Every dead child comes back. The cities crowd out from north to south. Blink and they’re fine, blink again and they look exactly how we left them under the water, under the earth, bound and destroyed. The ones burned look fine, except when you squint and they resemble walking ash in the form of a girl. Our heroes are somewhere finding the cause. Though some of the boys seem grateful they can breathe again (can they? someone asks, can they breathe again? Or are we just imagining, because it’s what we now want?), other children fear that we’ll put them right back in the ground, that the world hasn’t changed. They eat our food but can’t fill themselves, so they eat and they eat and they eat and they eat and whole cities are devoured and they don’t mean to do it, but they’re hungry, and we never fed them properly when they were alive, or even after we killed them the first time. Our heroes are finding the cause. Look, we love the dead. We love giving eulogies, writing elegies, adorning stones with flowers, and blinking back tears every time we’re reminded that the same wrongs that put them in the ground, keep us here. Dear lord, the dead are coming back and it’s too much. The planet can’t sustain this, the wheels will fall off. We arm ourselves and walk the streets and hunt for the dead. We feel bad at first, but it gets easier with every shot. Who needs heroes? If we’re fast enough, they won’t know what they’ve been missing. This is mercy. This is us choosing.
Born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, Gary Jackson is the author of the poetry collections origin story and Missing You, Metropolis, which received the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and co-editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry. His poems have appeared in numerous journals including Callaloo, The Sun, Gulf Coast, and Copper Nickel. He’s an associate professor in English and creative writing at the College of Charleston.
