In the year following Michael Brown’s murder on 9 August 2014, I wrote poems that attempted to reconfigure events of police violence directed at people of color between the day Trayvon Martin was killed and Brown’s death. My accounts work against the mainstream press accounts, which tend to make the police and their private-sector stand-ins the narrative subjects, and the victims their objects. Drawing on news accounts, I flip the official script, revealing the unjustified, racist nature of state violence.
Brian Holmes recently created WATERSHEDS, an interactive map that uses some of the poems to chart police violence against people of color on the Mississippi watershed. In this context, the poems help to intensify his point: that Political Ecology begins when we say Black Lives Matter.
His project is available here.
Brian’s introduction to the map, and a pdf of my poems, is available on the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor’s Compass website.
matthiasregan.org 