Amaud Jamaul Johnson
THREE POEMS
The Doo-Wop
you have to know something
about wanting to be saved
by a song, or have seen,
like a post-apocalyptic wave,
a whole generation of hard-
hearted men, built for terror
and self-sacrifice, all shatter
against a single curb.
my mother turned up
every love song and sung
as if the notes were liquid
filling her lungs. I think
what scares me the most
is that I’ve never seen her
drunk. And in every car
the same tune is playing,
as if that cry is holding
the air, as if we are dying,
as if we have never lived.
Smokey
the most dangerous men
in my neighborhood
only listened to love songs
to reach those notes
a musicologist told me
man essentially cuts
his own throat. some nights
even now, i’ll hear a falsetto
and think i should run
Black Dragons
“THOSE WHO ARE BOUND BY DESIRE SEE ONLY THAT WHICH CAN BE HELD IN THEIR HANDS”
—BRUCE LEROY, THE LAST DRAGON, 1987
Scene One: Attending Lotus Blossom
Leroy’s earliest wet dreams open
to the sky clotting dark, the late sun
wedged between the brick tenements
like a bullet lit between his teeth.
Then flashes of Bruce Lee’s exposed
torso, light like fabric gone threadbare
about him, the body becoming less
sphinxlike, less a riddle, then some
breaking, some knot of air like music
coming undone. He’s at his rooftop
garden again tossing stars, deadheading
another bouquet of arrows, disarticulating
the imagined bodies of his enemies,
anticipating some obligatory private war.
Amaud Jamaul Johnson was born and raised in Compton, California, and is the author of Darktown Follies and Red Summer. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and Cave Canem Fellow, his honors include The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, The Dorset Prize, and a Pushcart Prize. He teaches at University of Wisconsin-Madison.