For us the struggle is the myth that’s spelled R-A-C-E. In our mother tongues it binds our pride, can sound like almost any slur you please or any stereotype you like, for where and to whom one’s born guides our sense of this or that good or bad in the folks we were born into this world with. For us the struggle is the myth; it’s spelled R-A-C-E and seems to be the favorite meat of my home—Georgia, these United States, come to think of it, and, I dare say, folks of nations around this world. This man-made device— improvised thing—explodes—a bomb held in the palm of one trying to defuse the one-drop rule or blood quantum. I fear the fight for us will always be spelled R-A-C-E.
Poem copyright 2026 by Sean Hill. All rights reserved.
Straight, as in as a rail, though not necessarily as thin as one. A rail, useful as a means of confinement or steadying oneself. That rail not the same as the means of conveyance and expansion, but straight all the same like the queue worn down a so-called Chinaman’s back. You know, straight like the way it’s said an Irishman takes his whiskey. Or straight as in the last thing you’d say about almost any freedman’s hair not long off the plantation and on the work gang swangin a hammer to build the iron road—the Transcontinental Railroad. They all want to be American heroes or at least make a living. Or straight, the way telegraph lines run or telephone poles stand and ropes hang—the law and lawlessness. Or straight—what petty criminals, small-time crooks swear they gon go one day not like those railroad barons and industrialists and men who own land and real estate, who make it their business to do a deal and don’t deal straight. Straight, as in as a rail, though not necessarily as thin as one—no thin talk between father and son.
Poem copyright 2026 by Sean Hill. All rights reserved.
a transcription of the poem read on the home pageof this issue
“The State House Aflame, 1833” by Sean Hill
by Sean Hill
Fire can burn brands on a slave’s skin as he changes hands like cattle. And chattel slavery in a capital city is as old as fire and man. Milledgeville’s no different. It’s twelve noon, and the assembly’s just adjourned; the State House is aflame and water won’t reach the heights a slave can. Sam’s a bondsman.
The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire…
Without word from his master, Sam fights the flames. The townsfolk fearing Sam might slipandfall from that tremendous height look on with agonizing solicitude. As he tears flaming shingles from the steep pitch white folks move official records, furniture, and money from under that roof to a safer place, safer that any Sam and his issue yet know.
The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire, We don’t need no water…
We cannot pass in silence over the exemplary conduct of a Negro man named Sam, the slave Mr. Marlowe of this place. And the legislature will reward Sam’s fast action, heedless of his own safety, by appropriating $1,600 for the purchase of his freedom from John Marlow.
The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire, We don’t need no water, let the motherfucker burn
Poem copyright 2009 by Sean Hill. All rights reserved.
And from the beginning it feels like ain’t no winning. The blank they fill in is about their convenience. They are they and the other is theirs. We ain’t them. In part, we ain’t them because they need to be them. The speaker’s busted on the boom box—sound only coming out one side, not in stereo. A stereotype is a stereotype is a one-sided way of being seen not three- dimensionally, so to speak. The speakers be so close you might not even notice one’s busted. There ain’t no good stereotype, just ones they think we shouldn’t mind like you people are natural athletes; you people are so in touch with nature; you people are hard workers; you people are artistic; you people are good at math; you people run fast—your muscles are bigger and better than ours. You people got rhythm, you people know how to party; you people are great lovers; you people have the most beautiful skin, and when you people blend it with ours the children turn out so adorable. You people are strong, especially your women. You people have style. You people are so wise; you people are downright magical. You people are just so exciting. You people are so fashionable. You people are so strong, especially your men. You people are so spiritual. You people have thick skin; you people don’t feel pain the way we do; you people are tough. You people are so funny—you have the best sense of humor. You people are great lovers, especially your men. You people are great lovers, especially your women. You people have flair. You people sure can sing. You people are so neat and tidy. You people are good with money—so frugal. You people are imaginative, inventive—so creative. You people never go out of fashion. You people know how to make a way out of no way. We really appreciate you people—we really really do…
Poem copyright 2026 by Sean Hill. All rights reserved.
In his interview with Dr. Adesina, Sean Hill discusses an instance in which the intersection of the history of a place and the ecology of that place proved fertile ground, and helped bring to fruition a poem that had been incubating for a while. This prompt invites you to explore the same intersection as an instrument for your own revision process.
Take a poem that is in draft form, or that you’ve been struggling with for a while. Pull out 2-3 places that are mentioned in the poem or that are relevant somehow to the poem. Research both the history and ecology of those places–when was it founded? what are the demographics? what plants are native to it? what animals? Make a list of words, phrases and facts that intrigue you. Return to the draft and experiment with at least two ways that the information you gathered might be incorporated into the poem.
The poet, Sean Hill, is a son of Milledgeville, Georgia, a professor, an editor and publisher, a historian, a birder, a traveler, a mentor, a friend, a partner, a parent. He is more than these too. And his growing body of poetic work has always studied and imagined the past, the people who came before and how they, how the past, inhabits the present. The epigraph to his first book, Blood Ties and Brown Liquor, rooted in Milledgeville, was borrowed from James Baldwin: “The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.” What Hill navigates in Blood Ties and Brown Liquor, and in his second book, Dangerous Goods, a roaming of geography and history, as well as in his 2026 release, The Negroes Send Their Love: Poems, Perspectives, and Possible Futures, is what Baldwin describes elsewhere:
…And it is with great pain and terror that one begins to realize this. In great pain and terror one begins to assess the history which has placed one where one is, and formed one’s point of view. In great pain and terror because, thereafter, one enters into battle with that historical creation, Oneself, and attempts to re-create oneself according to a principle more humane and more liberating: one begins the attempt to achieve a level of personal maturity and freedom which robs history of its tyrannical power, and also changes history.1
Sean Hill’s poetry gathers a rich depth of historical information, a wide array of personal urgencies, with a fiercely inquiring mind, and filters them through sharp poetic structures, visceral narratives, and as his oeuvre grows, it filters them through a broadening range of written shapes. This trajectory is regularly expanding what a “Sean Hill poem” might be (what a poem can be), “re-creating” not only oneself “according to a principle more humane and more liberating,” but demonstrating how we might collectively re-create ourselves in mind, in language, in relation to one another. Hill is mapping how he and we might re-create, revise, redux the “unitedness” this Republic purports, how we might navigate this unutterably and unavoidable human challenge to rob history of its ongoing tyrannical power, how we might change history—the present and the ever-growing past, and therefore, our future. So Hill’s poems work through history in Baldwin’s all-encompassing sense.
