Chapters (46)
- Cover
- Also by Phillip B. Williams
- Epigraph
- Final First Poem
- Of the Question of Self and How It Never Quite Gets Answered
- Final Poem for the White Students Next Door Who Say “Nigga” When Singing Along to Rap Songs Loud Enough for Me to Hear
- Final Poem as Request for Maskot for White-Ran Journal, or “They Sure Do Love Them Some Black Pain.”
- Order of Events
- Final Poem for a King
- And Now Upon My Head the Crown
- Tabula Rasa
- Final Poem for War During War
- Interlude: Sasa and Zamani
- Final Poem for Amiri Baraka
- The Flying African
- Mushmouf’s Maybe-Crown
- Final Poem for the Crow
- Final Poem for the “Black Body”
- January 1, 2018
- Final Poem as Tidalectic Elegy
- Herald
- The Field
- Hunter
- Final Poem for the Deer
- Final Poem as Nocturne into Aubade, or Sonrise
- Final Poem for the Biography of a Black Man as Animal and His Enforced Embrace of a Human Praxis
- Black Joy
- Judgment
- Final Poem for the Famous Poet
- January 28, 1918
- Final Poem for the Bullet
- “Ne Me Quitte Pas”: I Put a Spell on You: Nina Simone: 1965
- Final Poem for the Moon
- The Void
- Final Poem for My Father Misnamed in My Mouth
- Final Poem for the “Field of Poetry”
- The Asphodel
- Shame
- Final Poem for Grandma Elizabeth’s Cancer
- Final Poem of Persona
- Mastery
- In the Beginning
- NOTES
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- About the Author
- What’s next onyour reading list?
“NE ME QUITTE PAS”: I PUT A SPELL ON YOU: NINA SIMONE: 1965
A single pant leg dangles from the chair.
Mud from the hem leaves graves on the floor.
Collapsing star: the last button
of your shirt caught
between my teeth.
Cricket: a record player cracks
its skipping obsessions.
A single pant leg dangles from the chair.
Stars: dust from your ankles glides up
slats of street light.
Où l’amour sera roi: only the pits
behind bent knees are kingdom.
Mud from the hem leaves graves on the floor.
Your underarm holds a nest of burnt leaves
I rub my face against. I smolder in the key of animal.
A single pant leg dangles from the chair,
a cougar unrolling the cologne
of a doe from its tongue.
Où l’amour sera loi: my bare feet run
against the headboard.
Mud from the hem leaves graves on the floor.
A single pant leg dangles from the chair.