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?
THE ASPHODEL
Yes, afterlife, but also flower,
though not its color, rather the star-
break from the pinnacle,
pointing in all directions.
A kind of greed, a kind
of giving up of one’s self.
But not retreat. Offering.
But not with fear. Love,
if love can make of a self
a reaching that does not end.
He had come back to him after
much time had passed.
It was the living-past
and it wasn’t. It was
the fully blossomed Xs
bending beneath him
who was thought dead:
get the hell out my life,
though he returned. Shield-
less. A field of sky
breaking, breaking. A door
knocked on, a door
like a voice
opening.