Sister Tubman, by Joanne Godley

Sister Tubman
 
after Untitled (Harriet Tubman), by Elizabeth Catlett (Mexico, b. USA) 1953
​https://www.nga.gov/artworks/143191-untitled-harriet-tubman

Git in formation, Harriet growls.
How could she have known that, centuries later, a woman named Beyoncé would sing those very words. Sing, not snarl-as Harriet is want to do. Singing, Harriet knows nothing about that. Her reality is shepherding parcels of Negroes out the hellhole of slavery to safety’s gallery up North. She reserves her gun for surly slave catchers, for hungry dogs that won’t back down, for any wild critters they stumble upon, for folks who imagine they can simply change their minds mid-stream and turn back, and for any man who is part of her parcel and can’t see fit to follow a woman’s orders. She sleeps with one eye open.

Joanne Godley

Godley is a thrice-nominated Pushcart and Best-of-Net poet, writer, and recent MFA graduate from Pacific University. She is a retired physician and public health specialist, who immigrated to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico with her puppy, Jazz. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Decolonial Passage, The Kenyon Review Online, among others. How the Black Panthers Fell From the Sky, is a memoir-in-verse and Godley’s first poetry collection. It won the Naomi Long Madgett award for 2025 and has just been published by Broadside Lotus Press.