There’s one boy on fire and another drowning. You only get to save onefor your final exam, so you lift the wet boy from the lake and don’t realizeyour mistake until Superman touches down. Sorry son, we can’t havesomeone who chooses their own over everyone else. The boy’s brown fingershold tight to your emblem, leave wet impressions on your chest. Nextyear the same, and the same after that. Every time you choose wrong. Blame iton empire. Superman, his arm wrung around your neck, we’re tryingto save the world here, his eyes pure blue, confirming what youalready knew: you always save the ones never meant to survive.
tryouts
Gary Jackson
For those of us who live at the shoreline / standing uponthe constant edges of decision / crucial and alone —Audre Lorde from “A Litany for Survival” With that jive bunch of turkeys in the JLA? Forget it!! —Black Lightning from Justice League of America, no. 173
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“tryouts” from SMALL LIVES: by Gary Jackson.
Published by University of New Mexico Press on September 2, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 by Gary Jackson.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Gary Jackson is the author of the poetry collections small lives, origin story, and Missing You, Metropolis, and co-editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry. He is the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and the Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.
small lives renders a graphic novel in verse form. Jackson creates his own metropolis, featuring original and remixed superheroes who are othered for more than just their skin and are subsequently and simultaneously celebrated, destroyed, and desired, illustrating what it means to reside in a country’s brutal imagination.
“There’s a charmed and charged theater in Gary Jackson’s small lives that’s rare in contemporary poetry. At its center, this book is about power: who has it, how it twists, how it’s weaponized, how it’s abdicated. On its face, it’s a superhero story in the tradition of Moore’s The Watchmen. A welcome counterbalance to our thirty-second culture, small lives is a tender, gritty thriller that resists hopelessness.”
—Maya Marshall, author of All the Blood Involved in Love
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