is burning.
That’s how Rockford poet and activist Christopher D. Sims’ poem “Minneapolis is Burning” begins. He said he wrote the piece after inhaling the fumes brought on by George Floyd’s death.
“I could feel the groundswell,” he recalled. “I could feel it, I could see it. So, I wanted to capture all of that.”
Sims was active in many of the Rockford protests that happened over the summer. He said he knows people in Minneapolis and St. Paul and he wanted to capture their story.
Although places in the city were indeed burning, Sims had another reason for using that description in his writing.