after Langston Hughes but it was to you? & him, too? Who am I to say what was, wasn’t, or, for that matter what is or isn’t true? I will say nothing’s new, that freedom’s just for a chosen few, also that it won’t do, this promise long past due, & so many singing the blues, bop, Bach & Bessie too. You, me, then America will be.
Rick Benjamin (he/him) lives on unceded Chumash land in Goleta, California, and walks each day on indigenous trails. He teaches courses at the University of California Santa Barbara, among them poetry and community, the wild literature of ecology, and literatures of both social and juvenile justice, while also working among elders, young people at a local Boys and Girls Club, in art museums and youth detention facilities. He served as the poet laureate of Rhode Island from 2012 – 2016.
