1965: Harriet Richardson Wipes Galway Kinnell’s Face after State Troopers Beat Him with a Billy Club

Vievee Francis

for Matthew

In Selma that day. The photograph. It is the way she is looking at him. Not his name. His pallor. Not the city, nor the event, not even the blood on his neck. When I saw the picture I realized someone cared enough to take it. There was only one lens. Then, the entire world wasn't always watching. She pressed that cloth to his neck as intimate as a kiss whispered into the channel of an ear. Spontaneously. Sudden and overwhelming as a father's embrace after a father's failure to embrace. I was two years old. It was before I knew what I was born into. It would have been illegal for me to have married my husband. My husband stares at the picture, but a man so compassionate cannot easily take in its lack. It takes the violating or the violated to know. You know why Galway was there. Why pretend? The reward of courage is this: my husband told his parents he would marry me. Period. He expected his parents to live up to the values they espoused. They have. If I cry, my blue-eyed father-in-law—whose father left Germany in the nascent rise of Hitler—cries. Galway's eye to Harriet's brown as mine. Look at the way he looks at her. Like a sun rising twice to be Galway that day, looking up in the face of the tender after terror. See, the grace of gratitude. He being there. She being her.

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November 9, 2022

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“1965: Harriet Richardson Wipes Galway Kinnell’s Face after State Troopers Beat Him with a Billy Club” from The Best American Poetry 2022, ed. Matthew Zapruder, series editor David Lehman.
Published by Scribner on September 13, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by Vievee Francis.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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Vievee Francis was born in San Angelo, Texas, in 1963. Her books of poetry include Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Ptess, 2006), Horse in the Dark (winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize for a second collection; Northwestern University Press, 2016), Forest Primeval (winner of the Hurston Wright Legacy Award and the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; TriQuarterly, 2015), and The Shared World (Northwestern, 2022). Her work has appeared in five previous editions of The Best American Poetry and in Angles ef Ascent: A Norton Anthology ef Contemporary African American Poetry. She has been a poet-in-residence for the Alice Lloyd Scholars Program at the University of Michigan. In 2009 she received a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and in 2010, a Kresge Fellowship. A former associate editor of Callaloo, she is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

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Matthew Zapruder picks the poems for the 2022 edition of The Best American Poetry, “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune).

Since 1988, The Best American Poetry series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume presents a selection of the year’s most brilliant, striking, and innovative poems, with comments from the poets themselves lending insight into their work.

For The Best American Poetry 2022 guest editor Matthew Zapruder, whose own poems are “for everyone, everywhere...democratic in [their] insights and feelings” (NPR), has selected the seventy-five new poems that represent American poetry today at its most dynamic. Chosen from print and online magazines, from the popular to the little-known, the selection is sure to capture the attention of both Best American Poetry loyalists and newcomers to the series.

“Want to read more contemporary poetry but don’t know where to begin? For expert curation and variety, you can’t do better than The Best American Poetry 2022, edited this year by Matthew Zapruder…Zapruder strikes just the right note in his introduction…He finds encouragement—and motivation—in fine writing."
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

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