In light of his second book, Dangerous Goods, Hill wrote,
When I write poems I’m attempting to use words to construct a system of resonances that get at some encounter, observation, or thought I’ve had in the world. If one thinks of history—the study of the past involving humans—as the understanding of relationships between past occurrences, then those relationships or connections are similar to the systems of resonances I’m after when writing poems.
I write poems as a communication to and with history, the future, and now. Language is a kind of correspondence with the present.2
Dangerous Goods widens the growing spiral, geographically and historically, from Milledgeville to Houston, Bemidji to the Bahamas, Liberia to Philadelphia, 1619 to the 21st century, “postcard” poems to series to a story. Hill’s newest work, The Negroes Send Their Love: Poems, Perspectives, and Possible Futures, widens the spiral further: “reduxes,” poem-essays, recipe poems, bird poems, a photo essay [in words], dialogues, and pronunciations; 1857 to 2338. The title also sparks several immediate questions: From where? To whom? And a response that is both question and affirmation: They/We do? They/We do. The title suggests some answers as well: From the future, and elsewhere. From here and now. Perhaps from the past. Genuinely sent from the future to the ancestors of now. Perhaps genuinely, though also smartly to the people and social systems that have hurt them, having traveled with and to some extent beyond the heft of American racist oppression. To send one’s love is to be gone, apart, free even.
Ever-generous, Hill immediately establishes “perspective” as a driving notion for the book and then shortly offers this frankness in “Where I Live,” guiding our attention to perspective: “You know, sometimes I remember the ‘I’ always lives in a context—spatial and temporal. I think that is a generous place to start.” This prose-poem-set-of-meditations anaphorizes “You know” at the start of each segment, colloquial and instructive, the third of which highlights what I hoped would come to us:
You know, I love how the ‘I’ in Langston Hughes’s poem ‘The Negro Speaks of River’ becomes this beautiful communal being thanks to that definite article in the title. This is not a long-lived Negro who’s been around since ‘dawns were young’ and has known the human lives intertwined with the multifaceted lives of ‘ancient, dusky rivers.’ This Negro is ‘the Negro’—we, plural in the singular, a collective, a communal ‘I,’ the way a blues singer might could speak to and through and for an audience with the story of their ‘I’—an ‘I’ so capacious and generous.3
Just as Baldwin’s “history” is capacious and generous, when he famously embarrassed William F. Buckley in a 1965 debate at the Cambridge Union, he also lifted every voice of this capacious, generous “I:”
I am stating very seriously, this is not an overstatement, that I picked the cotton, and I carried it to market, and I built the railroads, under someone else’s whip for nothing, for nothing. The Southern oligarchy which has until today so much power in Washington and therefore some power in the world was created by my labor and my sweat and the violation of my women and the murder of my children.4
Hill gathers perspectives—in spaces and times, articles that indicate individuality and collectivity, and features of identity that are pinged by one’s spaces and times. Perusing even just the table of contents makes this gathering clear. A sequence of poems that is spread across the book, though concentrated in the latter portion, builds with Hughes’s blocks: “A Negro Cook’s Recipe for Home in the Slaveholding South,” “A Negro Speaks of Worlds,” “A Negro Speaks on Community Relations in the Twenty-Third Century” (somewhere a gentle nod to Nina Simone’s avant-garde, imaginative “22nd Century”), and “A Negro Speaks of Lewis Temple in 2293.” This sequence woven with but also largely preceded by another strand: “A Father and Son Speak About Combustion,” “A Father and Son Speak About the Painting A Desperate Stand by Charles M. Russell” (also echoing Baldwin’s correlation between “it comes as a great shock to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you;” and I can’t shake the subtle associations with the infamous Southern Agrarians I’ll Take My Stand: The South and The Agrarian Tradition (1930), or our so recent, deadly-intended “Stand-Your-Ground” laws), “A Father and Son Speak About Perspective,” “A Father and Son Speak About Distinctions,” “A Father Speaks to His Son About Reckless Behavior.”
Perspective is the keystone, the many perspectives and the individual—honest and reflective. Hill layers the dimensions of a person who is Black, a person who moves about the United States (and the world), a person who is a father (inherently involving gendered experiences and notions), with several other very clear dimensions. We, somewhat recently, have gained the term “intersectionality” to help us understand how these (and many other) components, these whole layers of ourselves interact, combine, move through, and are moved by the world(s) around us. Not only does The Negroes Send Their Love gather these incisive, individual, and communal announcements; gather dialogues among father and son, across generations; gather a loving caution: “We need soon to lay low our goliaths / to honor the fact that all we have are the breaths / of our lives— / defy what collides with the sacred.”5 Not only is this an expansive, time-traveling, poetic form-traveling-and-innovating journey, it is an invitation into the excavation, the observation, the realization of how the world makes us and how we continually make the world. This has always been Hill’s work. We see Hill further enacting here what he described about his poetic mindset when Dangerous Goods came out, “Displacement keeps me from sinking, allows me a vantage from which to witness and write. Fascination—to be held as if spellbound—is an act of displacement, an irresistible narrowing of attentiveness displacing broad attention” (“What Spills Over”). Not only do the notions and written shapes of this new book buoy Hill, they reveal how true revision re-creates us and keeps us afloat.
Hill makes explicit throughout his latest intricate and layered work, and through his larger body of work, foundational components of his perspective, which inevitably, and beautifully, lead him to revisit, to re-evaluate, to redux, to revise as he moves through different spaces, times, both physically and imaginatively. His poetic reduxing also brings to mind some of Kiese Laymon’s recent notions about revision:
I thought he was talking about ‘revision,’ a word our professors and high school teachers believed necessitated us reducing all of our Black rhetorical abundance into meager-ass absolutes. In my own sloppy work, on and off the page, I was beginning to understand ‘revision’ as a dynamic practice of revisitation, premised on ethically reimagining the ingredients, scope, and primary audience of one’s initial vision. Revision required witnessing and testifying. Witnessing and testifying required rigorous attempts at remembering and imagining. If revision was not God, revision was everything every God ever asked of believers.6
The Negroes Send Their Love on its own, and in relation with the rest of Hill’s body of work, is an effort to witness and testify to the precarity yet inevitability of “going on.” We must go into the future working to better know our history, ourselves, our complexities and shortcomings, our effects. Just as Laymon notes, Hill makes clear that this has long been a deep current for Black Americans, for the African Diaspora. It’s why The Negroes Send Their Love into and from the future in this book.
