An Ode to Marsellus Wallace

by Juliette Givhan

—After Jericho Brown’s Ganymede A man gets revenge. That’s the version I prefer. I like the safety in the unspeaking of it— the body existing as just a body. Not necessarily Black & broken, but a structure of bone & sinew—capable of being more than the thing that is torn apart. In this version a Black man is the hero, white men the ones who suffer, & as we sit & watch we are so proud that we almost pull it off— this unremembering of a violence allowed to happen. — Juliette Givhan is a Black poet who writes about being a Black poet. Her work focuses primarily on navigating depictions of Blackness in media—existing at the intersection of popular culture and an interrogation of the self to understand systemic violence in America. Juliette received her MFA from Oregon State University in the Spring of 2020.   Photography by: Keitravis Squire