Jake Adam York is the author of Murder Ballads (2005), winner of the Elixir Prize in Poetry; A Murmuration of Starlings (2008), co-winner of the Crab Orchard Open Competition and winner of the Colorado Book Award; and Persons Unknown (2010), published by Southern Illinois University Press as an editor's selection in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, New South, Ninth Letter, Shenandoah, The Northwest Review, Poetry Daily and others. An associate professor and director of Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Denver, York co-edits Copper Nickel. Originally from Alabama, York was educated at Auburn and Cornell. He is also the author of a work of literary criticism, The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry (Routledge, 2005).
SENSITIVITY
May 4, 1959
for Mack Charles Parker, lynched near Poplarville, Mississippi,
April 24, 1959, recovered from the Pearl River, May 4, 1959
Six weeks since that whisper rose
into the window of a stage
behind the Half Note's bar,
whisper Mingus let spread like a bruise,
Lester Young is dead, six weeks
since he fell from the sky,
dead off the plane from Paris,
and each night this goodbye's
gone more sensitive. Now
the flats are hid, and Handy's learned
to fold the sound of breath
inside his notes—the bleeding throat,
tongue's last epileptic flutter—
while Mingus thrills the bass
