A Sonnet for Tamir
- A Sonnet for Tamir
“The US Justice Department announced Tuesday it found insufficient evidence to support federal criminal charges against two officers in relation to the fatal 2014 shooting of Tamir Rice in an Ohio park.”
—CNN, December 29, 2020
—and maybe the first year was all babbleand waddle, the innocent scent of milk.and later, the tender playground gravelunderfoot, the sugarsoap where he soakedbefore bedtime, maybe. And those brown handsmaybe used to lift an apple to lips,to wave cooly at a passing young friend,maybe. A maybe swallowed in the clipof a gun, in the pocket of dark airaround the bullets, fingers with an itchscratched by skin, bone, muscle, blood, tooth and hair.When does a boy turn from baby to hitch?The squad car, that day, had not fully stoppedbefore the bullet did its hateful job. [End Page 91]
Ashley M. Jones holds an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University, and she is the author of Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press 2017), dark / / thing (Pleiades Press 2019), and REPARATIONS NOW! (Hub City Press 2021). Her poetry has earned several awards, including the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, a Literature Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. She was a finalist for the Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship in 2020. Her poems and essays appear in or are forthcoming at CNN, POETRY, The Oxford American, Origins Journal, The Quarry by Split This Rock, Obsidian, and many others. She teaches Creative Writing at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and in the Low Residency MFA at Converse College. Jones co-directs PEN Birmingham, and she is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival. She recently served as a guest editor for Poetry Magazine.
