April 24: Afro
Martha
Afro
Morgan Parker
I’m hiding secrets & weapons in there: buttermilk pancake cardboard, boxes of purple juice, a magic word our Auntie Angela spoke into her fist & released into hot black evening like gunpowder or a Kool, 40 yards of cheap wax prints, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a Zulu folktale warning against hunters drunk on Polo shirts & Jägermeister, blueprints for building ergonomically perfect dancers & athletes, the chords to what would have been Michael’s next song, a mule stuffed with diamonds & gold, Miss Holiday’s vocal cords, the jokes Dave Chapelle’s been crafting off the grid, sex & brown liquor intended for distribution at Sunday schools in white suburbs, or in other words exactly what a white glove might expect to find taped to my leg & swallowed down my gullet & locked in my trunk & fogging my dirty mind & glowing like treasure in my autopsy
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More Morgan Parker:
+ If You Are Over Staying Woke
+ It Was Summer Now and the Colored People Came Out Into the Sunshine
Time warp:
2025: American Sonnet for the New Year, Terrance Hayes
2024: How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This, Hanif Abdurraqib
2023: Lit, Andrea Cohen
2022: Meditations in an Emergency, Cameron Awkward-Rich
2021: How the Trees on Summer Nights Turn into a Dark River, Barbara Crooker
2020: Ash, Tracy K. Smith
2019: Under Stars, Dorianne Laux
2018: Afterlife, Natalie Eilbert
2017: There Are Birds Here, Jamaal May
2016: Poetry, Richard Kenney
2015: Dreaming at the Ballet, Jack Gilbert
2014: Vocation, Sandra Beasley
2013: Near the Race Track, Brigit Pegeen Kelly
2012: from Ask Him, Raymond Carver
2011: Sweet Star Chisel, Dearest Flaming Crumbs in Your Beard Lord, John Rybicki
2010: Rain Travel, W.S. Merwin
2009: Goodnight, Li-Young Lee
2008: Bearhug, Michael Ondaatje
2007: Meditation at Lagunitas, Robert Hass
2006: Autumn, Rainer Maria Rilke
2005: On Turning Ten, Billy Collins