And since Hill is an impeccable historian, moving fluidly between present and past, future and its past, the past’s implications into its future, I must stress one final layer of Hill’s reduxing. His work’s consistent sliding along the timeline brings him, in his ways, clearly into dialogue with many key poets of recent decades, and at least a few major figures of the 20th century.
In his foreword to Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices (A New Version), substantially revised and published (1979) twenty-six years after the original version (1953), Robert Penn Warren notes,
Poetry is more than fantasy and is committed to the obligation of trying to say something, however obliquely, about the human condition. Therefore, a poem dealing with history is no more at liberty to violate what the writer takes to be the spirit of his history than it is at liberty to violate what he takes to be the nature of the human heart… Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.7
Brother to Dragons serves as a long-term “redux” of Warren’s, and Natasha Trethewey quoted to this excerpt in her closing address as Poet Laureate, ultimately published as “The Quarrel With Ourselves: Robert Penn Warren’s ‘World of Action and Liability.’” For Trethewey (and Warren and Hill), “the role of poetry [as] reckoning with our history and imagining our future, for poetry is concerned not only with the past. It presents a way to look backward and forward at once, showing a world that is possible, what we can work toward.”8 This is what Hill accomplishes, especially with The Negroes Send Their Love.
We must contend not only with history (as Baldwin said, “one enters into battle with that historical creation, Oneself, and attempts to re-create oneself according to a principle more humane and more liberating”), but with others’ and our own situatedness in order to access history from different perspectives. Elsewhere, I’ve argued that Trethewey and poet Jake Adam York “enact and advocate for a profound revising of our senses of history in order to gain a fuller, more accurate, more nuanced understanding of how American society has developed. Central to this revising is an attention to the history of conscious and unconscious ideas, assumptions, actions, and policies that comprise racism in America.”9 Hill’s work includes but goes beyond even this scope to be always revisiting and refining and re-creating what makes us who we are (remember the Baldwin epigraph for Hill’s first book), what molds and mars and mends us. In an interview with Rowan Lynum, Trethewey described her poetic work as an effort to create monuments for the people and history that is often forgotten, erased, or twisted, and she mentioned,
I don’t think that monuments are static. I don’t think that they are mute, in a sense, because I believe that every time we look at them, we bring something to animate them and interact with the past in certain ways. Now, what story they’re going to animate is a different question… That’s what I’ve tried to do, to create a living monument in words that will help us continue to remember… I’ve never wanted to erase history. What I’ve wanted to do is tell a fuller version and show how our shared histories as Americans overlap and intersect. Not two trains running on separate tracks, but woven together.10
And Hill takes this a step further, reminding us that our history is shared, that it is present in all that we do, and that we must be consistently re-membering, re-looking, re-creating what the world is and who we think we are.
Hill’s closing and eponymous poem, “The Negroes Send Their Love” is incantatory and incomplete, as is Hill’s work, as is the future. In it, the Negroes mend, rend, rescind, lend, penned, tend, defend, wend, contend, end, spend. The Negroes verb. The Negroes enact their love, react to others’ love or lack thereof, interact with others’ shove.
And, “The Negroes in their love : their rage, their sorrow, their nostalgia, their joy, and.” Apart from the epilogue, this is one of the book’s final statements and it shifts from the title phrasing (“The Negroes”) to “We Negroes send our love,” achieving at least three impacts:
1. Unifying linguistic references “The”/“Their” (exclusive, other) with “We”/“Our” (inclusive, collective), dilluting the border between “them”|”us.”
2. Collecting and overlaying perspectives, a perception from “outside” and from “within,” and
3. Connecting personal and communal knowledge (rage, sorrow, nostalgia, joy) with a parental imperative, a hope and loving risk.
This shift in the closing poem is indicative of Hill’s ongoing project. This is a revision of phrasing which is born from a revision of thinking and naming. It is a sign of the speaker and the poet changing and is a signal for how the reader might change. The poem and the book point us toward better understanding the weight of ourselves as expansive individuals tethered to others and a part of many larger wholes. We contribute to and are dependent on community of many sorts.
As noted earlier, Hill once described “home” as something from which he has displaced himself, while also writing about how displacement (e.g. water displacement) is something that keeps him afloat, moving, reviewing, and revising. Displacement is a useful tool for revising oneself, and for Hill as a revisory tool with which to fashion poems. He wrote: “Home is an emotion one wakes up to one morning. Home is the feeling you meet as you drive into town for the second time. Home is the tug you feel looking out the plane window as you fly away for the first time. Home is the sound the ground makes under your feet with every step.”11 Home takes many forms and reveals itself to us in new ways all the time, if we choose to notice. While home is a slippery notion, Hill seems to propose that perspective, our revisioning of ourselves, our commitment to seeing others and our ties to them is how our “home” grows throughout our lives. Hill’s body of work, then, serves as a time machine into which he and we climb. We witness who and what made the world before us, and so made us. We witness ourselves and study our perspectives. We whir into the future to look back at ourselves, to imagine, to repair, to restore, to revise, and keep on revising.
—. The Negroes Send Their Love: Poems, Perspectives, and Possible Futures. Milkweed Editions. 2026.
Laymon, Kiese. “What We Owe and Are Owed.” Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation In a Time of Pandemic. Ed. Valerie Boyd. Lookout Books. 2022.
Wesley Rothman is the author of SUBWOOFER (New Issues 2017), winner of the New Issues Editor’s Choice Award & an honorable mention for the 2018 Motton Book Prize. His work has appeared in The Believer, Bennington Review, Boston Review, Cherry Tree, Copper Nickel, Crab Orchard Review, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, The Hopkins Review, Image Journal, The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review, Mississippi Review, New England Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, The Slowdown, Southern Humanities Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Vinyl, Waxwing, the Poets on Growth anthology, The Golden Shovel Anthology, & elsewhere. His criticism has appeared in Publishers Weekly, Boston Review, Callaloo, Rain Taxi Review of Books, & American Microreviews & Interviews. He has earned degrees from the University of San Diego, Emerson College, & Catholic University, and he’s served in organizing or editorial roles for Copper Canyon Press, Ploughshares, Salamander, and Mass Poetry. For over a decade, he has taught in higher education and high school summer programs, including for Berklee College of Music, Emerson College, Suffolk University, UMass Boston, Catholic University, Loyola University Chicago, and Upward Bound. His work has earned fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Vermont Studio Center. A former Teaching Artist for the National Gallery of Art, Rothman teaches at Howard University.
