Tommye Blount

cantfindit

Tommye Blount is the author of Fantasia for the Man in Blue (Four Way Books, March 2020) and the chapbook What Are We Not For (Bull City Press, 2016). A Cave Canem fellow, he lives in Detroit, Michigan. Source

The Pedestrian

When the pickup truck, with its side mirror,

almost took out my arm, the driver’s grin

 

reflected back; it was just a horror

 

show that was never going to happen,

don’t protest, don’t bother with the police

 

for my benefit, he gave me a smile—

 

he too was startled, redness in his face—

when I thought I was going, a short while,

 

to get myself killed: it wasn’t anger

 

when he bared his teeth, as if to caution

calm down, all good, no one died, ni[ght, neighbor]—

 

no sense getting all pissed, the commotion

 

of the past is the past; I was so dim,

he never saw me—of course, I saw him

Published:

2020

Length:

Shorty

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2021

Themes:

Racial Injustice

Literary Devices:

Couplets

two lines of verse, usually in the same meter and joined by rhyme, that form a unit

Interrupted Clause

a word group (a statement, question, or exclamation) that interrupts the flow of a sentence and is usually set off by commas, dashes, or parentheses