"Blue Saturday" ("As the World Cries" )

The poem, “Blue Saturday,” is a visceral, lyrical elegy for Sean Bell, a 23-year-old Black man from Queens, New York, who was killed nearly for two decades on November 26, 2006—the morning of his scheduled wedding day. Unarmed and leaving his bachelor party, he was shot 50 times by NYPD officers. The poem transforms that day from one of celebration into a permanent landmark of grief, what you name “Blue Saturday.”

The piece moves through the shattered timeline—from the planned ritual of “jumping the broom” to the broken morning stained with violence. It weaves in cultural echoes of pain through references to Prince’s “Purple Rain” and 2Pac, and it ties Sean’s story to a longer lineage of lives lost to police violence, naming Amadou Diallo, Timothy Stansbury, and others.

At its heart, the ...