This month, we’re pleased to bring you poems by BRIONNE JANAE, GRAY DAVIDSON CARROLL, and WILBERT TURNER III.
Table of Contents
- Brionne Janae, “You Got to Walk That Lonesome Valley”
- Gray Davidson Carroll, “Aubade, or Ars Poetica as Men”
- Wilbert Turner III, “Desperado Despair”
From left to right: Brionne Janae, Gray Davidson Carroll, and Wilbert Turner III.
YOU GOT TO WALK THAT LONESOME VALLEY
By Brionne Janae
~ after Mississippi John Hurt
and how did you go through it?
and did you keep? did you keep your mind?
you got walk it for yourself
and on returning what state did you find it in?
as in what state were you in?
were you where you left yourself?
and who was left?
was anyone left?
and how sure were you that you could reach them?
aint nobody else can walk it for you
I only mean to ask how held you your body
and if not you who or what contained it?
and how did they contain it
I’m asking if it hurt when they held you how they held you
when they held you down?
you got to walk that valley for your self
and were you always together when you found it
found your body again? if you found it at all?
was your heart still beating in your chest?
or did it shatter? did is scatter the way a heart can
like broken leaves?
and did you find you could mend it?
were you able to mend it?
surely you didn’t have to mend it alone?
Aubade, or Ars Poetica as Men
By Gray Davidson Carroll
August 18th, 2025, Springfield, Massachusetts
They know each other here, these men on the Amtrak,
passengers and crew. Greeting one another in the glow
of the late August light as we step from platform to car.
Giovanni’s down in New Haven, still on leave after the birth
of his child. Jason’s daughter is starting her second year
of college, living in Boston with six other roommates.
Egg prices being what they are, it’s hard to imagine there being
any other way. Ed, God bless him, has three more months
of radiation treatment left before he’s in the all-clear.
Backs are clapped, a shoulder squeezed, heads shaken—
how quickly time passes. And then the whistle,
marched forth from between the pearly gates of teeth.
Desperado Despair
By Wilbert Turner III
It’s not so much that I want to be loved.
It’s just that I want to be allowed
to love someone.
I was born in the city of brotherly love
but I have no brothers
and so I could not love them.
I am named for my grandfather,
though no one taught me how
to love a ghost who does not haunt you.
He left behind a brother,
my father’s Uncle David.
Who preached every Sunday
not of love but of the fires
that nearly burned Meshach Shadrach
and Abednego.
Yes, my father’s Uncle David
who never missed the chance to tell me
how much I looked like his dead brother
And how that brother had shoved marbles
into David’s ears
like a mixed-up magician
mining for screams rather than applause.
It has always felt illegal to love him.
But I can love other things.
Mostly just things.
A list of things I’m allowed to love:
Competition, Callousness, Cursing,
Boundaries, Anger, Brutality, Audacity,
America.
Always fucking America.
My grandfather breathed every breath
and spent every moment being molded by America.
He never left.
And yet, I cannot love him.
I have to ask: Is America is the greatest
simply because it burns the brightest?
Because I would love to love a flame
but American fire has always danced through my fingers slicker than ice.
And if I ever do sing the praises of America,
just know that I am belting a ballad
of sweet and sour hallelujahs.
I had a grandmother who I loved.
And who I still do.
But can you love grandparents, fathers,
uncles, or mothers?
Can you love anyone outside of these roles?
If their role is now “ghost”
can you still love them?
Brionne Janae is a poet and teaching artist living in Brooklyn with their two dogs. They are the author of Because You Were Mine (2023) which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry, Blessed are the Peacemakers (2021) which won the 2020 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize, and After Jubilee (2017). Brionne is a 2023 NEA Creative Writing Fellow, a Hedgebrook Alum and a proud Cave Canem Fellow.
Gray Davidson Carroll is a white, trans femme writer, dancer, singer, cold water plunger and (self-proclaimed) hot chocolate alchemist hailing from Brooklyn by way of western Massachusetts and other strange and forgotten places. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, The Common, ONLY POEMS, Offing and elsewhere.
Wilbert Turner III is a Black American writer born and raised in South Philadelphia. He has been the co-host and curator of the Sunday Salon NYC Reading Series since 2023. He writes about people who turn marginal spaces into spaces of power. A graduate of St. John’s University in Queens, and The New School in Manhattan, he now lives in Brooklyn with his wife.
