they called him Money& he had none. ion evengotta tell you how funny thataint. they called him Junemint or, that June, he tasted ofpepper. i forget. i rememberthey called his hands to the frontthe smoke was thick &the bullets carved—no. he had a name. i thinkit was dark & my mouthlet out a sound & suddenlythere he was. grinning overthe sound of artillery &bruise-laughter. you rang?& i never asked for helpbut i ended up saved. anywaysomeone told me he diedcasually. like the worldswallowed his noise & gaveus the broth to recall him by.i laid with him & nevertold no one. never called himnothing but a cool blush of smoke.he asked me to gift him a wayout, a name to be welcomed homeinside & i couldn’t offer anything up,not even all me. anyway.someone told me he diedcasually. i called him up& ask is it true? he say somethingbout there being no war in the blues.he aint answer my question. directlyafter, the whole room got tosmelling like pepper. like June.gun powder in a Ferguson sky. & i be damned. there aintno word to call this what it is.
no name in the street
Feature Date
- August 25, 2021
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“no name in the street” from Gumbo Ya Ya by Aurielle Marie, © 2021.
All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260.
Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Award-winning poet, essayist and Freedom Fighter Aurielle Marie is a child of the Deep South and an Atlanta native. She received her bachelors in Social Justice Strategy and Hip-Hop Theory from the Evergreen State College, and is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama.
Aurielle’s poetry has been featured or is forthcoming in the TriQuarterly, Southeast Review, Black Warrior, BOAAT Journal, Sycamore Review, Adroit Journal, Vinyl Poetry, Palette Poetry, and Ploughshares. She’s received invitations to fellowships from Lambda Literary, VONA Voices, and Tin House. Aurielle is a 2017 winner of the Blue Mesa Review poetry award, and a Write Bloody Book prize. She’s the Lambda Literary 2019 Poetry Emerging Writer-in-Residence. She won the 2019 Ploughshares Emerging Writers Award for Poetry.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
The University of Pittsburgh
"Some writers write poetry to flex what they can do. Aurielle Marie writes reckoning poems themselves come to work. Gumbo Ya Ya kicks with this lit lit magic, this insistent electricity, pages that sweat ink, bleed it, weep it, drip it. Aurielle Marie will cuss, but an Aurielle Marie poem can curse; what she has seen, felt, or known, is trans-amplified in the room she gives the poem to do what it’s gonna do. Gumbo Ya Ya is Aurielle Marie’s Dirty-Dirty grimoire drawn from a vernacular trickbag at once up to something and down for whatever. These poems are spell weaving. They are bound to work you."
—Douglas Kearney, Cave Canem Poetry Prize judge
"Aurielle Marie’s Gumbo Ya Ya is a hex, a homily, a house of reckoning and revolution sprung from a young Black woman’s willpower and wondrous capability. Diverse and daring in form, this gxrl gospel of gumbo serves molten exuberance on each page, defying expectation and launching us into new hope."
—Tyehimba Jess, author of Olio
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