Names We Sing in Sleep & Anger

By Amaud Jamaul Johnson

Like fishermen at dusk, the soldiers returned

from war with stories slumped over their shoulders;

their fingers firm at the knot, the netting, thick

and tangled with the names of the dead.

None could explain how the flood of life all around

them escaped like water from between cupped hands,

how the bodies of men they loved began to crust

the earth like salt, how destruction danced slapdash

and unashamed everywhere, and still they survived.

When I came home from college proud, my educated

mouth agape, a tackle box of words, slick and glossy

and I saw the names of my friends, the young men

I fought with, learned to drink with, and left behind

Lil’ Rocc, Pumpkin, Ulysses, Junebug, Aghoster

names spray-painted throughout our neighborhood

in memoriam, I couldn’t understand how a god

could make one life possible and strip the world

clean of so many, or how, like high-watermarks

the dead remind the living of the coming of storms.

Source: Red Summer (Tupelo Press, 2006)

Biography

Born and raised in Compton, California, poet Amaud Jamaul Johnson was educated at Howard University and Cornell. His debut collection, Red Summer (2006), examines the infamous race riots of 1919, during which nearly a hundred African American men in cities across the country were lynched. The book won the 2004 Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press. Selecting the volume, judge Carl Phillips noted that “Johnson’s poems remind us that the . . .

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