Kevin Young described Sean Hill last’s book, Dangerous Goods (Milkweed Editions 2013) as “measuring the ‘distance between desires’ and the fear and possibilities of displacement…knowing well that the dark is an ocean for us all.” On the front cover of that collection, designed by Charles Rue Woods, we are presented with the tableau of a solitary wooden canoe on a sandy beach pockmarked, like history, with human footprints. The footprints march toward the edge of the ocean and disappear. The scene recurs a quiet desolation. A shipwreck. The lonely boat is a machine of ghosts. Or, on a closer look, we might see that this lonely boat, which, in the haze of twilight or dawn, crouches at the edge of the sea and sky, in fact, has the nervous energy of impending motion. The boat is on a precipice. If we look even closer, we might see that in the thin demarcation line that separates sea from sky, black sparrows like bent crucifixes or crooked arrows are rising into the sky. We might see that the paper skin of the pale blue sky on the cover is made of maps with names of great oceans and destinations faintly scrawled on them: “Western Ocean” “The Atlantic” “Gulf of Guinea” “North Sea.” Destinations and oceans the lonely boat is heading toward or returning from. This tension between shipwreck and levitation, between stasis and ascension is at the core of Sean Hill’s project. Writing of Dangerous Goods in TheRumpus, Wesley Rothman argues, “We see how personal histories, destinations of the past, echo in the destinations of now, how journeying is aimless and intentional. We learn how we might nomad forward, understanding our own histories, personal and collective.”
Consider this poem from Dangerous Goods:
“Bahamas Voyage: Meditations on Blacks on Boats”
Day 1
Up the gangway of the Big Red Boat the SS Atlantic white, red, and blue
banners and streamers A colorful crew croons along “The Star-Spangled Banner”
Accents thick sing-songy high and guttural low as the boat leaves port out to sea traveling show
Day 2
A cruise to the Bahamas on the 4th of July occasioned by a family reunion
Below decks cramped in with my little brother and a complimentary bottle of champagne
The Champagne goes down The water on-board briny that of coastal cities port towns to which slave ships made their rounds
Day 3
On deck in the sun headphones on listening to Charles Mingus: Town Hall Concert
Two songs “So Long Eric” and “Praying with Eric” After the first they clap
and Mingus introduces: This next composition was written when Eric Dolphy explained to me
that there’s something similar to the concentration camps once in Germany now down South.
The only difference being they don’t have gas chambers and hot stoves to cook us in
yet. He continues: So I wrote a piece called
Meditations as to how to get some wirecutters before someone else get some guns to us. Conflation and conflagration
Day 4
On a slave ship in the hold below decks Barely enough room for burial—squeezed in tight like a coffin too small—surrounded
by others, sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers…
(Dangerous Goods, 5-10)
Here we encounter diaristic entries, but in tercets with sparse punctuation which lend the lines musically chiseled syntax. Things begin as innocuously as possible—a family reunion on a boat cruise to the Bahamas: island bliss. The poet and his brother are below the deck sharing drinks. But history lurks around. For one, the boat’s name the “Atlantic” is electric with significations. We know but cannot fully know how many of our ancestors vanished in the Atlantic.
The poet remembers with a memory older than himself. His Black body on a boat is an echo. This energy of embodied echo within history triggered by geographies anchors this book, whether the poet is listening to Charles Mingus while sailing on the Caribbean Sea or visiting St Paul’s Cathedral in London (“I have brought voices with me”) or writing about Liberia (one hundred and fifty folks from central Georgia immigrated to Liberia under the auspices of the American Colonization Society in the nineteenth century). Some of these people were from Milledgeville, Georgia, Sean Hill’s hometown (and the subject of a profound historical meditation spanning six generations in his first book, Blood Ties & Brown Liquor (University of Georgia Press, 2008)), or encounters at an open eatery in Cairo. The logic or illogic of history and the chimeric yet profoundly resonant spiritual link between Africans in the old world and their descendants in the new, run like a fierce river through the book, as does the blood-filled severance and passage that produced this fracture of the soul.
But there is another energy that powers the book. It’s more quiet, more subtle, and transcendental—the intimate ecological histories of place. It’s still history, sometimes even haunted, but it is a different form of history available only to those who profess kinship with the extra human sentience and presences of nature: lakes, rivers, trees, birds. Precise observation as a devotional practice unlocks these intimate histories in Sean Hill’s work—ibises and their crescent beaks, the curiosity of starlings, the intricate pathways caterpillars carve into the grooves of apple trees, silk nests of Africanized Bees, blue-gray kestrels with undulating crowns. Geographies are not only defined by pain and the trauma of history, they are also garlanded by nature’s glories. The poet is hungry for the world and asks us how far we might fly if we can retrieve our wings from history.
Sean Hill was recently at James Madison University for a reading from his book, Dangerous Goods. He visited Furious Flower and spoke to Gbenga Adesina, the Furious Flower Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry at James Madison University’s Harrison Hall studio. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
This is the Furious Flower Poetry Center’s The Fight and The Fiddle interview. My name is Gbenga Adesina. I’m the Furious Flower Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic poetry. I have with me a brilliant poet, Sean Hill, who understands that there are certain historical truths that can only be excavated through the specificity of “place.” Sean, how are you today?
I’m good. I’m better that I’m sitting here with you.
There’s a brilliant thread that runs through your two poetry books: you’re able to take this panoramic view of history and distill it into a singular human action, moment, or event, so that that singular event or moment—that specific date or even slice of hours—contains the DNA of an entire history. For instance, distilled in the poem “The State House Aflame, 1833” is the long history of chattel slavery as a brutal form of capitalism, yet you situate it on a specific moment on the roof of a building in 1833. I love it. Talk to me about that process. How do you do that?
