Slavery. The Black Codes. Jim Crow. Segregation. Redlining. Bias in banking. Bias in hiring. Bias in medicine. Predatory lending. Property-tax-based education funding. Food deserts. Health deserts. Wealth deserts. Racial profiling. Racial gerrymandering. From systems existing at our nation’s founding to systems existing today, anti-Black racism persists in the foundations of our society. With such systems in place, the thinking that all racial groups have equal access to rights and opportunities is wholly unrealistic. It is our belief at Poets Against Racism & Hate USA that poetry can sway such thinking toward the understanding that systemic racism is real, must be addressed, and can be disrupted.
Each year on May 25th, PARH USA takes action to highlight the issue of systemic racism in the United States. This endeavor, which we call In This Together, stems from an initial virtual reading that occurred on the first anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, convened racially varied voices raised together in poetic protest, and led to the founding of our organization. This year we mark the date with publication of this special collection, In This Together 2026. In the collection, four PARH USA members—Lyn Ford, Scott Ruescher, Marjory Wentworth, and Jennifer Pratt-Walter—use their art to powerfully confront systemic racism and social injustice.
Poems
After the Murder of Another So Young
By Lyn Ford
It has been said that the dead will live on
as long as we say their names.
But
when I say that name,
that one is still dead.
When I say that name
it is praise but not prayer.
No incantation
can lift that one into being again.
When I say that name
it is remembering, not resurrection.
It is an honoring, and still an anguished cry
from my anger that one more is gone,
one more unprotected child
one more that god and humanity did not shield.
When I say that name
it does not compensate for fallen tears
that change nothing,
for distorted vision keeping that one a jewel
In the emptying treasure box of our children.
When I say that name
it may remind others, yes, we mourn, too,
and that name may move someone to shout
on someone else’s behalf.
That name may charge someone to make a change.
That name may set someone else’s heart afire,
the fire so hot its tongues cannot be quenched,
so bright it reveals, transforms and transcends
this hardened truth,
that for all I do or say or change,
when I say that name
that one will still be dead.
The dead, so many. The names, too many.
The tears, too many. The fires, too many.
And we are here, because we burn in their light.
We are here to be their light, to cry out for them.
To honor them. To live for them. To fight for them.
To always remember them.
To do more than say their names.
Lynette (Lyn) Ford is a storyteller, author, and poet. Lyn’s work has been recognized by her inclusion in the National Storytelling Network’s ORACLE Award winners, the National Association of Black Storytellers’ Brother Blue Circle of Elders, and the National Writers Project National Writers Council. Lyn’s poetry has appeared in several anthologies, including Callaloo: Black Appalachia Issue and the Women of Appalachia Project’s Women Speak poetry collections. Lyn is a National Association of Black Storytellers Black Appalachian Storytelling Fellow and a recipient of NABS’ Zora Neale Hurston Award. Lyn is also a laughter wellness ambassador and a great-grandma.
Three Baby Alligators
By Scott Ruescher
From the back seat of the 1964 burgundy Ford Galaxie sedan
that my aspirational parents had just bought new
on a monthly installment plan, I could tell, as my cranky dad
put it in park with a curse, that the teenager I’d spotted
on the top step of the general store porch, attending to the contents
of the silver metal bucket he held between his calves
on the next step down, at a crossroads in the tiny town
of Osteen, Florida, wasn’t anyone I would have known back home
in our modest little white-flight Columbus, Ohio, suburb.
He wasn’t the cocky, urban sort of kid I’d seen from the car
loping past the pawnshops, liquor stores, and bars, the vacant lots
and storefront Baptist churches, in groups of three and four
on Cleveland Avenue, in the streetcar suburb of Linden,
on the wrong side of the freeway from the OSU campus
on the racially divided northeast side of incorporated Columbus
that my Germanic grandfather, a foreman in tool and die
at the coal mining machinery factory where my father
and his brother worked too, had sold his house to get away from
when my grandmother died of her heart disease.
He wasn’t one of those angry young intimidating dudes I’d seen
bouncing up the avenue to shoot hoops in a schoolyard park
on a broken-asphalt basketball court where the rims had torn nets
and the splintered picnic tables and broken-chain swing sets
were rooted in a cement that sparkled with broken bottles.
