My poem "What They Did" featured 12/3 in Winedrunk Sidewalk

I am pleased to report that my poem "What They Did" is featured today (day 1416) in Winedrunk Sidewalk. Many thanks to editor John Grochalski for including it—and for keeping up the good fight!

For daily resistance poems, follow winedrunksidewalk.blogspot.com.

Permalink to just my poem: https://winedrunksidewalk.blogspot.com/2020/12/day-fourteen-hundred-and-sixteen.html.


Poem Process:

I wrote a lot of the first draft of this poem on 1 June 2018 during Write! hosted by River River at the Carson McCullers House in Nyack, New York. On that particular day, one of the workshop prompts was "What they did [was]...." A couple of days later, I edited the rough piece a little and added most of the section from "What they did was spit" through "white Jesus / made in our image." But it still didn't feel finished.

Fast forward to 2020. I found the unfinished handwritten piece while going through a pile of paperwork in my office, found it still unsettlingly relevant, and dusted it off to try out at a couple of Zoom readings. Finally, in late November I decided to transcribe it into a Word document and strengthen and (as much as possible) finish it. One glaring item was that my original ending had alluded to the then still-pending 2020 Presidential election. In the wake of Trump's loss, that ending no longer seemed to work, so I replaced it with the six final lines you now see.

[12/24/2020 UPDATE: When I originally posted this blog entry I said I began this poem during a workshop in Amherst, Ohio. I was wrong. Today, going through other old papers, I realized that while I had the date correct, I had misremembered the location. The poem was begun on 1 June 2018 in Nyack, New York, and I've corrected the paragraph above accordingly. Side note: this was the same day I wrote "Odd Missive," which is the final poem in my book Rattle and Numb.]