It’s what you say. Part of it is the language. I can ramble about this. I can talk about the process of getting to this poem in so many ways. But when you bring up capitalism and chattel slavery, these things share etymological roots with the word head, “caput,” right? Capital, chattel, cattle, all of that. It’s this idea, sort of a way of counting livestock. It counts the head, “caput.” And so with that poem, the words “capital” and “chattel” show up because of the kind of slavery that was developed here in America. Of course, slavery existed, and has existed for a very long time, in ancient times, all over human history, but in different forms. But the way it was developed here is very particular and is rooted in the construction of race that we are living with right now. Those are some of the things that are in the background as I’m thinking about the poem.
But also, I was doing research for this poem and one of the things I do is read history books and old newspapers and talk to people. The poem is the things I take in. And I’d been reading the history of my hometown by this historian, James Bonner, and he mentions this episode, so I went back to the newspapers because he preserved it in his record, I could go back into the newspapers and read the official account. Some of the language in the poem is borrowed from that newspaper article. And that process is part of the interrogation. There’s so much around the poem that is interrogating, archiving, right? Who preserves the record? And so when I’m talking about what’s happening with the state records and the state funds and the things are being moved to safety because of this fire, I have that consideration in my mind, and I hope that it comes across. And the thing with the borrowed language from the newspaper is it’s a form of public records. I don’t know that Sam’s family would remember that story, or how they would remember it, but I can say this is how it was recorded. And so we can interrogate that space.
Also for me, poetry—writing poems—is about being in conversation with other writers, and the form of that poem was developed by Afaa Michael Weaver, the Bop. It’s a very loose Bop, but I couldn’t have written this poem… honestly, I had this poem in me, I had the desire to write this poem for a very long time, and at some point I came across the Bop form and remembered the intricacies of the form. I finally realized it: “I think this poem is a Bop.”
One of the things that really moved me in that poem was the trope of the magical Negro, as if by this almost superhuman intervention the subject had elevated himself out of the indignity of enslavement. And his society did not deem it fit to consider that perhaps it was the whole system that was unjust and unimaginative, instead they thought of “buying” this singular person out and giving him his freedom in reward for his bravery.
Right! Yes, yes, yes, that!
You are going to find this interesting when we talk about your second book, DangerousGoods, in a short while, which is about journeys and comparative histories of places, because the thread of the “magical alien” continues as well. For instance, one of the things that has happened a lot in France and some other nations that are grappling with the questions of how to treat immigrants (and it happens in the US as well), is that an immigrant does something spectacular and we think of them as an exemption rather the fruit of a communal tree. There was some sort of fire in France, and then an immigrant from Senegal or Gambia climbed the wall like a superman and saved a French child from the house—so the President invited him, said “Oh, what a wonderful thing you’ve done. We’ll make you a citizen.” This notion of singular exemptions as against the overhaul or re-imagination of the system as a whole—you captured it so brilliantly.
Exactly. It’s like pulling that person out of the flattened mass that we’ve created, right?
I want to keep talking about history, but I also want to ask you, how did you become a poet?
I always feel like I need a better story than this. I was a lover of words and a reader as a kid. I read fantasy and science fiction, and those stories were the little things that drew me in. I also read about nature; these are the places my interests at that time were. And I thought “Oh, I’m gonna write stuff.” So, I would try to write stories, but as far as I could get was a vignette. That wasn’t very satisfying. I thought, “I don’t know how to write a story.” And then in college, a guy who lived in the dorms with me who wrote poems to his girlfriend said, “Maybe you should try to write a poem.” And I tried, and there was something about writing a piece that resolved — my first poem was about an owl that I had some intimate contact with. I thought, “I finally achieved something; I need to figure out how to do this better.” So, plot sort of evaded me, character development kind of evaded me, but I could write out of observation and contemplation. And that got me to writing poems.
Milledgeville, your hometown, how did it become a character in your poems? It seems like a lifelong character, almost a thread throughout multiple books.
Yes, that credit is due to the novelist Terry Jones. We were in a workshop together years and years ago, and I had been bringing poems about my father to the workshop. And she said, “I’m kind of tired of reading about your complicated relationship with your dad, fellow student to fellow student.” She said, “This isn’t really doing it for me, I’m sure you have a mom, grandmothers or something.” But I didn’t know how to write about them. I don’t have a complicated relationship with them. I needed to do research. I decided to interview my mom and grandma. What were their lives like? And one of them agreed to an interview, and we sat down, and I interviewed her and got to learn a bit about her. And that interview kind of transformed into these grandmother poems, which felt like the beginning of something. It felt like a sea change in my writing, an early exploration of form. I’d read sonnets and other formal things before, but I had never tried my hand at them. The role of the interviewer and researcher opened up some things for me. Those poems were published in Callaloo, my first major publication years ago—thank you, Charles Rowell, incredible editor, very generous person.
And I showed my grandma — I was very proud I got these poems published. And she was like, “I didn’t know, you were gonna do that, that they were gonna be in a magazine somewhere.” She’d been really happy to help me with my schoolwork, but she didn’t know that it was the sort of a rendering of a voice and that I might somehow share things that she just didn’t necessarily want out in the world. Though the poems were fictionalized, for her it still felt close enough. I knew I needed to respect her privacy. This ethical move for me as a writer opened up possibilities. I needed to invent characters; I’m going to move away from my grandmother and not be tied to her biography or lean too heavily on that.” So, I invented Silas Wright as a character, and let him explore Milledgeville, our hometown, that history, on a human scale, so that I could do the things we talked about earlier, and look at long histories with Milledgeville as a microcosm.
Oh, what a journey. Talk to us a little bit about Milledgeville as a place; this is a real place after all.
It is a real place. It’s my hometown. It is also the town that Flannery O’Connor called home. Her people are from there; her mother’s people are from there. She was born in Savannah but moved back to Milledgeville when she was young and grew up there in Georgia. So, it’s central Georgia, Piedmont, Milledgeville was the fourth capital of Georgia that was built on “ceded” Creek Muskogee land. There was a very calculated and determined governmental move to wrest native lands from native people. The colonial capital had been Savannah, Georgia. And after Savannah, it moved to Augusta, and then Lewisville, and then they sort of developed Milledgeville as a capital. I think there had been a fort there, a trading post for the Creek People.
I grew up there. The city was established in 1804. In the census records, I could find that my great-grandfather was born around there… he was born in 1856; his father was born in 1812, probably somewhere around that area. I can’t say farther back than that. I think what I could see from the census record indicated that his mother was from Virginia, which kind of also tracks the way economics and agriculture were shifting and where people were being moved from. His father was born in Georgia.
