The Specter + The Revolution
TWO MORE THOUGHT-PROVOKING WORKS FROM SEAN BEATTY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sean Beatty is a poet and med student from Raleigh, North Carolina. He is enrolled in medical school at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he also received his undergraduate degree and completed an Honors Poetry Thesis. He earned a Master's in Physiology at the University of Louisville. His poems have been published in Figure 1, CP Quarterly, Ice Lolly Review, The Ex-Puritan and other poetry journals. He tells us: "Specter" is about the legacy of pride that my grandmother had and that she passed onto her children and beyond. "The Revolution" is about the legacy of resisting oppression and how you win and then lose and then have to win again. There are so many ways that the world tries to limit you, but you have to refuse every day. Some legacies are responsibilities, some are burdens and some are liberating. When Sean writes “Some things need to be said, and I’m slowly figuring out how to say them,” KIZA says he is definitely getting it figured out. Follow Sean on Twitter @seanw0ww.
Specter
BY SEAN BEATTY
Copyright 2026. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
I
My grandma’s skin looks white;
her hair, now white with age,
looks straight, but cut
too short to tell.
Both keep the white lie
in her living facility
but that nose, round
just like her children’s,
hints at a secret
that she’d tell anybody.
II
I ask her what it’s like,
being a ghost here.
She says she hates it,
and I believe her.
The moment she says
I’m Black, tongues must
tighten around her
and eyes shift, scanning
for someone they never
saw enter the room.
Crooked spines shiver
from what they think
she might have heard them say.
III
I think she loves
introducing herself to spook
the old white folks she lives with.
She’s never been someone that
anybody could keep locked in.
Walls rise up, but my grandma
walks right through them.
The Revolution
BY SEAN BEATTY
Copyright 2026. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Build your families.
Watch them be torn apart.
Break your chains.
Watch them make you new ones
and break them again.
Build your churches that are schools that are community centers.
Watch them burn.
Build your own schools and community centers.
Watch their leaders fail you.
Raise your own leaders.
Watch them die of natural causes.
Watch them deny you their colleges.
Build your own colleges.
Get into theirs anyway.
Watch them complain.
Build your restaurants, motels, and banks.
Watch them burn.
Build your homes in between red lines.
Strengthen your neighborhoods.
Watch your neighborhoods be protected and served.
Watch guns and drugs enter your hood from the CIA.
Watch them arrest you for those guns and drugs.
Watch the system work.
Break the system.
Break your chains.
Always break your chains.
Watch the FBI take your leaders.
Watch them give you new ones.
Watch them make laws that only you seem to violate.
Watch them make new chains.
Watch them take your fathers.
Watch your sons grow into the criminals they called your fathers.
Watch your movements become gangs.
Watch your movements fall apart.
Don’t they always fall apart?
Build your families.
Watch them be torn apart.
Break your chains.
Watch them make you new ones
and break them again.
You have to break them again!