Jericho Brown

cantfindit

Jericho Brown grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, and worked as a speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans before earning his PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of New Orleans and graduated with a BA from Dillard University in 1998. Brown is the author of The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry; The New Testament (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), which received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; and Please (New Issues, 2008), which received the 2009 American Book Award. Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award and has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. He has taught at the University of Houston, San Diego State University, and the University of San Diego, as well as at numerous conferences and workshops. Brown is currently an associate professor of English and creative writing and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and poetry editor at The Believer. Source

Say Thank You Say I'm Sorry

I don’t know whose side you’re on,

 

But I am here for the people

 

Who work in grocery stores that glow in the morning

 

And close down for deep cleaning at night

 

Right up the street and in cities I mispronounce,

 

In towns too tiny for my big black

 

Car to quit, and in every wide corner

 

Of Kansas where going to school means

 

At least one field trip

 

To a slaughterhouse. I want so little: another leather bound

 

Book, a gimlet with a lavender gin, bread

 

So good when I taste it I can tell you

 

How it’s made. I’d like us to rethink

 

What it is to be a nation. I’m in a mood about America

 

Today. I have PTSD

 

About the Lord. God save the people who work

 

In grocery stores. They know a bit of glamour

 

Is a lot of glamour. They know how much

 

It costs for the eldest of us to eat. Save

 

My loves and not my sentences. Before I see them,

 

I draw a mole near my left dimple,

 

Add flair to the smile they can’t see

 

Behind my mask. I grin or lie or maybe

 

I wear the mouth of a beast. I eat wild animals

 

While some of us grow up knowing

 

What gnocchi is. The people who work at the grocery don’t care.

 

They say, Thank you. They say, Sorry,

 

We don’t sell motor oil anymore with a grief so thick

 

You could touch it. Go on. Touch it.

 

It is early. It is late. They have washed their hands.

 

They have washed their hands for you.

 

And they take the bus home.

Published:

2020

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2021

2023

Themes:

Identity

Poems of the Everyday

Literary Devices:

Antithesis

a person or thing that is the direct opposite of someone or something else

Asyndeton

the absence of a conjunction (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so…) between phrases and within a sentence