Flint, Michigan, serves as a model of numerous forms of racism. A major destination during the early waves of the Great Migration, Flint saw residential segregation of the incoming African Americans, including redlining, white flight, and gradual urban decay accompanied by protests in the 1960s. Deindustrialization, the War on Drugs, mass incarceration, and police violence from the 1970s onward lead to an eventual loss of population and emergency management of the city. In 2014, Flint was plunged into a water crisis – a humanitarian disaster brought about by underfunded infrastructure, the severity of which was exacerbated by decades of systemically racist policies as well as the neoliberalization of public administration. The locals struggled to draw attention of the state and city government. The national media ignored their story, too, until Michigan declared a state emergency in the spring of 2016, with President Obama authorizing FEMA to provide relief to the city shortly thereafter. The story of Flint water crisis has since then become a source of documentaries, TV films, studies and non-fiction books. However, little has been written about the artistic response by Flint’s African American community to the water crisis. This contribution therefore explores and analyzes two poems by writers of color from the spring of 2016. “Flint”, composed and performed by a group of young poets from the Raise It Up youth arts organization, and “I Told the Water” by Tarfia Faizullah provide platforms and channels for artists to ask for political accountability, to raise awareness, to articulate the community’s frustrations, hopes and to represent its stories, so often ignored or diminished by the officials and national media. The poems signal poetry’s potential to voice environmental justice concerns and vision, and function as an alternative infrastructure of communication by Flint’s community in the face of abandonment, divestment, and decay.