This poem was read on January 30, 2025 during the announcement of Junauda Petrus as the 2025 / 2026 City of Minneapolis Poet Laureate.
Ritual on How to Love Minneapolis Again
If you was away from here
and people questioned where you was from
and you told them people you was from Minneapolis and they said where?
And you said where Prince was from
and they said oh okay, yes, I understand now.
They wouldn’t understand.
That the Minneapolis Sound of synthesizers soothes our nervous system somehow with that funk
That the funk of blunt guts and stale beer
somehow
still penetrate
the coldest winter air
inhaled while waiting on the 5
anywhere on Chicago avenue, Lake street or Broadway
That through the ice and snow,
Shamans push baby carriages
filled with plastic bags of life possessions
as they whisper or shout their wisdoms to you
for free
That you hold your purple heart when you see
the Mississippi
and hear something tell you something
Being born by this river makes you
listen different, listen slow…
Makes you hear the other rivers we rode here
The Mekong. The Niger River. The Juba.
Middle passage, Greyhound and railroad.
That this Midwest nile connects us to oceans and rivers in the lands Of our ancestors we may never see.
That the drums played by native elders and kids at school assemblies Would activate the memory of ancestral rhythms,
African heart beats and inner cosmos
They wouldn’t know
That they made the place
Prince
learned how to play guitar
over North
into a police precinct
and you wish they would turn it back
to a place where kids could learn something sacred.
They wouldn’t know that everyone’s got an
auntie that dated, married and was in love with Prince
And still wears purple to mourn him
They wouldn’t understand you was a crew of black girls
invited to a Somali wedding
and borrowed the homie’s auntie’s
silk and colorful dresses
and was all dancing and bouncing with the family,
familiar and foreign rhythm and
you was kinfolk and
you was in motherland on this motherland
That you used to buy your rolling papers at
Cup foods
before it became the crossroads
before it became a chasm and we was all swallowed up
In redlines and chalk lines
That you was stopped by the police and you was alone
or you wasn’t
and you was quiet or you pleaded
or this was your first time, your 62nd time, your last time.
That we say Bde Maka Ska and not the other name
of a southern hustler of skin and soul
when we look upon our city lake
That balancing on double decker bikes and low riders
is the best way to ride our city
That you can’t shame
Black girls whispering and giggling to each other on the bus
Regal in bonnet and slippers
Henna laced hands
in dunks and fresh braids
Hijabs, Skateboards and
notebooks of poetry
How do you explain that as a teen
you wandered Nicollet mall
with no place to be and you was alone
and you was you
and you was searching
and you was cold and
you was in the footsteps of something
ancient singing into your body?
How do you make them understand that
On a cold frozen night that
even the wind gets into your heated home
Can find you under the comforter in your pajamas
And in this warm cocoon you think to yourself
Does everyone have a warm bed?
Does everyone have enough to eat?
Does everyone have a place to be safe?
Whose getting snatched in the night?
They wouldn’t understand at all still
And would add an inni to Minne and say Minne-inni-apolis
Mixing the whole midwest in their mouth
Not slowing down to feel the snow land on their tongues
They wouldn’t understand that Native and Black kids
use their legs as jet skis
to slide behind someone’s old hoopty
in gray slushy snow like some kind of hood Aspen
That your island immigrant parents
got taught how to winter by
4th generation Norwegian immigrants
who explained the science of winter
It’s dialect of long John’s,
good boots and wool socks and
warming the cars before you drive
How cold it can feel here,
how it shocks your bones,
how frigid and fragile
It is to breathe in that gasp
of icy air into your lungs
and you cough just to breathe
That even so
we kids would wear only hoodies
and adidas because we wanted
to be cool even in the freezing cold
That in Phillips you would eat fry bread
and have epiphanies like
Fry bread is Native fry bake
Fry bake is Trini fry bread
Colonizers rations uniting us in our
culinary ingenuities and cultural resistance
across oceans, lakes and rivers and creeks and lands
That we were neighbors who traded plates of food
with foil blanketing them,
so we all could taste where each other was from
Vietnam, Ethiopia, Chicago, Laos, Red Lake,
Mexico, Trinidad, Somalia,
Mississippi, Ecuador, Liberia, Eritrea, Palestine,
Bdóte
They wouldn’t understand that it isn’t cold here all the time
Deep, deep, deep down inside
That something here is quite warm.
By Junauda Petrus retrieved from the city of Minneapolis.gov and found at the link HERE on February 4, 2026.
Invitation: “They wouldn’t know that…”
Junauda Petrus is the author of The Stars and the Blackness Between Them, Because of Love, and Can We Please Give the Police Department to the Grandmothers?, and the poet behind civic and performance works such as Ritual on How to Love Minneapolis Again. Her writing moves across poetry, young adult fiction, children’s literature, and performance, centering Black queer life, love, community, and imaginative justice. She has received a Coretta Scott King Honor, a Minnesota Book Award finalist citation, a Jerome Travel and Study Grant, and was named Minneapolis Poet Laureate for 2025–2026. You can find more of her plays, poetry, and literary works at her site:
https://www.junauda.com/
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"Being born by this river makes you
listen different, listen slow..."
_________
I am struck by Junauda's expression to "listen slow" and that being born by the Mississippi River creates this kind of listening. What might it mean to listen different, to listen slow? For me, to slow down so that I can listen deeply. To be quiet, so that I can hear and listen. To shift the focus from myself to the other... so that I can listen different, listen slow.
I love the way she points to one of the best musical talents the world has ever known. Prince turned Minneapolis into a point on the world’s emotional map. Saying his name is not a claim to fame but a way of locating a pulse, a warmth, a shared memory that outsiders can unmistakably recognize.