List Poems & The Rhetoric of Radical Futures

I am, she is, he is the face on your T-shirt. Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery. We say their names with reverence because the moment our mouths close, they are no longer martyrs. In silence, the dead become numbers that will never see the light of day. But when the streets are alive, so is the memory of your cousin, the boy you went to high school with, that woman in the newspaper, any ancestor who left this world too soon. Names have power. So we must speak them, wear them, list them, adorn ourselves in their significance. List poems have emerged as the artistic medium of today’s racial protest movements because they lay bare our country’s “open secret” with an intensity that’s equal parts startling and accessible.

Image: Shout Mouse Press.