Featured Poet: Daniel B. Summerhill

                 ​kelly bell photography CC




sitting in a wicker chair against 
floral wallpaper in oakland heat

there is a portrait of huey newton 
                                in my church.
it’s communion sunday
              and mama has on her good shoes
with the gold links.
               the jackson boys are dressed 
to the nines 
their pants starch-creased and hovering
                above their snakeskins like halos

hueys in a Black beret— 

but gone, anyway-


                             what’s blood without a body to show for it?

in the states, what is more righteous than a gun 
               and a spear sitting 
               at the left hand of god

on a wicker chair
               in oakland?

//

wicker chair out front since before cointelpro 
               bludgeoned the panthers. 
​
we’ve come because it’s easter 
                                                             and we’re hungry. inside,

marvin gaye’s falsetto 

                                              seeps in like a gentle flood 

                                                             and the kitchen becomes 
                                                             a small soul train line 
                                                             for 12 minutes instead. 

all these bodies bending like prayer

                               Black means religion is second 

only to dancing.

//

the day america stormed 
                america 

                                                i was Black and in exile
                 for yanking a tulip 
from the ground

                                i shouldn’t have, 
but wanted something 
                more beautiful to die 
before i did-

call it civil disobedience 





what i imagine my mother meant when she said you sound like one of those conspiracy theorists
after i tell her nobody should be in be in prison

“I am interested in what it feels like to imagine yourself as large and immovable as the sky”
                                                                                                                                         -Hanif Abduraquib

imagination is a possibility we don’t yet have 
a language for. when you’ve been taken— 
you focus on the pieces that havent. what’s in front 
of you, she says. there’s less room for possible 
here. what i tell my mother sunday at dinner: 
the sky we look up to is larger than the world
it surrounds & we didn’t have a name for heaven 
until we decided some people don’t deserve 
to be there or kyle rittenhouse siting in a bar 
with neo-nazis makes him the devil or god 
                                depending on your definition 
of salvation or my mother and I watch outside 
my living room window, I decide only a deity could 
shake a tree that big, so I ask the wind to show me 
its palms to check for scaring. I want to see 
the battle wounds, the bruised joints, buckling skin 
& deliverance resting on tender ankles. 
we once watched the earth shift against itself 
as if the cascades reconsidered their location 
& i am reminded she has witnessed possible.
I am a nod to my mother’s hands. outstretched-
over me, like an evocation asking the day to end 
before I do. 





enlarge my territory 

i watch into the cosmos & feel 

                                                                            infinitely 

small, 


                                             how the homies must 
                                                            feel when they watch
                                                                           the birth of a nation
                                                                                          or any other carbon-
                                             copy slave movie


no matter 
how triumphant 
the battle, the victor 
is always 
abundantly
white

                                                                                            i can't help but think 
                                                                                            about the boys 
                                                                                            i grew up with 


who claimed to “run the city,”
not in colonial terms, but 
                                                           as anatomy


how they’ve learned 
               since birth 
                              to measure land, not 
                by geography, but 

through flesh & the taking of it

in this way, perhaps, 
                the obsession has always been
the body 
                & the destruction
                              it’s capable of wielding

or falling victim to

                                                            in this way, they too
                                                                           seek something 
new,

                                                                                            if not imaginative— 



                                                                            //

if not through 
their hands,
then, 
through 
their bodies.


                                                in this way,
                                                              we are huge, after all

how the few feet 
                separating our nikes 
                                               does nothing 
                                                               to render 
                                                                               the entire sky 


between us. ​

​

Daniel B. Summerhill is Assistant Professor of Poetry/Social Action and Composition Studies at California State University Monterey Bay. He has performed in over thirty states, The UK, and was invited by the US Embassy to guest lecture and perform in South Africa. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Columbia Journal, Rust + Moth, Button Poetry, Lily Poetry Review, Flypaper, Cogs, The Hellebore, and others. His debut collection Divine, Divine, Divine is available now from Oakland- based -Nomadic Press. His sophomore collection, Mausoleum of Flowers will be published by CavanKerry Press in April 2022.

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