Tag: racism

Orientation by Jacob Butlett

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Orientation

During my first week as a sales associate
at the Kennedy Mall, the assistant manager,
a white woman in a tight black blouse,
told me in a low voice, I’m not racist,
but many of the customers who steal
from us are Black, so keep that in mind.
I was speechless. Behind me, lava lamps
glowed bright red, as if blood were oozing
in their cylindrical prisons. I was seventeen.
A closeted white boy from Iowa. My high school
teachers warned me about casual racism—how it
can come across as benign but is really evil.
I looked at my assistant manager as she hurried off
to ring up a customer, & I wondered whether
my co-worker was evil for saying such a thing.
I stood stock-still by the lava lamps, not knowing
whether to be offended, glancing at the luminous
blobs drooping again & again. I felt like that,
melting from the inside out, burning hot.

*

Jacob Butlett has an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He teaches first-year composition at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and works as the Head Poetry Editor at Blue Earth Review. Jacob’s creative works have been published in many journals, including Colorado Review, The Hollins Critic, Crab Orchard Review, and Lunch Ticket. Jacob received an Honorable Mention for the Academy of American Poets Prize (Graduate Prize). He is the author of the poetry book Stars Burning Night’s Quiet Rhapsody (Kelsay Books, 2024).

Phone Call from a Brown Son by Vicki Boyd

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Phone Call from a Brown Son

My son calls driving home from work
in the dark, with one headlight,
he mentions too casually.
My heart the beating wings of a trapped thing,
I manage the smallest sips of air.

In the dark he casually mentions one headlight,
and I am a deer standing in my kitchen
choking in a trickle of air.
When do you think you might get that fixed?
I try for nonchalance.

I am a deer standing in my kitchen, suffocating
in the floodlamp of a single imagined headlight.
It’s OK. They can’t stop you for that, he says,
my feigned dispassion a failure.
We don’t say what we’re both thinking.

They can’t stop you for that, he repeats.
In my chest a trapped thing’s beating wings,
kitchen crackling silence, we can’t say
what we’re both thinking when my son calls
driving alone in the dark.

*

Vicki Boyd has made a professional life in education and publishing. She owes her writing life to Mrs. Williford, first grade teacher, who coached her in composing her first sentence, a dictation. When Vicki added embellishments, Mrs. Williford delighted in that, enough to set Vicki writing for life. Vicki has only recently begun writing for publication, her first piece appearing in Teach.Write: A Writing Teachers’ Literary Journal. She lives and walks and kayaks with her wife and their dog Rosie in and around Portsmouth, NH.