(David sings-“ dee bee dee bee dee bee boop dee poop
Dee bobbity poop dee do do.”)
David Eberhardt, 83, was a member of the historic Baltimore Four with father Philip Berrigan, Tom Lewis, and Rev. James Mengel; who, in a bold act of civil disobedience, poured blood on draft files at a Selective Service office on October 27, 1967. For this, the group was convicted and sent to federal prison. A fixture of the Baltimore poetry scene since the 1960s, Eberhardt began writing for underground newspapers and has remained an active voice ever since. In recent years he’s turned to parody, crafting takes on works by poets like William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His shift reflects a belief that “poetry needs more humor.”
Featured image in this post is, “Gallus gallus domesticus” by Böhringer friedrich, licensed via creative commons 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Malachi Byrd is the winner of the 2025 DC Poet Project, an annual poetry reading series and open-to-all poetry competition produced by Day Eight, publisher of the Mid-Atlantic Review. Day Eight is publishing Before We Gone by Malachi Byrd Fall 2025. A book launch reading for Before We Gone is scheduled for Saturday October 11, 2025.
2045
The year is 2045 and I am the last native left in D.C. A man on a bullhorn tells me I have 3 minutes to evacuate or they’ll open fire on me And this gives me a sense of pride because death can’t scare someone whose home has vanished before his eyes but I knew this day would come
I heard that if you scream at the top of your lungs in the city you’re from that breath will circle the earth and catch you when you need it most
So I pray this poem be planet-sized propellers that prevent my people from being pushed across the Potomac
And I vividly remember how the big neighborhoods were the first to go, how the place I learned to read became a Trader Joe’s
And yes the city was rough but we triumphed despite our pain And looking back I would’ve told us to be scared of dog parks Starbucks and bike lanes
This poem started writing itself in 2012 when Southeast didn’t have a trauma unit and Ward 8 victims were pushed to the bottom of the call log, In 2022 when somebody told me that they were from D.C. and they were really from Waldorf
And what seems like a microaggression is actually the difference between ruins and a renaissance Language is the reason you hear violent and criminal and think of Southeast before you think of the Pentagon
This place is not parsley for your plate not an instagram caption not a revolving door not a pit stop not a detour It’s not even the nation’s capital anymore
Because no amount of capital can unbound the blood bond I got with these blocks the soul ties we got with these streets
The year is 2045 and I am the last native left in D.C. Muriel Bowser is on her seventh consecutive term Martin Luther King is now Wall Street Skyscrapers lace what used to be the heart of the South Side and this big chair is all that I got left
So this city, I will 1965 riot for it ride for it ‘cus what is a city if not the people that died for it
My body belongs with my people it was never for audit dump your mortgage you do not own this land just because you bought it
Remember I will always be the boy who repped his city like a state Remember I was the congas that never lost they crank Remember I was the native that didn’t bend nor break
Remember I Remember I Remember I died for the place that gave me life
Addendum Upon second thought ain’t no block or plot that deserves my blood No neighborhood that has earned my urn and as much as I love this city I do not know her anymore
The love of my life took my lemonade and made lemons took my sacrifice and made it sour again
And before I was down to be martyr and miracle to stand firm in my final days but now I know that my city is not a place it’s punctuation on a life sentence the slur in my accent the congas in my crank
And sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the nostalgia remember the revival more than the repast remember what my grandfather was instead what my grandmother does
When I say I would give my life for the city I mean the coroners will crack open my chest to a knot of Northeast hear Overnight Scenario when they cut me open
But the place I once loved is no longer a barrage of buildings it’s a moment an amalgamation of what was and what could’ve been
My city cannot be gentrified because it is not a place it is a people a purpose and a point to prove and when they set the soil for the skyscrapers I knew my height wasn’t holy enough
So yes the cranes won the construction crew carried us out and the outsiders got their way
But even when Malcolm X Park becomes McConaughey Way Marion Barry becomes Musk Manor when this country decides I am more rebellious than resource
We will live without buildings without boundaries without blood
You can have this land I pray my dead makes your daffodils dangle I hope our candles light your picnic
I hope you love it I hope you love it I hope you love it Until the land decides to love you back the way it loved us
Time Black people don’t never be on time. It’s me, I’m Black people. I don’t care if it’s your birthday, Your baby shower, Or your bachelor party Malachi…. is going to be a bit behind
I promised that I would try to be punctual and I was being honest but I went to a Lauryn Hill concert on Thanksgiving and she didn’t step on stage until Kwanzaa and that’s when I knew I too had a problem
I have nightmares of running away from hands that only reach 12 succumbing to secondhand grandfather clocks and becoming a pendulum that never swings back Black boys look blue in the moonlight but every shadow is Black on a sundial and I just do not want to die. Especially before I learn the person I’m supposed to be. Really, I do not want time to run out of me
But truthfully, I have a toxic relationship with this timeline Somewhere between my mother who had me at 16 and me not making enough money to have a child until I’m 60 Somewhere between the early bird gets the worm and as a boy of a dying breed I never want to wake up and stare at the soil I used to think that when you got older you finally understood how the world works but really I think the monumental moments massage the urgent out of us.