And he didn’t appear to have anything at all in common with them,
with their James Brown pomades, Smokey Robinson smiles,
and Marvin Gaye swaggers deliberately misrepresenting
their churchgoing, refugee parents, who’d come north
from Louisiana, the Mississippi Delta, and coastal Alabama
to an area of Ohio once known as a trusted destination
on the Underground Railroad, only to be segregated on arrival
by an interstate highway that ran parallel to that railroad
and south-flowing Alum Creek that had so many safe houses,
breaking their disappointed mothers’ backs every time they stepped
on cracks in the sidewalks of red-lined residential blocks
that the city fathers in their infinite wisdom had voted to neglect.
On our way to stay for the weeklong Christmas vacation
at Buckeye Acres trailer park, on the shore of dank Lake Richardson,
where that first-generation German American grandfather of mine
and his equally widowed and wonderfully jolly new wife lived
among a few other couples retired from blue collar jobs
in the workforce of Columbus, we had stopped for groceries,
a soft loaf of Wonder Bread, a jar of Skippy peanut butter,
a tub of Blue Bonnet margarine, a head of iceberg lettuce,
and a block of Kraft American cheese in individually wrapped slices
that my mother had listed in her illegible script on the back
of a utility-bill envelope, when I spotted him on those stairs.
In cut-offs and sneakers, with arms as long and slender as his legs,
likely from a family that stayed behind the Great Migrations,
he looked like he must have spent his school vacations
fishing and hunting, exploring the woods, letting spiders walk up
and down his arms, teasing rattlesnakes with sticks,
and picking ripe citrus fruit in orchards for pay—unlike
those cool guys I’d seen in Linden from the back seat of the car
when we were heading downtown from our white-flight town
that prided itself, ironically, on the subterranean hideouts
of the Underground Railroad in cellars along State Street.
That would have been the back seat of another Ford Galaxie sedan
that my parents had bought new on the installment plan,
a big clunky black one from 1959 or so, with ugly round taillights
and a “flesh-colored” body, says my sister with racial irony,
chuckling in an email, when I ask her if she knows.
As I stepped from the sedan behind my determined mother,
leaving my timid sister to read her Seventeen magazine
in the quiet seat behind my dad, my hungry red heart pounded
and my hungry pink brain burned like the molasses-colored tape
of a home-movie projector curling onto the floor—
and as I followed her up those stairs, to the screen door of a store
protected on stilts from the hurricanes and floods like those
I’d read about much later, in a well-known novel set near there,
six miles north of Orlando, in the swampy town of Eatonville,
I had an intuition that didn’t become a real revelation
until decades later, after my exhaustive miseducation.
At 10, I hadn’t yet heard of, much less read, Zora Neale Hurston’s
Their Eyes Were Watching God, and my educational adventures
hadn’t even begun to do what they do for me now, bringing me
right back to central Florida, by way of central Ohio,
even as I sit here with my laptop in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
arranging the parts of this poem in a Central Square café.
I love these connections, how they lead me to wonder
if that young man on the top step of the general store porch
was related to Trayvon Martin, who was killed near Osteen,
in a gated community in Sanford, half a century later,
for wearing an ominous hoodie when George Zimmerman,
himself a man of color, with Afro-Peruvian heritage
and his own proud history of overcoming oppression,
on duty as coordinator of the Twin Lakes Neighborhood
Watch Committee, fancied himself an important vigilante.
They had already told me, early on in elementary school,
that history has a way of repeating itself, but not that it does so
in conversation, and to the annoyance of its companions,
omitting key information from stories it’s telling them
or arguments it’s making, sometimes absentmindedly forgetting
exactly what the point was and what it was about to say.
And though I hadn’t been told this yet, I sensed right away
that he wasn’t someone to scapegoat, fear, belittle, or suspect,
but a figure of beauty to admire up close, with fleece-like hair
and caramel eyes, milk-chocolate skin and a well-pronounced jaw,
his lower lip darker than his upper, his limber limbs more akin
to those of lanky basketball stars like Oscar Robertson, Bill Russell,
and Wilt Chamberlain than they were to the muscular boxers
like Floyd Patterson, Cassius Clay, and Sonny Liston
who glistened with sweat on Saturday afternoon television
while beating the living crap out of their beefy competitors.
