the blueshift journal
blueshift / ˈblo͞oˌSHift / noun
the displacement of the spectrum to shorter wavelengths in the light coming from distant celestial objects moving toward the observer.
March 2017
Jacqui Germain is a published poet, freelance writer, and contributing Arts and Culture writer with ALIVE Magazine based in St. Louis, MO. She is a 2016 Callaloo Fellow and author of "When the Ghosts Come Ashore," published in 2016 through Button Poetry and Exploding Pinecone Press. She has performed on multiple national stages and been featured on Huffington Post, St. Louis Public Radio, and Ploughshares Journal as part of their Activist-Poet Spotlight Series. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Muzzle Magazine, The Offing, Connotation Press, Drunk in a Midnight Choir, and elsewhere, in addition to Sundress Publications' 2015 Best of the Net Anthology and "Crossing the Divide," an anthology of St. Louis poets, published in 2016 by Vagabond Books. Her essays have been published in The New Inquiry, The Establishment, Salon, Feministing, Blavity, and elsewhere. Her writing focuses on historical and contemporary iterations of black, brown, and indigenous resistance, which she believes is deeply urgent work that both exists on the page and extends beyond it. Jacqui is represented by Beotis Creative.
Listen to Germain's poem, "How America Loves Ferguson Tweets More than the City of Ferguson," here.
THE HARVEST
If I were to die
in police custody,
their handcuffs would
be my ex-lover’s
mouth, my ex-lover’s mouth
would be a series
of teeth, the teeth rows
enamel fingers digging
into my flesh, my flesh be a plot
of land, the plot of land
would a map of bleeding
artifacts, the bleeding
be place-markers
for buried collarbones,
the buried seedlings, collarbones
the white men planted,
the seedlings the white men
planted be the ghosts
that call for the plow,
the plow the fist that pulls
the harvest, the harvest the coffee shop
selling a Columbian village
for $6 a cup, the harvest a history
textbook falling asleep on itself in class,
a Walgreens on every corner, the harvest
every city we pretend the Dream
survives in
the harvest is their Dream rotting,
​
the harvest is every
Walgreens decaying
with flame & smashed
windows, is a bankrupt
& rotting classroom,
is burnt & rotting coffee,
is rotted teeth, is sick
& green with
the harvest's gifts
refusing the tongue,
to feed the body
that consumes it, is the whole
land spoiling itself to kill
the fingers that dug it raw,
the white teeth, the wide
eyes, the blue badge
that saw me & whistled,
​
Shit. Look at her. I bet she
tastes too sweet.
​