Joshua Bennett
Family Reunion

But who did Jesus think he was,
exemplar or experimentalist?
The question quarantines.
My cousin's usual talk
of anime & first apartments
& Kimberley Thomas's flawless
hips has long ceased, faded
like ghost kisses into the tepid
night. I try & fail at least four times
to make this into a conversation
about wonder, do my best
to make the doubt sound pretty.
I watch the chariot wheels spinning
in his eyes turn over & over.
This is the longest we have spoken
in ten years, the sword now so deep
I could not retrieve it without killing us both.

_ _

Joshua Bennett hails from Yonkers, NY. He is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Princeton University, and has received fellowships from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University, and the Ford Foundation. Winner of the 2014 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the 2015 Erskine J. Poetry Prize, his poems have been published or are forthcoming in Anti-, Blackbird, Callaloo, Obsidian, Smartish Pace and elsewhere. Joshua is also the founder of Kinfolks: a journal of black expression.

>> Back to Issue 18, 2015