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.

 
Previous
Previous

Bob Hicok

Next
Next

Claude Wilksinson