Gratitude to the root systems: public libraries, literary journals, small presses, and independent booksellers. In particular, I off r immense thanks to the editors, staff, and readers of the following publications where these poems first appeared:

Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day: “Primordial Mirror”

Atlantic: “Why I Left the Garden”

Common: “Bluest Nude,” “Burying Seeds,” “Of Being in Motion,” and “On Seeing and Being Seen”

Georgia Review: “Etymology of a Mood” and “Lotioning My Mother’s Back”

Gulf Coast: “Diamondback” and “Slow Drag with Branches of Pine” (as “Self-Portrait with Branches of Pine”)

Massachusetts Review: “Poem After an Iteration of a Painting by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Destroyed by the Artist Herself”

Narrative Magazine: “Two Girls Bathing”

Prairie Schooner: “A Family Woven Like Night Through Trees,” “At the Fish House,” and “Posing Nude”

Southampton Review: “After a Year of Forgetting”

Southern Indiana Review: “Marigolds of Fire”

Tin House: “Blueprint”

Virginia Quarterly Review: “Aubade,” “Bathers with a Turtle,” “Heaven as Olympic Spa,” and “Resembling Flowers Resembling Weeds”

Yale Review: “[After the _____, I yearned to be reckless. To smash],” “[After the _____, I mothered my mother,],” “[After the _____, I had the urge to dance],” “[After the _____, time turned like a mood ring.],” “[After the laughter subsided the crying kept after we held hands],” and “[There is a scar near my right eye no lover ever noticed]” (as “After the Apocalypse”)

A selection of these poems appears in Blood of the Air, winner of the 2020 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, published by Northwestern University Press.

“After the Apocalypse” appeared in Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic edited by Alice Quinn and was reprinted in the Best American Poetry 2021 edited by Tracy K. Smith.

“Burying Seeds” appeared as the featured poem on Poetry Daily, June 26, 2020 and was reprinted in Why I Wrote This Poem edited by William Walsh.

“Facing Off” originally appeared in the anthology Plume Poetry 9 edited by Daniel Lawless.

“Labor” originally appeared in the anthology I Know What’s Best for You edited by Shelly Oria.

“Resembling Flowers Resembling Weeds” was reprinted in Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African-American Poetry edited by Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne.

“She Said” was reprinted in Verso / vol. 7.

Gratitude to Natasha Trethewey for selecting “Etymology of a Mood” for the Georgia Review’s 2018 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize and John Hennessy for selecting “Burying Seeds” for the 2019 DISQUIET Literary Prize in poetry.

Gratitude for the off rings of nourishment and solitude that greatly shaped this book: Lesley Williamson and Saltonstall Foundation; Crosstown Arts; Ann Brady and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; and the kind staff f MacDowell.

I am deeply grateful for support from the Bronx Council on the Arts; Cave Canem Foundation; the National Endowment of the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; the Oscar Williams and Gene Derwood Fund; and the Rona Jaffe oundation.