That’s just mind blowing to me, how you went from writing about your dad, who I think appears very minimally now in this book, to writing about your grandmother and wanting to do the ethical thing of protecting the people we love in our stories, you decided to shift to the larger biography of “place.” What role does “place,” occupy in your writing imagination? Why “place?”
It did sort of just happen. It wasn’t a deliberate decision on my part. Nature takes place in context; history takes place in context. I had been moving as an adult from place to place, and when I find myself in a different place, I’m interested in that place and those sorts of spaces, like, “What is the history of this place? The natural history? What are the creatures, the other beings that we share the space with?” And, so birds show up, and the fish, and all these things show up. What is the sort of the human story here?” The second book sort of explores this kind of moving around, but also northern Minnesota. When I showed up in northern Minnesota in May of 2003, I felt very conspicuous. There were not a lot of Black folks there. And having moved from Houston, Texas, going from Georgia to Houston to northern Minnesota, was really kind of — I experienced culture shock, a little, like “Oh, the look of this place is very different in so many ways.” And so, that is sort of how I understand “place.”
And then I sort of want to figure out, like, “Well, who was here?” When I was wandering around Bemidji one day (in northern Minnesota) I happened across a flyer for a lecture about a “Black Voyager”—and that’s a simplification of who this person was—but I was like, “Oh, there’s a Black Voyager here? Let me find out about this guy!” The lecture was a couple weeks out, but I couldn’t wait, I needed to find out. So I went directly to the Historical Society, and said I need to know whatever you have about this guy. They had a file on another Black guy, Charles Scrutchin, who was a lawyer, who moved there in 1898 or so, like, 100 years before I moved to Bemidji, this guy moved up there, and I was like, I’m just learning about him and getting a sense of, like, what his life was in this space and sort of how he ended up there, just sort of tracking his life to getting to Bemidji. If I remember correctly, his mother was from Georgia, his family ended up leaving the South after the Civil War and he was raised in Washington State. He ended up going to law school in Michigan, all of these things, and ended up settling in Minnesota—first in Minneapolis. Then the Black lawyers and race men in the cities were like, “You’re new, we’re glad you’re here, but this place is saturated, and we could actually use sort of an ambassador, someone out in Bemidji.” So, he took the train north to Bemidji and practiced law in Bemidji for 30 years and was part of some major cases, and it was through this that I ended up learning about a particular lynching. I think I’d heard about it, I’d seen some postcards, but I didn’t know he was attached to it. I discovered he had defended one of the men who had to stand trial after the lynching. Which, I guess, doesn’t quite answer your question about the place, except when I go to places, I’m looking for, you know, for stories.
It fits neatly into my next segue. When I read Blood Ties and Brown Liquor it was very vertical to me. It was like digging, or an excavation, whereas Dangerous Goods feels very horizontal, and it struck me that there’s a sense in which this is a writer, or better still, a creative persona that history follows everywhere. In Dangerous Goods, the second book—and these books are like five years apart–there’s a quality of the Nomad. There’s a quality of some sort of spiritual exile, historical exile. There’s the quality of rootlessness that seems grounded in an original ruthlessness in history. Everywhere this character goes, he’s floating. There’s a quality of a flaneur, He goes everywhere but he seems unable to escape history. So, I wanted to talk to you about that, that sense of floating around in history, of moving from place to place, but also with a mind that is unable to escape noticing the histories of those places.
Oh, my goodness … I’m glad you noticed that, and that is sort of part of my way of being. I am interested in the histories of places. The same way I notice birds when I’m walking around, they will slow me down as does the history of a place. I gotta see, gotta look, because there’s a history of every place, and it’s a way for me to track who I am in a place and who I can be in a place. So, I’m always looking for legacies and forerunners. I love that you used the word “flaneur,” thank you. Yeah, that’s part of my creative being. When I sit down to write, I find myself coming to other places I have been to. I’m glad it’s appreciated. I don’t know if I have any other way of saying that. I’m writing what I need to write.
The book I’m working on now is a similar kind of activity in some ways, except I’m exploring the American West, because I spend a fair bit of time in the American West, and I was like, What is this place? When I was in the Upper Midwest, in Bemidji, I spent a lot of summers driving across the country to Southern California with my then-partner, just sort of being in that space and being encountered and encountering people in that space, thinking, Oh, I got to find out what’s going on here. There’s a poem that’s going to be in the book that comes out of research, and me trying to understand that space. It’s based on some historical readings. There’s seminal historical text of Black folk in the West called In Search of the Racial Frontier, by Quintard Taylor, and in it he mentions Black people who were brought to this little town in Washington — Rosalind, Washington — to break a strike. They didn’t really know they were being brought in to break a strike, these miners—Black miners—from across the South breaking a strike against a coalition of miners who’d immigrated from Europe. And there was tension. It was armed tension. I thought This is fascinating; I want to write about it. I had the poem in me for a long time, but I couldn’t figure out my access, my entry into it. I even stopped in Rosalind to do research, and I was on the ground to see what was there. But it wasn’t until I was invited to a conversation about other beings, in one of those eco poetry conversations, and they asked if I could write about a particular woodpecker. I looked into it and found out that woodpecker is an indigenous endemic to the space where Rosalind was established. The range of the birds is where the town grew up. I thought Oh, I can write about that; I can write about both of these things. They came together. And so, this notion of the rootless traveler, the flaneur, traveling around the West and stopping in various places and histories, poking around, I had an opportunity to bring these multiple things together.
Beautiful. I want to talk about woodpeckers as a metaphor and through it dwell a bit more on rootlessness or perhaps flights. In your first book, Blood Ties and Brown Liquor, you were thinking in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner—the lush, deep, complex sense of place. In your second book, Dangerous Goods, however, there’s a kind of outward spread—a voyage of sorts—not just within the South or the United Sates. The spread is international, going beyond the Americas and the western hemispheres in a way that reminds me of the spiritual quests of James Baldwin across nations and continents. He had run away from the United States because he could feel the limitations his country had invented for his soul. He fled to France. But in his essay, “Equal in Paris” about how he spent the Christmas of 1949 in jail for mistakenly taking a hotel bedsheet as a broke 24-year-old and how he had been mostly incarcerated with Algerians who were the underclass of that French society, he wrote, “I suddenly realized that you can’t run away from home, that history follows you.” (citation). I got that quality in your own writing in Dangerous Goods. I love that poem about being on a boat. I want you to dwell a little bit on how your continental and international travel influences your poetry. Why did you even start traveling internationally to begin with? That might be a door that tells us what’s going on.