I always wanted to be the young parent that knew all the songs at the kids’ party The cool chaperone that could recite the latest raps Without embarrassing the kids But let’s be honest you become embarrassing the moment you make an embryo So no, I don’t care about knowing the newest dance I want to be 100 years old doing the oldest dance imaginable
This whole time I thought that I was running out of time, but really I was catching up to it. I am learning to be on time That I can be both poem and prompt Both punctuation and punctual
I proclaim here and now that I will walk into the sunset I will walk step by step into the afterlife with all of my breath and all of my composure but more importantly, that day is nowhere near I am breaking the generational curse of the sun setting at 2pm Screw being a lawyer or a doctor I want to be ancient I want to be a Morgan Freeman meme I want to be the everlasting everglade that sees the world change over and over again until the last day comes
More than a writer I want to be a relic Lorraine Hansberry only lived to the age of 35 so I will age until I am a Raisin in the Sun The world used to move fast then it slowed down now I want it to stop I don’t want to kill time I want to be on time all the time in line with the life that is supposed to mine.
Malachi Byrd is the 2025 winner of the DC Poet Project, a competition that identifies and supports exceptional poets. The artist known as MalPractice is a poet, teacher, battle rapper, songwriter, and arts advocate from the District of Columbia. He is the former youth Poet Laureate of Washington, D.C. and a graduate of Princeton University. A full-time artist, the author has taught in over 100 schools in the DMV.
with their candy pink, flame red, mustard yellow bows,
suspended between their hands
with the wristband, like a yo-yo
rocking back and forth like a cradle—
their stabilisers, the anchor.
The weighted rod branches
from the front of the bow,
like another limb
to maintain balance, sharpen precision.
Bows sway, crescent-shaped, lulls my anxiousness to slumber,
I’ve never owned a stabiliser.
ARTEMIS
My second friend was a Hoyt Olympic recurve bow. My arrows’ fletching were feathery fiery reds & bright whites. I fired them into the foam bail target, earning myself a proud gold disc glistening in the summer sky. For once, I conquered something out of my reach, The target, some twenty yards away.
My future, even farther.
My present—a waning crescent. My home housing a sinkhole. Irreversible. As we descended into homelessness, I don’t know when
My arrows lost their fletching, their points, halved the length & soul, strength & heart.
TWILIGHT OF THE ARCHER
Hollow holes plastered our sheetrock walls. Tonight, she gifted me an onyx black recurve bow. It had a militaristic feel to it, with its neon orange grip. I struggled to hold it in my palm. My arm, a collapsing bridge. I barely drew the string back, before launching the arrow with its metallic tip, into the weak wall. I was aiming & shooting incorrectly. I wasn’t trained, back then
Oh, the damage I could cause.
Heaven Santiago is from Brooklyn, NY. She is expected to receive her MFA degree in Creative Writing this May. She has attended the Barrelhouse conference for writers in Washington, D.C. twice. She writes in multiple styles within poetry.
We who are wedded to time lounge on the beach. Gulls sweep along the sand carrying a message of depths. They have salted their paths in the brine of enduring secrets, a source that the waves pounded into a scattering of questions and children shape into castles. It clings to us all day and as we leave, carrying it out into the world, disperse it like pollen. It’s what draws us back to the shore of its mystery, not to answer but simply to feel what love there is in being asked.
