Big City

By Amaud Jamaul Johnson

He promises a canary dress, white gloves,

says they’ll eat chops, thick as her thighs,

that they’ll order doubles of the “finest,”

see all the Big Names when they arrive.

But it’s the thought of them dead:

half of what they own draped around them,

her head against his chest, his back slack

against the headboard, all their letters unopened,

bills not paid, long knocks, the notices tacked

outside their door. It’s not knowing

whether some smell would introduce them

to their neighbors or a landlord wheeling

them out into the hallway; the highboy

he chipped on the drive up, the silver

she inherited from her mother, her hatboxes,

stacked high next to them like a wedding cake

waiting to be buried. He heard that “up there”

the wind had talons sharp enough to hook

a grown man beneath his collarbone and carry

him a full city block. He heard that you learned

the months by measuring the length of their shadows

and even summer was like a quality of night.

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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