This is a brutal place. We blame the dead for their dying. We train our eyes to make their bodies grow to monstrous girth. We say their blood is a necessary sacrifice. Or worse, we forget their blood. The pumping that made them move. The breath that caught before the air filled with shrapnel. Who can help? I stare into the void of my cell phone and search for truth. I stare into the void of my own soul and search for truth. I stare into the void of the governing body and find a void. There is no truth without blood. There is no blood in a constitution. There is no blood in a marbled hall. There is no blood in the gavel which strikes to signal another bill—also bloodless—passed against all the blood just trying to stay within our bodies, trying to do its job. This place is brutal by tradition. Remember discovery and the murders necessary for making a whole new world? Remember Oklahoma. Remember Alabama. Even across the wide sea, the murders we sanction with money, the tanks all filled with fire. The miles and miles of blood. Some of us say the children, the children. How do we tell a child her innocence is meaningless? Her blood irrel-evant to the bloodless powers that bleed the world? Her blood only a messy inconvenience spilled to fill unfillable hands? Her blood, my blood, all for sale.
Conflict/War
for Gaza, for the Trail of Tears, for Jim Crow and slavery, for the far reaches of colonialism and its violent scythe
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Reprinted from Lullaby for the Grieving. Copyright © 2025 by Ashley M. Jones. Used with permission of the publisher, Hub City Press. All rights reserved.
Ashley M. Jones was the Poet Laureate of Alabama (January 2022-January 2026). She was the first person of color and youngest person in Alabama’s history to hold this position, which was created in 1930. Jones is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Lullaby for the Grieving. She is the author of the essay collection WHAT THE MIRROR SAID: THE NECESSITY OF BLACK WOMEN IN POETRY, and she is the co-editor of WHAT THINGS COST: An Anthology for the People. Jones has earned fellowships and awards from many organizations, including the SouthArts, Academy of American Poets, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Alabama State Council on the Arts. Her poems are published in many journals and publications including POETRY, Academy of American Poets, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Oxford American, and her work has been featured by outlets including PBS, CNN, The BBC, Good Morning America, ABC News, and the New York Times. Jones is the Associate Director of the University Honors Program at UAB, the executive director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, and she is a PhD student in English at Old Dominion University.
With previous work hailed by the New York Times as “unflinching” and “piercing”, Ashley M. Jones’s Lullaby for the Grieving is her most personal collection to date.
In her fourth poetry collection, Jones studies the multifaceted nature of grief: the personal grief of losing her father, and the political grief tied to Black Southern identity. How does one find a path through the deep sorrow of losing a parent? What wonders of Blackness have to be suppressed to make way for "progress"?
Journeying through landscapes of Alabama, the Middle Passage and Underground Railroad, interior spaces of loss and love, and her father’s garden, Jones constructs both an elegy for her father and a celebration of the sacred exuberance and audacity of life. Featuring poems from her tenure as Alabama’s first Black and youngest Poet Laureate, Lullaby for the Grieving finds calm in unimaginable storms and attempts to listen for the sounds of healing.
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