The Only Where We Live
The only stair we take, winding down into ourselves, one rib at a time inside this citadel of flesh, these walls that ache, tingle, and scooch into ripples at the merest touch, a release of geese at the slight graze or glance nearest to nothing but only the sound of violins surging from a piece of music like Mahler’s 5th Symphony. Or it could be the return of stone pushing its way out, what the kidney’s calcified of the remains of beer and wine and the celebration of all that passes over us, like weather and wonder, a wave cutting the surface of us as the world passes through and all its aethereal etchings, like a tree troubled by wind or a river flinging itself off the edge of its untidy bed into a waterfall, and all that we are flies out with it into arcs and spindrift, suspended in air briefly before the plunge.
Had to Believe
How many ways can I learn what is hidden? Can I learn what is hidden in so many ways, or shredded or deleted, the documents, the conversations in Washington offices limiting the help my aging neighbor will receive, a worker at McDonalds in his golden years, or the single mom on the corner considering still a third job because of the rising cost of groceries, the rising cost of medicine for her ailing son who likes to sit at the window watching the birds along the telephone wires like beads on an abacus, especially when they take to flight as if the addition and subtraction could be tossed into the air and there’s a chance that when it all comes down, it could fall out in his favor and he would have more time to spend with his mother, and in sorting out those numbers, it might be the reports will tell us not what we had to believe but something useful like how to fly?
Michael T. Young’s fourth collection, Mountain Climbing a River, will be published by Broadstone Media in late 2025. His third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared in numerous journals including I-70, The Journal of New Jersey Poets, One Art, and Vox Populi.
A private spiral, whiff of yuck bit off her trail of pummel slick. The shell was cold, and damp, and empty.
Exhaust feared the snail’s return would poison cork her uncooked void, any moment, any nowness, replace her empty shellness, resting mess of nestness.
So Exhaust shrank back and back, shore receding, shove and smudge and grope, fractal nothing to divide her weight by zero up the empty coil recoil, until she found the smallest cone of curl, exhaled her thereness speechness.
But still she feared outside the empty shell, its runs and boils, and so Exhaust took up her size and pulled and pushed all overhang and bulge as small as small, then smaller still inside the empty shell, and waited for the snail.
THE ITCH TANK
Windows here don’t work right. They’re not mirror sunshinesafe with eyes trained out, but sinking in. My inside view is blank so even glass cupped broken squint can’t see past ruffled knifeprint pupil.
The neighbors glance and see a zoo. The room’s scraped empty, foundation excavate, invade a squirm and squeeze.
I crave, please store me, but no tissue, bag, or cardboard box is safe. I spread my own paint thin to walls. I grab a sheet of jostle dust to floatcollect unplanned array, no rag rub complicate or jealous trace, just mundane display of a slimy shrine.
WHERE TO APPLY THE IMPULSE
When the walkway is paved with felt and food, you’ll know.
When your ears stretch string into bone and drop notes on the floor, you’ll know.
When clouds slice the sun, twin yolks wide, and paper rains from each half, you’ll know.
When each fork of aspirin leads to a ring of bees, you’ll know.
When hand knits knuckle to silk, spent mouth behind mouth-bent back, and all you hear is tin, you’ll know.
When each face scowls on each roll,
and each rind wraps each seed and flies back soft,
when wood grows teeth out your neck,
and fire beats lies,
and plastic teaches beaks to bark and spit to crawl,
you’ll know what to do.
Kate Powell Shine (she/her) lives in Maryland, where she is active in numerous literary communities including those at Montgomery College, Montgomery County Public Libraries, and the Eastern Shore Writers Association. She has had poems published in anthologies and magazines including FuseLit, Gargoyle, and Little Patuxent Review. She was a finalist in the 2024 Enoch Pratt Free Library Poetry Contest, and she is co-editor of the poetry anthology, Echoes Through the Stacks. Her recent writing explores themes of isolation and illness via grotesque humor and the surreal. She has struggled with mental and physical illness for most of her life.
Featured image in this post is, “Thésée-la-Romaine” by Daniel Jolivet, licensed via creative commons 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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