IN 1910, IN ONE OF THE FIRST FORMALLY RECORDED INSTANCES OF POLICE BRUTALITY IN CHICAGO, A POLICE OFFICER SHOT A BLACK CHILD PLAYING WITH HIS FRIENDS MISTAKING HIM FOR A ROBBER. THE POLICE LATER EXPLAINED, “THE BOY WAS PROBABLY LARGE FOR HIS AGE.”
o city of broad shoulders, o special boy of long limbs, city that my grandmother built, i have grown taller than other boys in my grade, full face made of down feathers, wooden soldiers, i thrash my arms in the air with fluorescence, filled with sweets that mother gives me before bed, my brothers shining under porchlight, playing with masks, pretending to be things they are not, i am always outgrowing my church vest, swollen and joyous, my brothers dancing around me, steel mill fathers looking up, and suddenly i am forty feet tall, the rain like creation, skyline as likeness, towering the ferris wheel, doves perched on my ears i am cradling everything above me, hands always reaching, copper and glimmering, i hear sirens below
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- December 27, 2022
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‘IN 1910, IN ONE OF THE FIRST FORMALLY RECORDED INSTANCES OF POLICE BRUTALITY IN CHICAGO, A POLICE OFFICER SHOT A BLACK CHILD PLAYING WITH HIS FRIENDS MISTAKING HIM FOR A ROBBER. THE POLICE LATER EXPLAINED, “THE BOY WAS PROBABLY LARGE FOR HIS AGE.”‘ from MISTAKEN FOR LOUD COMETS: by Lily Someson.
Published by Host Publications on February 27, 2021.
Copyright © 2021 by Lily Someson.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Lily Someson is a poet from Gary, Indiana. She is the author of Mistaken for Loud Comets, winner of the Host Publications Spring 2021 chapbook prize. She has also been published/is forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets, Allium Journal, Underblong, and Court Green among others. She is currently a third-year Poetry MFA candidate at Vanderbilt University where she served as the poetry editor for the Nashville Review. You can find out more about her at http://lilysomeson.com.
Winner of the Spring 2021 Host Publications Chapbook Prize
mistaken for loud comets is a collection of poems that intertwines experiences around incarceration, queerness, and the Black body in America. In this chapbook, lily someson leads us through the Indiana dunes, into dusk air as incarcerated men are beamed into the heavens, and into the rooms of a house she built around herself, creating “a world without confinement.” someson’s poetic genius can be felt in her fortitude—she embraces the storm with startling empathy, and within these poems, offers up her most vulnerable moments alongside her most resolute proclamations of selfhood, claiming space on the page as if fighting for her birthright. Exploring the outermost limits of identity with a gentle, inquiring mind, someson lets the poems in mistaken for loud comets be “everything/ all at once.”
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