William Evans

cantfindit

William Evans is an author, speaker, & instructor from Columbus, Ohio. In addition to founding the Writing Wrongs Poetry Slam in Columbus, William is also the co-founder & editor-in chief of Black Nerd Problems, a website focused on pop culture & diversity. He is the author of We Inherit What the Fires Left, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in Spring 2020. Evans has been an artist in residence for both the Columbus Wexner Center and Columbus City Schools since 2012. Evans belongs to fellowships from Callaloo & the Watering Hole Poetry. He is the poetry recipient of 2016 Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant & the 2018 Spirit of Columbus Foundation Grant. He is the author of the poetry collection, Still Can’t Do My Daughter’s Hair, released on Button Poetry in October of 2017. Source

I Turn the Volume Down Because Beyonce Says [ ] in the Car While I Drive My Daughter to School

the four-year-old                  gives her              first

 

            protest of the   morning                whether intentional

 

            or the default position of her mother's resolve

 

her fist is balled in              the way a boy would          grip her  hair

 

              in a   kindergarten class or                at any age that    boys

 

               put                         their        names  on things

 

she says, hey I   like       that song and Beyoncé has         already finished

 

              saying                  I'm gonna [  ] me up a [  ]                            so

 

               I turn the             volume back up                to five seconds                 ago

 

before a father                 once told a Black woman she was                too loud to         

 

            fill        his daughter's lungs      before the        tabernacle

 

            of mist filled the               car until all we   knew to               breathe  was

 

gunsmoke        and the ire of   men  interrupting  the choir     of crows

 

              that               ain't meant for                  their ears             and I        know

 

               it doesn't                             take much          to get this little                  girl's blood

 

​into      a spell  because it was once                       her              grandmother's

 

               blood                    which    means                                  there will             be

 

               a                   day when            someone             some man              tries to pull      it            

 

out of   her       and      she becomes a wound                  where the curses             her

 

           father hid         from  her come                 tumbling  out of                  the     

 

​            same

 

​tomb    where   she once buried a         woman with a too        quiet    face

Published:

2016

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2021

Themes:

Family

Pop Culture

Literary Devices:

Allusion

an expression designed to call something to mind without mentioning it explicitly; an indirect or passing reference

Asyndeton

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

Caesura

a break between words within a metrical foot