Jean-Michel Basquiat // Harriet Tubman

“When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person.”
— H. T.

Burn barrel. Cuffed, hungry hands. Morning twilight.
& with a bit of paint, newsprint can be repurposed into

something truer. My dead, for example. How theirs is
history while another’s is myth. A tall tale handed down

generations over makeshift fires of a woman who could not
read or write freeing words from their reins. Breathe,

language. Remind me how breath can be a luxury. It takes
time for a genuflected knee to suffocate the sky. Sky, words,

morning, bodies roughly sketched onto a concrete canvas.
A few wear their crowns like halos. Mouths a permanent

scar. Teeth jagged. Bared. & all those impossible colors
contrasted into accuracy. Personhood. In a certain light,

how everything is self-portrait. How they called her Moses.
How white the Moses over my grandfather’s well-lit mantle.

Do you tire, young man, of shouldering so much nothing? Nothing
but 300 hearts smuggled north. 300 names. Given names. Master

names. Graffiti. High art. A bronze statue, as apology. Celebration.
They're gonna kill me. I cannot breathe bejeweled onto the base.

John Sibley Williams is the author of six collections, including The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award), As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize). A twenty-six-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and founder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series. Previous publishing credits include Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Verse Daily, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly.