Reflection

This poem was born as a consequence of witnessing. During The Uprising which happened just shortly after Derek Chauvin and the Minneapolis Police Department squeezed the life out of George Floyd, local protests, local art, and violence in localized places started to pop up all over the Twin Cities. The days were long and the nights were even longer. During the days, just before the city imposed an 8 pm curfew, I would ride around Minneapolis on my Marin beach cruiser with my 7 and 3-year-old kids strapped in the back-wheel burley rolling through the avenues spectating. We witnessed the peaceful and not so peaceful parts of the previous nights. We saw celebration, alongside destruction of stores, goods, and property. But above all, we saw artists enraged and engage a tense city, a more tense community, a terse police federation, and a tick of a mayor the only way they could—through art. This act of witnessing transformed to a call to action for me so I began to write. Ironically, the photograph used to help readers visualize the poem was the first image my iPhone 12 captured on our bike rides. I was honored to capture this artist in the creative process and wanted to juxtapose this scene with a line taken from Faulkner’s short story, “Dry September.” I feel as if this city, this time that we are living in right now, is illustrative of life caught in its terrible and beautiful mutations. I especially want to highlight George Floyd's experience and his connection to the murdered, black watchman named Will Mayes.