Manifest Destiny

and so he learned that the land could be called a name so he called it mine.
and so he learned it could be bordered with blood and so he called it conquest.
and he learned that the land was willing to give fruit and flower and he called it profit.
and so he saw some otherfolk planting and praising and he called them enemy.
and so he saw there were armies to guard those flowering folk and he called them prey.
and so he saw the ocean, and what was it but a highway to make more borders?
and so he saw the bright and peaceful sea and he littered it with trade—
the bodies stacked next to the crops, the textiles and the rot of disease.
and so he ground hope and God into dust and called it rights.
and so he heard the wind blowing joy over its people and he sliced it up with law.
and so he kept slicing for five hundred years.
and so he built his things around him, and so his coffers never emptied,
and so he took wives and made children. and so he gave them, too, a price.
and so he saw each blade of grass and counted it as currency.
and so his blood was transfused with gold.
and so he built a wall around himself to keep his many riches in. the walls encased with bone.
even his heart, a fortress of muscle and money.

listen, now, your past and future generations:
your hoarded haul will spoil where you stand.

A Lesson in Distraction/Abstraction – 2020 Time Capsule

When I said yes, I meant yes.1

The day my cousin died I was deep in preparation for a virtual reading, because the world keeps turning, and I was laughing, moments before we heard the news, which means he was dying or dead while I drank my morning coffee or sang a stupid song or looked at myself in the Zoom window or even while I coughed a meaningless cough and not too long before, I had been sick myself with something I won’t name as what I think it was, but it wrecked my body and made my nose bleed like blood was air and my voice got lost somewhere in the phlegm and I still went to work because america has trained me to value only work, not blood—I meant yes, because before that I had wondered what it felt like to not question the open bigotry of liberals and conservatives alike, and I wondered if this last year of tr**p was truly a year to celebrate something like the return of the hidden bigotry of liberals and conservatives alike, and maybe this was before I saw F**K NI**ERS and SHE’S A SASSY NI**ER floating in pixels on the Zoom chat of a program I did online, because this was Our New Normal in These Strange Times—I’d even dressed up for the stream: my black skirt and top, my full fro and red lipstick, even heels because I felt pretty like I hadn’t when the man said yes and then no or said I will never make a fool out of you while he, yes, did make a fool out of me, and goodness is this what they mean by when you’re with someone you’re with everyone they’ve been with, because even though I’ve never had a lover, I did kiss him and he must have also been kissing her and does this mean she and I are now sisters?—I meant yes, and when my cousin died from coronavirus and I was laughing at something that probably wasn’t even funny, because what is a wasted laugh but a useless clutter of breath, and when we heard the news the world shifted, again, into a purple sort of shape that had been there since the first time I felt pain, when the boy’s family let me know Black was forbidden in their white son’s kindergarten life, when my grandmas died and my aunts died and my cousins died and I saw death riding them like some cruel rodeo clown and the world told me I really would die alone and maybe my words would outlive me but there’s no breath in words and I just want to keep on breathing.

1 The question was: are you afraid to die?

Ashley M. Jones is a poet and teacher in Birmingham, Alabama. Her third collection, REPARATIONS NOW! is forthcoming from Hub City Press in September 2021. She is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, and she teaches creative writing at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and Converse College.

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