I love Milledgeville. That’s where my family is. Most of my family’s still there. There’re some branches that are gone here and there, but mostly everyone, like the main trunk of the family, is in Milledgeville. And yet, when I was 18, I was like, There’s so much more I want to see. Part of that as a kid and as a young adult, was driven by my engagement with nature and other beings, right? I grew up watching these nature shows on TV and often, you know, they’re not about Milledgeville. I mean, I watched all of them, like all the stuff—nature shows and fishing shows. And the fishing shows were kind of local, in some ways, the south, southeast. You know, bass fishing. I was just fascinated by that. But then, there were these shows about the Australian outback. And for years I wanted—I have—a great desire to go to Australia. Or portrayals of Safari in Africa, the lions and gazelles etc. And so those places, some of them drew me—not the city, not the people. And then as an adult in college, I had the fortune of going to the University of Georgia, which had a robust, to me, at least, African languages program. I took Swahili, but there was also Yoruba and Ibo, Zulu. I thought I’d like to go to East Africa for the people now. So that’s when I finally got the opportunity. I ended up going to Kenya. And then it was like, Oh, while I’m here let’s go to Tanzania, Zanzibar; let’s go to Egypt. Let’s look … let’s experience people. I also went on a Safari. I thought I wasn’t going to go on Safari because at that point, that industry, and that way of viewing a very diverse continent of many peoples and many nations was kind of abhorrent to me. But then I was like, Okay, I can hold that feeling, and also, I should probably go on safari. I hold those experiences and just think about what they tell me about myself and the space I come from. One of the things I encountered when I was in East Africa, in Kenya, Tanzania, Zanzibar and also in Egypt, was people trying to place me in terms of origin.
You wrote about it in one of those poems.
And maybe that’s why I was aware that it might happen. Before going I had met this man at the library who said you look Sudanese or something. I thought, Okay? In Kenya, they said “Oh, you’re from Lamu.”
To place you in a localized origin?
Yes. “You look like you’re from Lamu.” And I went to Lamu, and the people there looked familiar to me, in a way, and one of them asked me, “When did it happen in your life?” Wherever I’ve been in Africa, people tell me, “You feel like you’re from a place where mixing has happened.” Along the coast of East Africa where Swahili culture grew out of, or in Egypt, it was like, “Oh, Aswani, you look like you’re from Aswan.” And you know, in Morocco, “You look like you’re from Southern Morocco.” Once, when I was in Lamu, this guy asked me, “So, when did it happen in your family?” And the “it” I understood to be a kind of racial history, the long history of racial mixing, because I wasn’t from there, but he’s like, “You look like us for a reason.” And I said, “I look like you because of American slavery. Chattel slavery in America.”
That is so deeply moving, Sean. Deeply moving. These journeys began as seeds of invitation. I loved how nature created a very multi-continental portal of connections for you. “I want to see the birds in Australia. I want to see the gazelles in Africa. I want to see the forest in Europe.” I also love that at some point; language becomes your door. I think there’s a quote in DangerousGoods that says, “We don’t exist in places; we exist in language.” I love this notion that a love for a language felt like an invitation to be among the people who speak it. But I think what I’ve heard you say the most poignantly is “I want to throw myself against the backdrop of places so that I can see what I am.” You want to know who are my forebears in this place andwhat does that mean for my future?
And now to woodpeckers, because we’ve got to talk about woodpeckers. I mean, maybe not woodpeckers, but birds generally. One of the things I love the most in reading Dangerous Goods, is how you tell the long ecological history of a bird, an animal, a plant. I thought I might ask you to read the poem “Postcard to Eduardo.” which I love so much.
“Postcard to Eduardo” for E. Corral
Leaving Dickinson, ND, on 94 W, with the sun rising at our backs, a tractor trailer in front and from the height of my vision, from nowhere, or from heaven, a wine soaked handkerchief, trailing its edges, falls as quiet as a bruise into the next lane over — a barn swallow caught in the truck’s wash. They once lived in caves, but now make their nests in man-made shelters, under bridges and barn eaves — barns where might be kept a horse’s harness, the parts of which you recited to me once — crupper, martingale, throatlatch — rolling your r’s, lashing those words lavishly for all they’re worth. I’ve since been told one should always keep the throat-latch nice and loose.
Beautiful. I love this poem so much. I love the quietness of it, the images of it, but also how you were able to archive a poignant ecological history. So, talk to me about birds, which you love so much and how you make them figurations of beauty and mystery in your poems.
Thank you for saying that. One of the things you said just now was about this world that we share with other creatures. It’s recognition that I’m sharing this space with non-human beings and taking note of them. And I don’t think I’m necessarily special in that, but it sometimes often feels like I’m the one who’s noticing the birds, and maybe that says something about my life and my focus, like I need to be focused on my life. I get too easily distracted, my wife might say. But for me, they’re in the poems because they are part of what I’m experiencing. And that particular poem is part of a series that I was working on that became part of the book, but most of those poems fell away. They were a kind of a self-assignment, because I found myself traveling a lot at a period of my life, and I was like, I need to make sure I’m still writing, and I know I’m going to be observing birds, noticing birds, and it came out in one particular poem that came out of observation, and I felt inspired to write to a poet friend of mine about seeing these birds, these common nighthawks. And I was like, Oh, that’s the thing I should keep doing, because it’s making me productive. And so, during that period of my life, whenever I saw a bird while I was traveling, I would write a poem while in transit for a friend. And with this particular bird, you know, when I got to thinking about the barn, there was an interesting moment in my life when Eduardo Corral was looking up, if I remember this correctly, in the dictionary, “horse tags,” and he was reading the different names to me. And I thought “Yes, there is poetry in the names of these things.”
