~ After Johannes Barfield’s De-Extinction Elixir ~
Poem & audio recording by Joy Priest | Art by Johannes Barfield
Wood cabinet speaker, hand-harvested red clay soil from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, joint compound, liquid polymer asphalt on canvas.
October 21, 2021
In that duck yellow Catalina, our hearts fluttered like tweeters we sat between the elbows of men, behind us a trunk full of speakers
Our uncles ciphered the block with no destination in mind politicking with everyone, the streets’ sage monk speakers
Twice a day they stopped at the Executive Lounge where old men in dark glasses leaned drunk against speakers
We had dreams named after us there, too young to drink we sat silent, swayed to the funk of the speakers
Back in the car our uncles whistled at women and we learned to read lips over the thump of the speakers
They stopped in alleys and parking lots, dropped their hands out the windows, doing business, selling junk to the tweakers
They jackhammered asphalt and red clay, after work still vibrating they gathered, woofing, like the subs of a speaker
In truth they worked a gang of jobs, the union was their set all they had to show was the rattle & jump of their speakers
Inside our grandfathers played “Trouble Man” on repeat, skillet cornbread crackled like torn, lumped speakers
Our mothers, home from work, called us in from outside, their hair on our cheeks, the soft mesh that housed the bump of our speakers
“We Had Dreams Named After Us” is available in Issue No. 2 of The Bitter Southerner magazine.
Joy Priest was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. She is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), selected by U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethwey as the winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of a 2021 NEA fellowship, a 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, The Atlantic, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others, and her essays have appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Poets & Writers, ESPN, and The Undefeated. Joy received her MFA in poetry, with a certificate in women and gender studies from the University of South Carolina. She is currently editing an anthology of Louisville poets, forthcoming from Sarabande Books.
Johannes Barfield is an American sample-based visual artist who works in installation, video, photography, mixed-media, and sound. Johannes, explores: childhood memories, joy, appropriation as a means for survival and cultural production, the repatriation of artifacts, objecthood, extinction, and the music played at family cookouts.
