"Mercy, Mercy, Me" by John Murillo

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend May 1, 2018   Mercy, Mercy, Me   John Murillo

Crips, Bloods, and butterflies.    A sunflower somehow planted in the alley. Its broken neck.    Maybe memory is all the home you get. And rage, where you    first learn how fragile the axis upon which everything tilts.    But to say you've come to terms with a city that's never loved you    might be overstating things a bit. All you know is there was once    a walk-up where now sits a lot, vacant, and rats in deep grass    hide themselves from the day. That one apartment fire    set back in '76—one the streets called arson to collect a claim—    could not do, ultimately, what the city itself did, left to its own dank    devices, some sixteen years later. Rebellions, said some. Riots,    said the rest. In any case, flames; and the home you knew, ash.    It's not an actual memory, but you remember it still: a rust-    bottomed Datsun handed down, then stolen. Stripped, recovered,    and built back from bolts. Driving away in May. 1992.    What's left of that life quivers in the rearview—the world on fire,    and half your head with it.                Copyright © 2018 John Murillo. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "I wrote the first draft of 'Mercy, Mercy, Me' in late April of 2017, a few days before the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Rodney King riots. While on a trip to Los Angeles earlier that month, I looked for old addresses and other childhood landmarks only to find that many had been razed in the fires, while others were lost to time and neglect. I'm not sure, but I think writing the poem was my way of processing memory, grief, and the loss of an already tenuous sense of home." —John Murillo   John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher Books 2010) and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2020. He is an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada College. Murillo lives in Brooklyn, New York.   Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths Poetry by Murillo   Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher Books, 2010)   from "Notes on the Shape of Absence" by Celina Su "4/30/92 for rodney king" by Lucille Clifton "Saturday Night at the Buddhist Cinema" by Juan Felipe Herrera May Guest Editor: Matthew Shenoda   Thanks to Matthew Shenoda, author of Tahrir Suite: Poems (TriQuarterly Books, 2014), who curated Poem-a-Day this month. Read more about Shenoda and our guest editors for the year. Help Support Poem-a-Day   If you value Poem-a-Day, please consider a monthly donation or one-time gift to help make it possible. Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today's poets each weekday morning. The free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. Thank you! Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038

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