Poem In Which I Am Too Political To Read At Your School

Ashley M. Jones

A rose, single, silent, and soft, opens—
red petals tender, innocent, fragrant.
What beauty! How holy! Peace, unbroken
in the rose’s solid stem. O, ancient
wonder, rose of unsullied joy, I sing
to the majesty of your sun-loved face—
your color so pure, petal fine as wing,
leaf’s thin veins a natural puzzle of lace.
Even your thorns are worthy of my praise,
their spikes but soldiers keeping you from harm,
a stab could set my fingers all ablaze,
but still your grace would silence all alarm—

except the rose was black and you killed it, black and you silenced it, black and you raped it, black and it could not vote, black and it got in the wrong garden so you had to use pesticide, had to poison its water and all the little black rose babies, had to stop teaching it to read, it was black so you pulled it up by the roots with a knife shaped just like America, just like the government, just like white Jesus, just like your mouth leaking bless your heart, you severed its roots and you chewed them whole and you smiled as it withered, searching for home.

Feature Date

April 18, 2024

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Reprinted from “Reparations Now!”
Copyright © 2021 by Ashley M. Jones.
Used with permission of the publisher, Hub City Press.
All rights reserved.

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ASHLEY M. JONES is the Poet Laureate of Alabama (2022-2026). She is the first person of color and the youngest person to hold this position in its 93 year existence. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University, and she is the author of Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press 2017), dark / / thing (Pleiades Press 2019), and REPARATIONS NOW! (Hub City Press 2021). She is the co-editor of WHAT THINGS COST: An Anthology for the People (University Press of Kentucky, 2023). Her poetry has earned several awards, including the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, a Literature Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. She was a finalist for the Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship in 2020, and her collection, REPARATIONS NOW! was on the longlist for the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. Jones has been featured on news outlets including Good Morning America, ABC News, and the BBC. Her poems and essays appear in or are forthcoming at CNN, POETRY, The Oxford American, Origins Journal, The Quarry by Split This Rock, Obsidian, and many others. She is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival. She is the Associate Director of the University Honors Program at UAB, and she is part of the Core Faculty of the Converse University Low Residency MFA Program. She recently served as a guest editor for Poetry Magazine. In 2022, she received a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets.

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Reparations Now!

Hub City Press

Spartanburg, South Carolina

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"In a book that is balancing history, trauma, rage, and joy as brilliantly as Reparations Now! is, there must be something beyond language that grips and holds a reader in place. For this, I am thankful for the generosity of this book, how the poems are shaped, how they challenge the eye as well as the ear, with rich payoffs at the end. I am thankful for the population of this book — how it bursts with ancestors and homages, places rendered so stunningly that they are present and touchable. What a massive undertaking, and what an achievement." —Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Fortune For Your Disaster

"Ashley M. Jones is a genius in how she wields, innovates, and wades through a bounty of poetic forms (sonnets, an aubade, a ghazal, a contrapuntal, anaphora, the subjunctive mode and so much more) with a sense of mastery, levity, and play. This collection is jam-packed with music, grace, and grit. I felt loved and seen by Reparations Now! The book is a personal mix CD in verse curated by Black bliss and brilliance. I kept dog-earring pages for prompts and poems I wanted to read again until I realized the whole collection was mangled by my enthusiastic appreciation and inspiration." —Tiana Clark, author of I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood

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