— featuring: Martín Espada, Terrance Hayes, Shauna Morgan Kirlew, Brenda Marie Osbey, Safiya Sinclair, Frank X Walker, Afaa Michael Weaver, and more.

Fallen at Charleston
Introduction
by Brenda Marie Osbey

1969 Hospital Workers’ Strike, courtesy of the Waring Historical Library

Within minutes of having been stopped by a policeman for driving with a broken brakelight in North Charleston, South Carolina, Walter Lamar Scott lay dead, face down in a grassy lot near the intersection of Remount Road and Craig Street.

Video footage shows clearly that Michael Slager twice used his Taser and then, from a distance of at least fifteen feet, fired eight rounds, striking Scott in the back, buttocks, ear and heart as the man fled on foot. Slager calls in the incident, stating simply, “Shots fired and the subject is down. He took my Taser.” He then approaches the fallen man, instructs him to put his hands behind his back, and, receiving no response, handcuffs him and walks away. After another officer arrives and requests a medical kit, Slager reaches down, places his Taser beside Scott’s body, and only then does he check the man’s pulse. Paramedics arrive and pronounce Scott dead on the scene. Videotaped by a passerby, start to finish, the event times out at under five minutes. Slager and his attorney, David Aylor, will at first claim that the officer feared for his life. Immediately upon release of the video, Aylor will resign as counsel.

Two months later, Dylann Roof will enter Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston proper and join the congregants gathered there for Wednesday night prayer service, before opening fire and killing nine people. Upon arrest, he will confess that he had hoped to instigate a “race war” because African Americans are “taking over the world.”

Emanuel AME, “Mother Emanuel,” is the home church of Telemaque (eventually known as “Denmark”) Vesey, famed for having organized the 1822 slave rebellion popularly known as the Charleston Rising. Suppressed on Sunday 16 June, the planned insurrection ended with trial by the newly formed Committee of Vigilance and Safety made up of members of the city council and wealthy landowners. Four officers of the city guard were formed into a special police force assigned with locating participants and potential informants. Twenty-four hours later, no fewer than ten were in custody. Continue reading →

Not songs of loyalty alone are these,
But songs of insurrection also,
For I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over.
                                                                            Walt Whitman

I see the dark-skinned bodies falling in the street as their ancestors fell 
before the whip and steel, the last blood pooling, the last breath spitting.
I see the immigrant street vendor flashing his wallet to the cops,
shot so many times there are bullet holes in the soles of his feet.
I see the deaf woodcarver and his pocketknife, crossing the street
in front of a cop who yells, then fires. I see the drug raid, the wrong
door kicked in, the minister’s heart seizing up. I see the man hawking
a fistful of cigarettes, the cop’s chokehold that makes his wheezing
lungs stop wheezing forever. I am in the crowd, at the window,
kneeling beside the body left on the asphalt for hours, covered in a sheet.

I see the suicides: the conga player handcuffed for drumming on the subway,
hanged in the jail cell with his hands cuffed behind him; the suspect leaking
blood from his chest in the back seat of the squad car; the 300-pound boy
said to stampede barehanded into the bullets drilling his forehead.
Continue reading →

                        – After W. E. B. Du Bois

Wild irises purpling my mouth each dawning—
                                                                 trauma souring the quiet street.
Its whole dark field roots me down and down. The mock-sun a blank obscuring. Fire whips
white-shock of lightning, bright Molotov angel, what ash marks assume a coon cemetery.

And all the names scratched out.
                                                                 What burns this house burns apishly.
                                                                 The mouth the church this immaculate body
such untouchable sounds we have made of ourselves. A blues archeology. Thus like a snake I writhe upward,
mottling and spine-thick, where heavy nouns flay through my tubercular,

                                                                 their heavens coil a twisted rope. Your veiled suffocation.
                                                                 Unknown asphyxiate. The mourning-dove which scales
                                                                 its double gaze in tongues knows this: the broken world
                                                                 was always broken. Continue reading →

 for Mother Emanuel A.M.E.

In these clasped hands we see the seeds
of what has come to be, the tiny black faces
of children chained into ships headed to sea,

not an invitation to a better life, not a vote
for the human, but the deadened greed, a wish
against what life means to the living, a cruelty

above the requirements of evil, our ambition
to live, to survive, to grow beyond chains now
our only hope in row after row of bloody pews.

Continue reading →