I felt as enthralled, as I reached the top of those stairs with my mom,
as I would be at a mini mall, a few days later, in the same back seat
of that Ford sedan, on seeing a young woman in a sky-blue bikini,
tall, blonde, and tan, in red heels and sunglasses, emerge
from the glass doors of a pharmacy, near the future site
of Disney World, to a blistering hot parking lot in Orlando.
For all I know, he may be sitting at home in Florida right now,
retired from supervising the crews at the citrus orchard,
managing the meat department at a supermarket across
from the beach in New Smyrna, running a landscaping business
in suburban Deltona, or preaching the gospel at a church
in Apostle Heights—a man of greater social standing
than I ever was, a community leader, good with money
and excellent at understanding the needs of perfect strangers.
But he never once flinched that day, and he never lifted his gaze
from the bottom of that bucket, where three baby alligators,
with pimpled green skin, sharp yellow teeth, and tapered tails,
that he had probably caught at Lake Richardson that morning,
were trying without success to climb to the rim and escape,
looking up at him with beady little eyes, unable to get a grip
on the slippery sides with their claws, like me unaware,
as my mother would tell me later, that he was trying
to sell them, and, like me, vying for his mercy and attention.
Scott Ruescher has published two books in recent years—Waiting for the Light to Change (Prolific Press, 2017) and Above the Fold (Finishing Line Press, 2025)—and is working on a third one. The new manuscript will include two poems he published with PARH USA in 2024 as well as “Three Baby Alligators.” He has been writing obsessively about experiences involving race and class issues in his native Central Ohio, even after 50 years in the Boston area—but he addresses similar issues in descriptive poems set in the Boston area, the Deep South, and Latin America.
So Out Of Words
By Marjory Wentworth
In a world where too many people
have their fingers on the triggers
of guns aimed directly at black people,
we have borne witness, time
and time again, to executions
filmed on tiny cameras—
Which allow us to see too much
Which allow us to see not enough.
Judge, jury, executioner—
It’s due process in the suburbs
and the city streets, on winding
country roads and highways, sidewalks
in front of the convenience store,
where the streetlights don’t shine
in the back corner of a parking lot,
on the playground, behind the fence
in a field near your children’s school
on the street in front of your house.
This interminable spectacle
of black death playing on a loop
over and over again until
we become numb to something
that is now a permanent part
of the American memory.
How could these grainy videos
not translate into justice?
I just don’t know how to believe
change is possible
when there is so much
evidence to the contrary.
I am so out of words
in the face of such brutality.
Black lives matter, and then
in an instant, they don’t.
Marjory Wentworth is the New York Times bestselling co-author of Out of Wonder, Poems Celebrating Poets and the author of the prizewinning children’s story Shackles. She is the co-writer of We Are Charleston, Tragedy and Triumph at Mother Emanuel and Taking a Stand, The Evolution of Human Rights. She has published five collections of poetry. In 2021 she received the Governor’s Award for the Arts in South Carolina, where she served as the poet laureate from 2003 to 2020. She teaches and serves as the director of the Writing Center at Wittenberg University, and she is the Ohio co-director of Authors Against Book Bans.
All Mothers Were Invoked When He Cried Out
By Jennifer Pratt-Walter
To George Floyd and all brown people who lost their lives to racial injustice
This day began so small; the sun came up
plain as pale skin worn upon my hands.
How easy to pour coffee in my cup.
The day ran on; a man whose skin was brown
lay stifled in the street, eyes dripping fear.
as three pale men in badges held him down.
All mothers were invoked when he cried out,
all shades of skin: “Oh, momma, I can’t breathe!”
as every mother rises at their shouts.
And back, and back, more brown-skin people died.
Beaten. Shot. Hanging from a tree.
Marched to death, a grim yet human tide.
This day, so small when lifted from night’s seams
shocked all the earth and stole all sleep from dreams.
Jennifer Pratt-Walter (she/her) is a Crone who finds awe in the simple daily miracles of life. More recently, she has been exploring issues of war, violence, and women’s rights. Jennifer is a professional harpist, poet, and self-taught photographer and runs a small farm. She has had poetry and photography published in a number of print and online journals, including VoiceCatcher, Calyx, SageWoman, and Palette. Jennifer has three grown children and a husband and lives in Vancouver, Washington.