Volume III, Issue I Available for Order Now
THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA IS ONE OF THE MOST WRITTEN ABOUT AND LEAST UNDERSTOOD PLACES IN AMERICA. Writers and scholars have long documented its blues, its poverty, and its beauty, but the economic architecture underneath, the capitalism, the land theft, the tax exploitation that made and unmade Black life there, remains underexplored in literary form. These three poems approach the Delta not as a landscape of nostalgia or long past tragedy but as a site of ongoing extraction and unfinished resistance. My angle is personal and structural simultaneously. I grew up in North Memphis, at the northern edge of and the epicenter to the Delta’s cultural and economic reach. In 2024, I fought and won an eminent domain battle against a government agency attempting to seize my family’s ancestral land, a fight that radicalized my understanding of how capitalism uses legal mechanisms to dispossess Black communities of the land they built, farmed, and bled for. These poems emerge directly from that experience and from years of research into the history of Black land ownership, tax exploitation, and displacement in the South. This work sits alongside my literary nonfiction published in The Oxford American, including “Dear Queen,” named a Notable Selection in Best American Essays 2025, which explores Black land, family legacy, and maternal memory. These poems extend that inquiry into more compressed, imagistic territory, asking what poetry can hold that prose cannot.
Highway 61
A conduit, connection
a thoroughfare of time travel
spatial spirituality
a convening
the trickers roam
these roads
far beyond Tunica
The legacy of exploitation
Lives
One road connects to so many
Destinations
Monocrops
Monotheists
Battle it out
Mono e Mono
The legacy of cultivation
Lives
One road lends itself
To back breaking labor
The spine of the cotton capital
Why does share cropping
Sound socialist?
I too, have a dream.
I have a dream, too.
That the real dream of Dr. King comes true.
Integrating us into a burning house wasn’t the goal.
Social for media wasn’t the want.
What about
Social for good.
Social for love.
Social for soul.
Social for community.
Social for health.
We tend to love all the -isms.
But social.
I too, have a dream,
That capitalism doesn’t eat us all alive.
I have a dream that the 99 percent can remove the boot.
Off the 99.
For the 9, 9 and the 2000.
I dream of backing up.
Not to be nostalgic.
To retrieve what we tend to forget.
I too, have a dream.
I have a dream, too.
The ghostly wail of a mechanical beast
In the distance
announces that I am home.
Rumbling through the man-made arteries
every engine, car, and railroad spike tells a story
of what matters most.
Passenger vs freight
In this town
The hub of the world
A distribution nerve center they say
The only capital they want
isn’t the start of a new sentence
I pray this isn’t the start of a new sentence
Enough.
We’ve carried the weight
of being merchandise
It’s a logistical nightmare
From there to here.
