Summer in Oklahoma always brings heat, storm, and explosions of life on the tallgrass prairie but in 2020, human dramas eclipsed its natural wonders. A global pandemic, the likes of which the modern world had never envisioned, caught the state in a death grip, along with new moments of reckoning with Oklahoma’s painful demographic history. Its designation before statehood as Indian Territory for native people removed from ancestral lands came home to roost on July 9, 2020. In an historic decision, the Supreme Court found that the reservation boundaries in eastern Oklahoma were never disestablished in the reconstruction treaties forged in the Civil War’s aftermath, reaffirming that the city of Tulsa and most of eastern Oklahoma rest on Indian land. Oklahoma’s citizens have only begun to come to terms with the implications.

In the runup to the one-hundred-year anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921, long unheeded cries to search for bodies rumored to be buried in mass, unmarked graves finally prompted the Tulsa City Council to act. In the summer of 2020, excavations began in Tulsa’s Oaklawn Cemetery, where victims of the massacre were thought to lie. Meanwhile, the Black Lives Matter movement drew attention and backlash on the weekend of a controversial Presidential visit for a campaign rally during the pandemic. A street mural painted on Black Wall Street for the Greenwood district’s annual Juneteenth celebration became a flashpoint.

These poems register 2020’s summer heat. Even more, they celebrate Oklahoma’s beauty, lament its people’s pain, and reach for its possibilities.

Under review for publication.