when you have closed your windowsagainst the cold and all your winter terroryou can hear them in the streethis voice thin and so close to breakingreminds you of mornings back homedon’t touch me don’t fucking touch mehe cannot be any clearer and stillyou can only just catch the woman pleadingshe must not be as desperateas he is hurt or else you’d recognizethat too you have so much practice with this wakingto bear witness earlier in the nightwhen you had wanted to drift into peaceit was the neighbor’s toddlerand the crisp slap of a grown palm against his pudgy thighas if that would quiet him sometimesit’s the animal sounds from below or the crashof pots or the dull thud of flesh against a wallthat makes you think of Daddy a boy in that houseof all the things he learned to forgetand what a necessary skill revision
Even after Summer
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- March 27, 2022
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Janae, Brionne. “Even After Summer.” In Blessed are the Peacemakers: Poems.
Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2022. pp. 3.
Copyright © 2022 by Northwestern University.
Published 2022 by Northwestern University Press.
All rights reserved.
Brionne Janae is a poet and teaching artist living in Brooklyn. They are the author of Blessed are the Peacemakers (2021) which won the 2020 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize, and After Jubilee (2017) published by Boat Press. Brionne is the recipient of the St. Botoloph Emerging Artist award, a Hedgebrook Alum and proud Cave Canem Fellow. Their poetry has been published in Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The Sun Magazine, jubilat, and Waxwing among others. Brionne is the co-host of the podcast, The Slave is Gone, alongside poet Jericho Brown and Rogue Scholar Aífe Murray. Off the page they go by Breezy.
Evanston, Illinois
Northwestern University
"Drawing the monster of inheritance as it shapeshifts, these poems illustrate how our fathers’ sins can make fugitives of us. Saved in moments by something as simple as the sight of the lemons growing in their grandmother’s yard, abandoned in others to ‘don’t touch me’ seeping through the wall, the speaker in this elegiac collection finds in the fact of flesh the hope of praise.”
—Lyrae Van Clief‑Stefanon, author of Open Interval
“If ‘we are nothing more than heirloom seeds / falling into the dirt and blooming,’ then Blessed Are the Peacemakers forces us to consider which birds of hell and paradise fly from the soil of family and nation. The speakers of Janae’s magnificent garden merge memories and insights with the death, deception, and desire we often lack the courage to face. The wonder of this arresting collection is how in reckoning with legacies of violence, estrangement, and love we ‘learn, just a little, about peace.’”
—Ama Codjoe, author of Bluest Nude
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