Reparations Now!

By Ashley M. Jones

Reparations Now! asks for what’s owed.

In formal and non-traditional poems, award-winning poet Ashley M. Jones calls for long-overdue reparations to the Black descendants of enslaved people in the United States of America. In this, her third collection, Jones deftly takes on the worst of today—state-sanctioned violence, pandemic-induced crises, and white silence—all while uplifting Black joy. These poems explore trauma past and present, cultural and personal: the lynching of young, pregnant Mary Turner in 1918; the current white nationalist political movement; a case of infidelity. These poems, too, are a celebration of Black life and art: a beloved grandmother in rural Alabama, the music of James Brown and Al Green, and the soil where okra, pole beans, and collards thrive thanks to her father’s hands. 

By exploring the history of a nation where “Black oppression’s not happenstance; it’s the law,” Jones links past harm to modern heartache and prays for a peaceful world where one finds paradise in the garden in the afternoon with her family, together, safe, and worry-free.  While exploring the ways we navigate our relationships with ourselves and others, Jones holds us all accountable, asking us to see the truth, to make amends, to honor one another.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hub City Press
• Release date: Jan 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781938235870

Ashley M. Jones

Ashley M. Jones is the 2022-2026 Poet Laureate for the State of Alabama. She 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 at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, she co-directs PEN Birmingham, and she is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival. 

Book preview

Hymn Of Our Jesus & The Holy Tow Truck

after Mary Szbist

Mary, Don’t You Weep, Or, Mary Turner Resurrected

When Mary Turner threatened to press charges for the wrongful lynching of her husband in Brooks County, Georgia on May 19, 1918, she was strung upside down, her clothes were burned off, and her unborn baby was cut from her womb and stomped to death. Turner was shot repeatedly, and she and her baby were buried close by their murder site.

like all resurrections, it began with blood, dirt,

unending light—

the georgia moss punctuated by camellias, their white hurt

stretching across brooks county—no blight

to stain their leaves, just the ash falling, bloody

from mary’s emblazoned womb. her baby, a fire,

its single soft cry still igniting the air—could it be

that even this baby, even this one-breathed-angel was crucified

to save us all? maybe.

maybe mary and her baby flew up from death

in sweaty georgia—her shallow grave shaken loose. finally free,

resurrected—it turns out, all along hell was earth,

what else could she name that rock covered in leaf and loam,

not loving, not hopeful, and most certainly not home.

Stephon Don’t You Moan, Or, To Serve And Protect

22 year-old father of two, Stephon Clark, was shot twenty times on March 19, 2018, by Sacramento Police in his grandmother’s backyard. The gun police claim to have seen him carrying was his iPhone.

is there a police protocol for grace,

for the moment between show us your hands and shoot? that night,

policeman, servant of the gun, did you give space

for a man’s innocence to bloom? despite

the loaded weight of your finger on the trigger,

despite how the night

painted that man bigger,

made him a giant with a fireball in his hands? despite the loud explosion of your fright?

innocence is for softer things—an open, empty palm, a blooming flower,

a spread of rocks becoming sand.

silly civilization, you thought we’d evolved beyond abuse of power,

but again, a pruning. what a flower you were, stephon—and

what holiness in your body opening, petaled in the white helicopter light—

this, an armageddon of bullets, flowers, stars, stripes.

The Kid Next To Me At The 7pm Showing Of The Avengers Has A Toy Gun

: and is wearing black flip flops

: has commented, loudly, for the entire feature presentation

: is pointing it at his mom

: is clicking the plastic hinges on its expanding arm—fist for a bullet—so it sounds like scissors

: is still salty around the lips from his movie popcorn

: will later regret this tub of movie popcorn, intestine-bound

: is pulling the trigger over and over and maybe once in my direction

: is shooting up this whole theater to the tune of this dramatic and opulent theme song

: is restless, but what else will boys be

: chatters about sequels, every word a click click triggerpull triggerpull

: is, incidentally, about the size of Tamir