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Chapters (46)
  1. Cover
  2. Also by Phillip B. Williams
  3. Epigraph
  4. Final First Poem
  5. Of the Question of Self and How It Never Quite Gets Answered
  6. Final Poem for the White Students Next Door Who Say “Nigga” When Singing Along to Rap Songs Loud Enough for Me to Hear
  7. Final Poem as Request for Maskot for White-Ran Journal, or “They Sure Do Love Them Some Black Pain.”
  8. Order of Events
  9. Final Poem for a King
  10. And Now Upon My Head the Crown
  11. Tabula Rasa
  12. Final Poem for War During War
  13. Interlude: Sasa and Zamani
  14. Final Poem for Amiri Baraka
  15. The Flying African
  16. Mushmouf’s Maybe-Crown
  17. Final Poem for the Crow
  18. Final Poem for the “Black Body”
  19. January 1, 2018
  20. Final Poem as Tidalectic Elegy
  21. Herald
  22. The Field
  23. Hunter
  24. Final Poem for the Deer
  25. Final Poem as Nocturne into Aubade, or Sonrise
  26. Final Poem for the Biography of a Black Man as Animal and His Enforced Embrace of a Human Praxis
  27. Black Joy
  28. Judgment
  29. Final Poem for the Famous Poet
  30. January 28, 1918
  31. Final Poem for the Bullet
  32. “Ne Me Quitte Pas”: I Put a Spell on You: Nina Simone: 1965
  33. Final Poem for the Moon
  34. The Void
  35. Final Poem for My Father Misnamed in My Mouth
  36. Final Poem for the “Field of Poetry”
  37. The Asphodel
  38. Shame
  39. Final Poem for Grandma Elizabeth’s Cancer
  40. Final Poem of Persona
  41. Mastery
  42. In the Beginning
  43. NOTES
  44. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  45. About the Author
  46. What’s next onyour reading list?

And Now Upon My Head the Crown

AND NOW UPON MY HEAD THE CROWN

In the first place—I wanted him and said so

when I had only meant to say. His eyes

opened beyond open as if such force would unlock me

to the other side where daylight gave reason

for him to re-dress.

When he put on his shirt,

after I asked him to keep it off, to keep putting off

the night’s usual end, his face changed beneath

the shirt: surprise to grin, to how even the body

of another’s desire can be a cloak behind which

to change one’s power, to find it.

~

In the first place

he slept, he opened the tight heat of me that had been

the only haven he thought to give a name:

Is-it-mine? Why-you-running? Don’t-run-from-it—as though

through questions doubt would find its way away from me,

as though telling me what to do told me who I was.

Tabula Rasa