The Mind Creative March 2014
Peter Johnson is an award winning poet and
professor of English. He is widely regarded to
have ignited a renewed spark of interest into
prose poetry in the 90s.
Yesterday I wondered why the blacks weren't
rioting. Even I want to shorten the days of most
white people I meet. Funny, how we're not supposed
to say things like that—instead, slip into our iron
shoes, stumble past each other as if we don't exist
until my kid puts a .22 cartridge into the palm of your
kid and shouts, "Bang!" Today our smug city streets
are coated with ice, a few orphaned birds cling to
frozen branches. I trod down to the park,
anticipating The Final Showdown, which of course
never comes—just a biting February chill, like a
February thirty years ago, stoned in the bottom of a
railroad car with Jimmy Reed. We were waiting for
the crane to arrive and drop its chains. Later, at the
Governor's Inn, Buddy Guy was playing. Jimmy said
to hang close, cup my hand over my beer, "Don't
stare." I was eighteen, two years older than my son,
who goes to school with kids و]