Masked Man, Black

Poetry October 2020 ISBN 978-1-936628-59-9 88 pages Softcover, 6" x 9"

"Professor Frank X Walker has yet again used his superpowers to insert a conscience into the tumultuous cacophony that is social media. His latest series of poems debuted in our news feeds, week after week, speaking truth to the tangled web of perspectives splattered across our digital landscape. By spreading light in our darkest times, our Professor X speaks to a class of students, who have been mutated by the pandemic, by political doublespeak and visions of violence and brutality from around the world. With each new line of prose, our Professor X reads our minds and speaks to our hearts. Catharsis and metamorphosis are experienced simultaneously for the reader."—Willard C. Watson III

From the Book

Black male me           walks into a store
in broad daylight      black phone in hand
wearing a black mask.

You already know how this         ends.
Somebody felt threatened.
Somebody got shot.
Black woman wailing makes news.

But it isn't new.
All the chalk outlines are white.
All the states are red.
The Coronavirus doesn't discriminate.
Racists still do.

Peel off mask no grins no lies.

Mrs. Butterworth, Uncle Ben & Aunt Jemima

...walk into a bar in America.
Butterworth says, I'm being repackaged.
Ben says, I'm being rebranded.
Jemima says, I remember
when they branded my mama    on her back.

The bartender says, I could stand in the middle
of Main Street and kill somebody
and I wouldn't lose any voters.
Butterworth says, then I'll take eight bullets
in my sleep. Ben says choke me to death
with your knee. Jemima says,
lock me in a holding cell and say
I decided to hang myself.

The bartender poured the drinks,
said he felt threatened
and was simply standing his ground
when he thought the thug
was reaching for a gun.

The headlines said Well-Loved American
Foods Resisted Arrest, Failed
to Comply, and Were Delicious While Black.

Butterworth's daughter said here's to progress,
we might finally get an anti-lynching bill.
Ben's son said I'd rather they abolish
qualified immunity. Jemima's kid said you know
they abolished slavery once,
then they hung my mama      on that box.

What Others Say

Professor Frank X Walker has yet again used his superpowers to insert a conscience into the tumultuous cacophony that is social media. His latest series of poems debuted in our news feeds, week after week, speaking truth to the tangled web of perspectives splattered across our digital landscape. By spreading light in our darkest times, our Professor X speaks to a class of students, who have been mutated by the pandemic, by political doublespeak and visions of violence and brutality from around the world. With each new line of poetry, Our Professor X reads our minds and speaks to our hearts. Catharsis and metamorphosis are experienced simultaneously for the reader. Thank you for sharing your words.

— Willard C. Watson III

We all wear masks. There are people with whom we can take our masks off and speak from the heart. Professor Walker is an expert in masks, or personas. And he well knows that sometimes masks let us speak deep truths about the world. He also knows masks sometimes protect us, sometimes keep us from ourselves, and sometimes cause us pain. Paul Dunbar, in "We Wear the Mask," asks of the world and of poetry, "Why should the world be over-wise, / In counting all our tears and sighs?" Yet, it seems that now, as then, the world pays too little attention to the tears and sighs about which Dunbar sings. We are so grateful that Walker has taken the time to sit with death and pain and heartbreak, to sit and tune his voice to sing these elegies, so that we can gather around him to sing through our tears with head held high.

— Jeremy Paden

Sometimes poignant and moving, other times raw and gutting, Walker's pandemic and protest poems provide a ballast to the widespread sensation of being at sea. Their immediacy helps us to digest the inexplicable chaos all around, grappling in real time with loss, pain, tragedy, horror, madness, and death—from systemic American racism, inextricably linked to systemic healthcare inequities. Greeting us each morning during the Covid-inflected version of National Poetry Month in April, and continuing into the belly of Black Lives Matters protests in May and June, Walker's daily offerings calm us, inflame us, inspire us, and offer up a clarifying lens through which to examine the world anew. Now polished and collected into this volume, they continue to sustain us as we move forward into an uncertain world.

— Kris Yohe

About the Author

Frank X Walker

Multidisciplinary artist and educator, Frank X Walker, is the first African American writer to be named Kentucky Poet Laureate. He is the author of the children's book, A is for Affrilachia, and eleven collections of poetry, including Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, which was awarded the NAACP Image Award for Poetry and the Black Caucus American Library Association Honor Award. Voted one of the most creative professors in the south, Walker coined the term "Affrilachia" and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets. He serves as Professor of Creative Writing and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky.