Deborah Paredez received a PhD from Northwestern University. She is the author of the poetry collection This Side of Skin (Wings Press, 2002). Paredez is a cofounder and codirector of CantoMundo, a national organization supporting Latinx poets and poetry. She teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.
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Lightening
for Deborah Johnson (Akua Njeri)
—Composed on the 45th anniversary of Fred Hampton's murder, Chicago IL—
you didn’t look
down or back, spent
the fractured minutes
studying each crease
and curve of the law-
men’s faces
so later you could tell
how it happened:
how you crossed over
his body, how you kept
your hands up
how you didn't
reach for anything
not your opened robe—
nothing—how they said he's good
and dead
how you crossed
over the threshold
how you lifted one
and then the other
slippered foot across the ice
how you kept yourself
from falling—how
your bared belly bore
the revolver’s burrowing snout—
how
how
—how when the baby starts
to descend, it’s called
lightening though
it feels like a weight
you cannot bear—lightening
is when you know
it won't be
long before it's over
Originally published in RHINO. Copyright © 2015 by Deborah Paredez. Used with permission of the author.
Originally published in RHINO. Copyright © 2015 by Deborah Paredez. Used with permission of the author.
