Red Summer
By Gerry Sloan
RED SUMMER
(Centennial of the Elaine
Race Massacre: October, 2019)
The dust devils of eastern Arkansas
are not currents of air,
as we wrongly suppose,
but rather spirits of the victims
of the Elaine Race Massacre
seeking lost repose, returning
as a reminder of our collective crimes
when racism and fascism combine.
I still see state poet laureate,
Lily Peter, sitting on the porch
of her Delta plantation, bemoaning
the loss of spring peepers, as industrial
agriculture sank its fangs deeper
into the loam of Phillips County,
the ancestral home of lynching,*
events in Elaine just the cherry
on top of the shit sundae served
to its citizens for almost a century.
When whirling dervishes speak
the dialect of cottonwood trees,
they leave only this white shroud
on the killing ground, a delicate
mantle that will last a few weeks
then be gone to sprout its own likeness.
“In 2015, the Equal Justice Initiative counted more than 4,000 lynchings between 1877
and 1950 in twelve states of the old Confederacy. Leading all other counties in these
states was Phillips County, Arkansas, with 254 lynchings; in second place were two
Louisiana parishes with 51 lynchings each.” —Patsy Watkins, It’s All Done Gone (The
University of Arkansas Press, 2018)
Gerry Sloan is a retired music professor living in Fayetteville, Arkansas. His collections are Paper Lanterns (Half Acre Press, 2011) and Crossings: A Memoir in Verse (Rollston Press, 2017), both available on Amazon plus five chapbooks including one in Mandarin. Recent work appears in Slant, Nebo, Cantos, Xavier Review, Arkansas Review, Cave Region Review (featured poet), and Elder Mountain (featured poet). He can be reached at: [email protected].
