Lynched

By Julie Weiss

Editor’s warning: violence, racism

—For Robert Fuller

There’s a body hanging from a branch
outside City Hall & nobody is talking.

The sky cowers under its predawn cloak.
The tree holds its breath.

This is not a Discovery Channel documentary
set in the Antebellum South

or an antique postcard from the 1920s,
sold as a souvenir to grinning spectators.

Did they jostle each other for a spot
at the front, inches from the man

being hoisted to his death?
There’s a body hanging from a branch

in a 21^st century California suburb.
The tree is full, leaves glistening,

much like the one we lean against
while picnicking with our children,

white & unafraid, oblivious
to the nooses that have squeezed

the breath out of Black families
for centuries.

Whoever claimed time marches onwards
lied. Decades struck backwards

under the lash of the past
as the morning newscast fades

to black & white.
Suicide, they’ll say. A coincidence:

all these unbalanced, pandemic-stricken
Black men hanging themselves

in the thick of a revolution.
His body, now slumped on the ground,

blazes in the colors of sunrise
& nobody is talking.

Julie Weiss found her way back to poetry in 2018 after slipping into a nearly two-decade creative void. In 2019, she was a Best of the Net nominee. In 2020, she was a finalist in Alexandria Quarterly´s first line poetry contest series and a finalist for The Magnolia Review´s Ink Award. Recent work appears in Praxis Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, and others, and she has poems in a handful of anthologies, as well. Originally from California, she teaches English in Spain, where she lives with her wife and two young children. You can find her on Twitter @colourofpoetry or on her website at julieweiss2001.wordpress.com.

Photo credit: Marilyn Peddle via a Creative Commons license.