1.
A griot tells a story.
A riot tells the story in the language of the unheard.
2.
Police in riot gear, surround high schoolers in uniform.
Police shut down the buses and trains home. Herded kids like cattle.
Unheard of.
3.
Something funny can be a riot.
Last night, police sprayed protestors with tear gas-
no joke.
3.
Rioters shatter windows;
Police, spines.
4.
Men in gang colors lock arms with reverends and imams
Walk abreast down streets, like showgirls on a chorus line.
5.
During a riot, ghosts of young men
killed in the streets whisper encouragement.
6.
At Pickles Pub, Orioles fans shout “Run them down”
as protestors cry “Black Lives Matter” as they march past Camden Yards.
Beer and belligerence spill onto Pratt Street like blood in West Baltimore.
7.
A riot has its own rhythm: waves of cries for justice; anger rising to high tide; silence.
8.
Sounds of a riot: so many sirens-neither beguiling nor wrecking. The city itself, keening.
9.
Rooted in my home; fearful of leaving my young son alone;
fearful of bringing him to a place where anger is the acelerant; fire the answer.
I supplant these fears, this helplessness, with action. I dig in.
Five blocks from the riot: under a sunny sky, I garden. I plant
bleeding hearts next to the willow, weeping. Police choppers whir in the wind.
Where Pennsylvania Avenue and North Avenue meet, young protesters stand,
feet planted on pavement. Rooted in cries for justice, they seed the crowd with
words from Baldwin, from Malcolm X, from Ture, as hopes for a new way forward,
tiny tendrils, emerge through the broken concrete blocks.
10.
History of a Riot: Baltimore (aka Mobtown) - so named because of how quickly the city would find an excuse to riot. During the War of 1812, a newspaper came out against the war, then, some 35 men and boys attacked the newspaper's headquarters, dismantling it brick by brick. This was followed by the Baltimore Bank Riot, the Know-Nothing Riot of 1856, and the Baltimore election riots of 1857, 1858, and 1859. Riots course through the city’s lifeblood like the Jones Falls streams through it.
11.
Watching over the riot, a statue of Miss Billie Holiday sings the blues.
Gardenia tucked behind her ear, she sings and remembers.
A panel at the statues’s base depicts a lynching; Strange Fruit it says.
Another depicts a small baby; God Bless the Child,
a wish traveling forward through time and space to
twenty-five years and few blocks away, where as a tiny, premature baby,
Freddie Gray’s mother shushed and rocked him to sleep.
12.
Under curfew, penned in our homes:
bulls at the slaughterhouse on North Avenue.
Captive, restless, I refresh my Facebook feed to follow the riots,
Cat in lap, glass of wine in hand,
Reading noises outside like hieroglyphs.
13.
A tattoo shop created a $50 “riot special”:
a heart shaded with the yellow & black of the Baltimore flag;
It was all the rage among the activist crowd.
I got one: my first tattoo. As the machine whirred like a helicopter/my body rose to defend itself, skin pinking up, macrophages engaged. Wounded, my yellow & black, bruised Baltimore heart continues to ache, to hurt, to heal.
About the author: Marceline White is a Baltimore-based writer. She writes policy, prose, poems, essays, and plays. An artist and activist, Marceline’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Copperfield Review, The Free State Review, The Loch Raven Review, The Shattered Wig Review, as well as anthologies including Ancient Party: Collaborations in Baltimore, 2000-2010 and Life in Me Like Grass on Fire. Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in Woman’s Day, Baltimore Fishbowl, Baltimore Sun, and Mother Jones.
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