetry event In This Together 2024. See the event recording on the Poets Against Racism & Hate USA YouTube channel here.