fan art by Autumn-Sacura (http://autumn-sacura.deviantart.com/).

LAUREN BULLOCK

Reboot

When I first heard how DC had de-aged 
our Justice League for the reboot it read like 
a lazy plot twist, superheroes suddenly shrunken 
back into quarter life crises, decades of camaraderie
reduced to awkward introductions (like God knows 
when Batman picked up all those children sidekicks). 
Who desired this: Superman barely graduated from 
work jeans to costume, Green Lantern all greenhorn
eager, Wonder Woman wrapped in identity issues
tighter than her lasso? As if generation millennial, stumbling 
towards stability, asked for a reflection. As if watching 
my own parents loosed back into their youth (my father 
a demi-god of football and funk music, my mother 
an artist unlearning to call me mistake) might draw
me closer to them. See, here, how Diana and Clark 
might make love midflight now that all their wisdom 
is gone? See, here, how my mother wades in a warm 
hope, my father’s touring and groupies still some small 
obstacle. Every obstacle is small: the manager firing my
mother for my father’s black, delayed graduation, endless
needs of child me. Yes, hear how far future screams are 
from this couple’s gentle, as though history were pencil 
sketch simple, erasable, pain as preventable as our wrinkles.



Whitewash
for Connor Hawke

When the next issue of Earth 2 
slides onto screens and stands,
your face is the plot twist. 
Can't call it winter coloring, 
that paleness you're sporting 
like a new full quiver, always 
some halfbreed archer as it was, 
now with thinned lips, pinched nose, 
all that wilderness bleached right out, 
all that history gone like grass stains.
You're your daddy's boy now, 
and isn’t that what you’ve always 
aimed for? His blonde crowning
your world map in reverse, colors 
sucking backwards into blank.
Sure, you can be kyudo and kimchi
when convenient. Hours of relaxing
creams, sitting through the fuming 
stench of burnt hair, I get it: 
when your skin says burial
you can only hope to blend. 
But on the second Earth, Connor,
ain't no white people coming back 
black. Meanwhile, on your old Earth, 
another brown boy goes gone. 



Lauren Bullock  is a multi-racial, ace woman hailing from North Carolina. A founder and three time member of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill slam team, she was also a 2013 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational finalist and a 2013 National Poetry Slam representative for the Bull City slam team in Durham. Recently Lauren graduated with a double major in English and Communications and a poetry minor at UNC.   She has been published in the poetry collection Tandem, Volume II.  When not working on poetry­-related activities, Lauren enjoys fighting crime as a costumed vigilante.