FROM HERE
On a Saturday in early June 2020, as protests against police violence and on behalf of Black lives surged nationwide, people gathered in West Cleveland to call for justice for Desmond Franklin, a young man who had been shot to death by an off-duty officer in April. We were outside the 2nd District Police Headquarters, a couple thousand people, articles later said. A line of police stood on the roof of their HQ, looking uncomfortable in their vests, looking down with binoculars. On the way to the march maybe 40 cops on bikes had passed us, to join the hundreds of their fellow officers already excessively there. What did this show of force cost? We were paying. We were masked, sweating, carrying signs. We were new here, community leaders long at work had assembled us, called for any and every one of us to be there. From the lot across from the police station where we stood or sat we couldn’t see the leaders of the rally, the speakers, we could barely hear them, the PA system nearly overcome by the noise of surveilling helicopters (four?) and drones (three?) overhead, circling and circling. Families spoke on behalf of so many who have died in our city at the hands of police. 96 families was the number we heard. Sometimes a people’s mic manifested to silence the crowd to allow someone else to step forward and speak. One mother spoke about her lost son, who had been killed by police a few years before, an elegy we strained to hear, we could hear her anguish but not his name. I still don’t know his name. We began marching, a slow march in the heat that took hours, and people called out the names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, who as you may remember was from Cleveland, from here. People called out the name Desmond Franklin, so recently lost. A friend turned to me at some point, distressed that we couldn’t hear the name that one mother had spoken, and so she in turn couldn’t hear this march take up and call out her child’s name. As a group did we know national media better than we knew our own city? Better than the incarnations of racism right here, where we were walking, where we lived, where we reached the corner where Desmond Franklin had died and his sister asked us all to kneel on the asphalt and pray?
This has been something to think about for all the months since. This failure, the names we didn’t and don’t know. And the noise of the militarized city severing people from one another, burning the city’s money up in a helicopter circling oppressively in the air.
The local to the nationwide, the nationwide to the local. What I’m talking about would seem to be more about the work of local journalism than a local small press. “You can’t get the news from poetry,” etc., except you can. It’s what I’ve been thinking of, for our small press, in Cleveland. How are we present here, in this city, in the most local sense, in the largest sense? How do we connect books we publish—by writers around the country, around the world, some living, some dead—to people living here, and how do we help connect writers and readers here to sites and powers to which we may serve as a bridge?
A book is a meeting place, a site of communing. It is always in motion. No one finds it as the same place and you don’t find it the same way twice. It’s a place where you learn how to know. When I finish reading a book of poetry I often think, ah, I am now ready to read this book of poetry. As if the book has attuned me to the possibility of reading it, which I have not yet and never begun. It showed me a space where I could read it, where I might know how to know exactly that which I’ve failed to know yet. OK. This is hopeful. Sometimes when I have read a book five or six times in the process of working on publishing it (I am thinking of, say, Russell Atkins’s World’d Too Much and Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Scorpionic Sun, trans. Conor Bracken), I am so glad when it comes out because I stupidly think: OK, now I am ready to read this. To be summoned up as one of its readers. I am never ready. A book is a city living everywhere around you. You are lucky to see its face.
Hilary Plum is the author of the novel Strawberry Fields (2018), winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose; the work of nonfiction Watchfires (2016), winner of the 2018 GLCA New Writers Award; and the novel They Dragged Them Through the Streets (2013). She has worked for a number of years as an editor of international literature, history, and politics. She teaches at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA Program. With Zach Savich she edits the Open Prose Series at Rescue Press. Recent poetry, prose, and criticism have appeared in College Literature, Denver Quarterly, the Brooklyn Rail, West Branch, Poetry Northwest, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.