Remica Bingham-Risher
a man is killed in Mobile, Alabama. It is 1981, nearest what some will call the last lynching in
America. The business of our nation goes forward—a star leads and hostages are freed while Michael
Donald walks from the corner store. He is 19, the youngest of six, a college boy. He will miss
class the next morning and Sunday dinner; he will not bring the cigarettes to his sister. Those
weeks after spiriting me into the world, my mother watches the news, looks over at my father too
frequently, calls his name each time he heads to another room—delirious in her exhaustion and
fear—where was he, would he disappear? And the little girl, what world was this for her to enter?
Crosses burning on the county courthouse lawn, then other sons with ropes and guns, looking
for anyone, find Michael Donald walking, ask him for directions, a sign for old haints. They
show him the rifle and what can he do but be forced into the car, driven past this life into the
next. Years later, in an unimaginable victory, his mother will bankrupt the KKK, demanding they
pay for her loss and others, while my mother, like so many, carries me daily to school around the
corner, insists on watching until I am beyond the large blue doors. Mothers are God again, and
they will not go quietly; they know everything born will need to be fed, even children hung from
low branches in their jean jackets and muddy tennis shoes, carried out of the wood into the light
of everyone's suffering.
from the book ROOM SWEPT HOME / Wesleyan University Press
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This poem is a tribute to Beulah Mae Donald, who makes me remember that mothers will care for us, pray over us, hold folks accountable for us, even in our absence. Because I'm grateful for that, this poem is also a tribute to my mother, Doris Knight-Bingham, who brought me into an unsafe world that I'm sure frightened her just as much as it frightens me when I look around at my children and grandbaby, but who has done her best to keep me safe and loved and praised in it.

Remica Bingham-Risher on "25 days after I am born"
An Interview with Ada Limón

"I was thinking about how much nature means to me in my own work, and how speaking about nature is also a way of talking about the climate crisis. It felt crucial to do something that blended poetry and nature, but I didn’t want to do it in a way that felt forced. I wanted it to be rooted in what poetry can actually do. Poetry can allow you to pay deep attention. The brain can expand, and beyond that, the heart can expand."

via THE NATION
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Cover of Jessica E. Johnson's book, Metabolics
What Sparks Poetry:
Jessica E. Johnson on "Of Daylight Saving Time, MyFitnessPal, and Indoor/Outdoor Cats"

"I want to weave in my long, stubborn opposition to hierarchy, noting how eyes trained on hierarchy and classification will miss what is rich, intricate, and inherently valuable in favor of an arbitrary metric. Rich, intricate, valuable: the adjectives call up the sword fern, mahonia, and yellow stream violet that grow under the tall, broad cedar I love and try to listen to, the whole system around her unsuited to commodification."
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