Amaud Jamaul Johnson was born and raised in Compton, California, and educated at Howard University and Cornell University. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford, and a Cave Canem Fellow. His first collection, Red Summer, won the 2005 Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press and was published by Tupelo in spring 2006. His […]
Halve the heart— Set the meat aside In slivers From the fatty part That loves him. Mother, You’ve always been good About whipping something up From nothing. Even memory, The bits skewered, Speech sifting, words measured By the quarter cup. Give it time, Son. Low heat. Slow cook. […]
After Mississippi John Hurt Some nights, I need to feel like the Sheriff’s backstage And a too-tough niggah, who I owe more money than what’s In my pocket, is standing out front, and I know my ass Is too drunk or too slow to make the exit and keep my guitar. When I close my […]
(July 4, 1919) The peach of Willard’s face split wide, ran sweet and sticky on Dempsey’s gloves. Canvas met the lumbering burden of his body seven times. By the end of the first, blood, sweat and saliva pooled at their feet, swirled like dashes of hot sauce in a bucket of egg whites, […]
For generations, hillbillies stumbled into the hollow of the rock, testing themselves against the hard darkness treacherous as the mouth of a dead man. Below ground, alcohol echoes in every chamber of the heart, so the bootleggers moved in, and plenty a man, lost in the pleasures of his work, blew himself […]
Watch the fire undress him, how flame fingers each button, rolls back his collar, unzips him without sweet talk or mystery. See how the skin begins to gather at his ankles, how it slips into the embers, how it shimmers beneath him, unshapen, iridescent, as candlelight on a dark negligee. Come, look at […]
(for my grandfather) When Junior returned to Texas The sky caravaned down behind Him, narrow as the fishing creeks He often described in his stories. He spoke of those who wouldn’t leave, Women who thought California Was too far, that we’d be sliced And swallowed whole by the ocean. He spoke of […]
Amaud Jamaul Johnson, a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford, and a Cave Canem Fellow, on his writing process.