Oakland, Cal.
This poem is told from the perspective of a first-person subjective point of view and every action has a timestamp to it. The action begins in the morning, at 7:00 AM when the narrator wakes up from a restless sleep to the sound of bullets. He later finds out that a friend of his dies after a drive-by shooting and he even sees the bullet-ridden car. This image causes the narrator to have a panic attack but he continues driving.
A few blocks later, another horrific scene is described. The sidewalks are littered with used needles and children are playing right beside them. Strange men are shooting at one another and a woman is attacked in broad daylight.
The image changes as the narrator wakes up, after falling on the floor. He realizes everything was just a dream but the poem ends with the conclusion that unfortunately, the dream is just as disturbing as the reality.
ALL THE DEAD BOYS LOOK LIKE ME
The poem was written in response to the Orlando attack when an armed man entered a gay club and killed 49 people in the span of a few minutes. Through this poem the narrator wants to transmit the idea that when a person coming from a minority group is killed or injured, the whole group suffers with the affected person.
Jessie Hernandez, a teenager who was killed while fleeing the police, is also mentioned here. The narrator is afraid because he knows that because he is gay and because he is not white puts him in danger and makes him a target for the police force.
[SOMEWHERE IN LOS ANGELES] THIS POEM IS NEEDED
This poem is told from the perspective of a first-person subjective point of view. The narrator is inside a kitchen together with his sister who is under house arrest. The probation officer comes to the apartment and the narrator and the sister are unsure how to react.
The presence of the officer is seen as an invasion of privacy and after he leaves the sister recalls her past and how the police were always a present fixture in her life. But, instead of protecting her, the police only made her life harder. The poem ends with the narrator claiming they for them, or rather for the black community, freedom will come only in the afterlife.
