Honorable Mention, E.E. Cummings Prize, selected by Carolyn Oliver
JUNETEENTH: A POEM IN PROGRESS
. . . . . / and also my voice
in humility / reverence weary
solidarity / for seekers of what
is right each of us / must help create now
or no one is free / what matters is Black
lives are not pieces / of america
not america / too but Black lives are
america / this incised country hurts
does it not night sticks / crack people open
in fiery streets / uniforms take knees
out efficiently / words do not stop them
blunt force history / can taste like tear gas
but this bitterness / will not wash away
we must spit it out / mouths we stand behind
a summer night sticks / to our colored skin
after the protest / we all go swimming
peel off our face masks / and pile our signs
then dive through the rough / conventional waves
and float cooler wet / the flashlights in town
blind here we listen / seeing no faces
to hear our friends breathe and hear their voices
Stephan Delbos
Stephan Delbos, the first Poet Laureate of Plymouth, Massachusetts, is the author of InMemory of Fire (Cape Cod Poetry Review, 2016); Light Reading (BlazeVOX, 2019); and Small Talk (Dos Madres, 2021). Awarded the PEN/Heim Translation grant in 2015, he has translated widely from Czech, including Tereza Riedlbauchová’s Paris Notebook (Visible Spectrum, 2021); and Vítězslav Nezval’s Woman in the Plural (Twisted Spoon Press, 2021). His scholarly work includes The New American Poetry and Cold War Nationalism (Palgrave, 2021). He is a co-founder of the web journal B O D Y (www.bodyliterature.com).