Home > Work > Brown: Poems
1 " A quiet snowglobe of pain I want to shake. While the flakes fall like ash we race the train to reach the place Emmett Till last whistled or smiled or did nothing. "
― Kevin Young , Brown: Poems
2 " I was ten when Mike Smiley, half-Indian, skinny, brown-skinned, brought the word jigaboo to schoollike lunch, or the flu,fed him by his adopted white father who saidthat's what we calledthem then. By noon it was done--everyone had a name for what had beenbothering them, some thing utterly humanas hate. "
3 " There are gods of fertility, corn, childbirth, & police brutality--this last is offered praise & sacrifice near weekly & still cannot be sated "
4 " A finger is a gun-- a wallet is a gun, skin a shiny pistol,a demon, a barrelalready ready--hands updon't shoot-- "
5 " a calm that would undo most anyone who thought noise worse than its opposite "
6 " Sixth grade you didn't survive just endured. "
7 " The apocalypse sounds like this-- black men breaking in to steal back the thing once stole from them. "
8 " Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die to get there. "
9 " A shack made of ribs. A house made of out. A car made of rust. A smile made of doubt. "
10 " We were never young. "
