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?
Final Poem for War During War
FINAL POEM FOR WAR DURING WAR
Questions for the war poem to host:
Who among us could weave one ghost
into another? Where find water hosted
but in the tulip’s snapped back and tilted
cup? How count the escaped’s speed by silt
dragged from one ruin to another? Wilt,
sings the sky’s dayfabric unwoven into grayscale
as though night could coax from a star a paler
face, but when night arrives on the felled
back of a mule winged on either side by baskets
of water and rotten grapes, what verb is tasked
with this weight? How many missiles cast
their light above a child’s gait? When do lions,
banished to the hills, water their hunger, lie on
their roars till the vultures pile on?
How many ways can I write exile
having myself never been exiled?
What is the face of exile
besides the one hidden beneath the pyre
of music peeling from a liar’s
head? Bless the maenads, that they retire
only after this laughable poet is dead.
Interlude: Sasa and Zamani
INTERLUDE: SASA AND ZAMANI
Because you were ancestor, because living dead and loved, in your necessary addiction you toed the roots of the banyan tree from underground, fiddling with your skullcap while saying my name in a mirror of groundwater. I saw you just the other day standing in the corner of my room at the corner of my eye, cornering my truth like a panther, remaining quarter-visible while I typed you into half-recollection, into forever the hand that held mine then undid the holding. Because I refuse to look the dead in the eye, I minded you like I mind dark shapes darting peripheral after I leave a room. My Egbe have hungers. My living makes room for finite cycles, a staircase spiraled to a point. If I die after my younger sister, you will become unknown, mortal-proofed. On the altar for my ancestors, I leave for you my favorite candy. You will love what I love. Florida water flares citrus from your obituary’s fold. You were sweet when you were here. Forever be my father in your becoming forever.