Shirley Jones-Luke

A Portrait of Michael Brown that Wasn’t Michael Brown

after Ferguson & The White Card

Black outline on a white space             dots indicate entry path
of bullets
The body is naked.     The Black body is naked
except for the dark marks.
A caricature of a young man, of Michael Brown.

But it’s not him.               No outline can represent        a black body.
White space cannot hold             who Michael Brown was.
It looks like a target     at a gun range     a black body bullseye.
Not a boy. Not a man. A step above a stick figure.
Some might call it art.
Some might

 

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Shirley Jones-Luke is a poet and a writer. Ms. Luke lives in Boston, Mass. She has an MA from UMass Boston and an MFA from Emerson College. Her work has appeared in Adanna, BlazeVOX, Deluge and Willawaw. Shirley was a 2017 Poetry Fellow at the Watering Hole Poetry Retreat. Ms. Luke will be a participant at VONA (Voices of Our Nation) in June 2018.

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