Behold:
a Poetic Exploration Migrant Stories from North Carolina and Florida
poems by
Jay Bryan
~84 pages, $15 (+ shipping)
Projected Release Date: January 2026
An Advance Sale Discount price of $8.50(+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $13.50/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412.
PLEASE NOTE: Ordering in advance of the release date entitles the buyer to a discount. It does not mean the book will ship before the date posted above and the price only applies to copies ordered through the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore.
Jay Bryan was poet laureate for Carrboro, North Carolina. For fifteen years, he coordinated poetry readings on Carrboro Day for the town’s celebration of its residents and their gifts. He compiled and edited the Carrboro 100th Birthday Poetry Anthology, published in May 2011. In 1994, he published Haiku for Carroll, a book of haiku written to his deceased wife during her terminal illness. His poems have been published in Blink, they wrote us a poem VII and VIII (Health Arts Network at Duke), the Ecozoic Reader, and Cowboy Poetry. In 2013, Finishing Line published Selected Poems.
Jay Bryan hears voices. When he gets the spirit, he speaks in tongues. The voices are of migrant farmworkers Jay knew as a young man in the fields and camps of North Carolina and Florida. The tongues are those voices merged, blended, and mingled through his poet’s ear, then rendered for the rest of us into haunting poems of sadness, hardship and resilience. If you love the blues, you will want to read these poems. ~Alex Harris, Emeritus Professor, Duke University
Jay Bryan’s Behold is a timely body of work, but more than its timeliness, the work in this book compels us not to look away. Not to look away from our history, not to look away from our present. The poems in Behold have a cinematic quality that doesn’t always resolve where expected, but still touches the reader. In musical terms, many of these poems end in dominant chords, Bryan challenges us to complete the score. ~Fred Joiner
Jay Bryan’s poems present an orchestra of voices singing the stories we need to hear. Celebrating the wisdom, persistence, and endurance of migrant workers in the American South, these necessary poems hold narratives and lives like armfuls of precious melons. ~Gideon Young
Miles Outside Johnston County
No matter if we’re sore, hungover, or pregnant,
wet dirt is wearisome. The way we kneel
in it, slosh and slip, covered, soaked
in mud, sliding cross it. Boxes spread
in a line, the tractor coming, coming,
the spuds trapped on the vine, no time.
Handbags cutting into thinner and thinner shoulders.
The crew chief under a shade tree next to his German
Shepherd, above our backs glistening in waves
of fecund heat, his chewed cigar protruding.
Lunch maybe three or four p.m., packet
of nabs and a soda and lying among flies.
Another day tomorrow, picking potatoes
for someone else’s fries.
Emerging from Darkness
Steaming rain seeps through slats of rag-packed
holes and under a double bed, her slippers,
his dress boots. Two pitted roads dead-end the camp
between picked tobacco skeletons.
Willie emerges from darkness at the door,
his yellowed teeth a lecherous grin. She runs
as the diarrhea erupts again, crying, “Who will cook
for my brothers?” Her Black husband steps out.
Willie smirks and slips away, she saying, Eight years
being kicked by a man was plenty. Her husband
not interrupting – having her what counts –
Go on whitey, stare, she shouts in the grocery store.
You can dig on our baby, ‘Sooooo cute.’ Us buying food
or planning our future? No – no -no.
The President’s Salad
“We put the President’s salad
on his plate, then get turned
away from doctors’ offices
and stores, so-called drunk,
dirty, uncivilized? Who are they
to talk about people who
pick their food? If we weren’t out
there, who would be? Come
to a migrant camp and stay —
you’ll see life, more than
in a red-brick housing development
the other side of Belle Glade. That’s not
fair because there is life there, too.
But why make us out to be less
than human. Because we are dirty
from working in fields, no room
to pack clothes for the road?
Are we less than living, fearing,
loving, crying, aching, even
hateful human beings?
As much as the President I want
to sleep on a bed of my choosing.
But no, we go here and there
in the backcountry, far from what
we deserve as much as anyone else.
25 years I was a migrant worker.”
Muck City
An oasis of caged brokenness, in a desert
of sugar cane, raw sewage, torn clothes
and toys, plywood over windows, gaping
roofs, unhinged doors and buzzards.
Sheaves of cane flail forward in flanks
over thousands of acres. They bow to pillagers
hiring men from the West India’s
whose machetes slay the slight
weathered trunks drawing water
from miles of canals, and before morning
slash a field mate’s skull over insult
or spilt beer. Many bodies are buried
in the black muck, where a row
keeps an American in sugar for one year.
