Portion Given
By Amaud Jamaul Johnson

Halve the heart—

Set the meat aside
In slivers

From the fatty part
That loves him.

Mother,
You’ve always been good

About whipping something
Up from nothing.

Even memory,
The bits skewered,

Speech sifting, words measured
By the quarter cup.

Give it time, Son.
Low heat. Slow cook.

Even when I thought
He might kill you.

Even after he changed
The locks.

I don’t want to hear
How it might have ended.

Let’s strain the blood from gristle.
Let’s crack the window—

And leave the scraps for the dog.

Reprinted from Red Summer, with the permission of Tupelo Press. Copyright ©2006 by Amaud Jamaul Johnson.

Amaud Jamaul Johnson is the author of Red Summer (Tupelo Press, 2006), selected by Carl Phillips as winner of the 2004 Dorset Prize. Born and raised in Compton, California, he was educated at Howard University and Cornell University, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. His poems appear in The Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, Rivendell, the Poetry Daily, and From the Fishouse websites, and elsewhere. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Copyright © 1997-2006 by Cave Canem Foundation, Inc.

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