Choose Your Own Adventure: Reparation as Fable

Poetry Contest Winner

1955: Activist Lamar Smith was murdered and remained unsolved after 30 white witnesses 
did not come forward; no conviction. This was the same year Emmett Till and George W. Lee were killed.

Fable, lime slugs and mango peepers, hail, under the purple verbena,
Charge, undertaker, full moon, a version of America crosshatched,

Two fables, transmogrification and head-in-the-sand, you, choose your own adventure.
Rush in to fill the gaps; suddenly broad with uncertainty, choose your own witness.

Recognize the moral currency, one-by-one, the other obscured by arrest.
Above you, a lavender pillow, a scrub grey hairstreak munches early morning dew.

The cold case closed, a body of evidence, an unnatural mailman serves papers anew.
Moss-infused, turn to page 86! this bloodhound on the stained trail, you repeat a reparation.

       Like deep wounds in the form of indictments sprouted, guilt, an early creek of butterfly sails. 
It ribs you, what once was, a pageant to sympathy, a posthumous letter, so.  Dignity

You, arbiter of your intrinsic red-lined scales, justice, what speckled the sun, 
They found Lamar Smith’s body, by the lake where bromeliads bashed.

Who spreads its petals, unrests, she loved me, she loved me not,
Mother Earth’s chrysalis’ firstborn, out the garden, wanders the hollows and hails

Cry hails, cry hails, cry, hails, until it can be heard even with no human breaths.

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Jonathan Andrew Pérez, Esq. (@hilliconjustice), has published poetry in Collateral, Rise Up Review, BARNHOUSE, Projector Magazine, Hiram Poetry, Cape Code Review, the Tulane Press, POETRY, and elsewhere. His first book, The Cartographer of Crumpled Maps: Justice Elegies will be published March 2020 by FLP press. He is a poetry reader at The Rumpus. He has a day job as a trial attorney in justice.