So that got me around to sort of entering into this poem. I was thinking about the ways in which we share this planet with other beings. I was recently at a conference and on a panel, and this question came in about nature and writing about nature, and the imposition that our writing might place on “him.” That was the pronoun that was used, and I pushed back against genderizing nature in any way. Because I feel like nature, you know, is this life force that manifests itself and expresses itself, and has done so for millennia, for eons, through several mass extinctions, and that we’re facing one now. What we need to be focusing on is how we can help each other and the beings around us survive a mass extinction that we might have set into motion, as opposed to, you know, dinosaurs having the bad luck of living on a planet that was struck by an asteroid, a meteorite.
The history of humans, the history of birds, the history of place and the history of animals and the history of objects all in a kind of dance, that’s how I perceive that poem. Speaking of history, I was going to talk to you about “Voices in St. Paul’s Cathedral.” I love that poem so much. Which specific Saint Paul Cathedral is this?
It’s the one in London. Do you want me to read it?
Yes.
Again, one of those poems I don’t read very often.
“Voices in St. Paul’s Cathedral” For Geddes Thomas
Christopher Wren designed it from base to dome — built in the 17th & 18th centuries, declared complete about ninety years after the first twenty were brought to Jamestown.
Alone in the Whispering Gallery, I lean to the ear of no one to my left — Can you hear me?
A voice, my father’s, his father’s, comes from the right — Can you hear me?
I’ve brought voices here with me; they linger the way odors do. A friend who visited the Citadel at Gorée Island said you can smell death left over from the days of the trade.
What a poem, Sean. I love this poem so much! There’s a way this poem is emblematic of what you do in your poems. You’re talking about London, but you’re also talking about Gorée Island on the coast of Dakar, Senegal, West Africa. We’re talking about St. Paul in London, but I’m hearing Jamestown here in Virginia. We’re talking about the 17th and 18th centuries, but the voices you hear are situated in the 21st century with you—the voice of your father and perhaps his father before him. It’s almost like a choir of ghosts. There’re multiple voices—voices of place, voices of time, voices of history. And I wanted to ask you how you’re able to exist in multiple times. Because sometimes one is reading your poem and it talks about you and your brother. In terms of temporality, that’s now. And then the next poem says “Milledgeville, 1912” And I think, “Oh we just traveled back a century just by opening a page?” How are you able to exist in your poems and perhaps inside yourself as a human being in the world in these multiple time frames? This practice of multiplicity and simultaneousness in time and space. How do you do that?
It’s resonances, right? There are things that strike frequencies that bounce off each other and suggest that they need to be sitting together, especially when I come to the page. When I began to write, I was in London on vacation visiting a friend, and I was traveling by myself. I was mostly in London by myself. I would visit someone who left the country. In this particular instance, I was going to St. Paul’s to do something touristy. Up in the dome, there’s this gallery that is circular, and the acoustics of it are such that if you sit on one side, you can whisper and it will travel around. And I didn’t have anyone with me, and so it was my turn to do that. I just sat there and did it myself. And the question that came to me to ask was, Can you hear me? At this point in my life, I think increasingly I do hear my father in my voice and think about the implications of that. But in that moment, I don’t think I’d experienced that before, and it was electric. And then that resonated for me, in a way, with a conversation I had with my seat mate on my first Trans-Atlantic flight. There was this Trinidadian man who was telling me stories, and one of the things he said at the end about smell lingering, and I was like, “Wow.” And so, as a poet, as an artist, when something has an effect on me, I feel like I have to take note of that, make note of that, and hopefully I can make something of it. That poem is the culmination of me working with all of these things that are me and others around me, thinking about the legacies, and histories surrounding me. At this point, I think it’s become a habit of being; I’m not sure I’m good at it, but I’m always thinking about these things, and I’m sometimes surprised when others aren’t.
Oh, it comes together beautifully, Sean. Thank you, and on that note, we’ll bring this wonderful conversation to an end. That was great. Thank you.
Gbenga Adesina is a Nigerian scholar, poet and essayist. He received his PhD from Florida State University, and his MFA from New York University, where he was a Goldwater Fellow. His debut collection of poetry, Death Does Not End at the Sea, won the Ras Shumaker/Prairie Schooner prize, and was longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award. His poem, A People’s History of 1998, was included in the 2025 Best American Poetry anthology, and his chapbook, Painter of Water was published as part of the New-Generation African Poets series from Akashic Books. Adesina has received fellowships and support from Poets House, New York, the Fine Arts Work Center and the Norman Mailer Center, and he was the 2019–20 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow at Colgate University. He has been published in Paris Review, Harvard Review, Guernica, Narrative, New York Times, and elsewhere. He is the inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry at Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University.
Upon entry, The Hierophant hears two patrons state, there’s nothing in here, which may or may not be true, depending upon one’s position, what is seen, unseen. The question of visibility, what is worthy of recognition, what’s hidden. One’s proximity to, or distance from, the length of a foot, a lead pipe, copper wire, two shadows triangulate between sanded cedar blocks. If it sounds boring, it may be. What if I asked you to draw me a map, and made it mine? Am I a thief? What are the measurements of ownership if everything is stripped to millimeter, access to any and all information outside the numerical, denied. What if you are forced to draw your own conclusions, your only clues a pencil-thin sequence descending a sheet of white, a library of one-liners filed in metal cabinets. A whiteout room singing sterility, galleries cloaked in opacity.
in obscurity.
Poem copyright 2026 by Krista Franklin. All rights reserved.
Study to show thyself intuition exists, iridescent orb, the third eye crown jewel between of bull’s horns. A closed mouth nestles the sacred on the bed of the tongue. Listen, the whisper that bellows beneath the conscious self, in the shadow grows the seed of god shifting in you. To tune the ear is to sit at the altar of silence, hush the chatter of the mind’s preschool, soothe the fretful heart in the blue waves of regret.
Poem copyright 2026 by Krista Franklin. All rights reserved.
If you have never missed rude banter, witty tête-á-tête with the man who part-made you. If you cannot recall cooling his death bed brow, standing near his ashes, watching him grasp at his life with tales, with vinyl, messages scribbled in blue BIC pen on their worn sleeves, you do not know this. What it means to have a staring match with God. That the body is a trick, a black tophat with a false bottom, a white rabbit somewhere in-between. You do not know the tricks played, the spades, payday loans, debts and disappointments. You cannot imagine sifting through the debris, the deadend documents of unpaid bills and mysterious correspondence, plastic bags tied in plastic bags tied in plastic bags tied in plastic bags, like some strange Russian Dolls Tucked beneath the bed. A sealed manila envelope with some porn inside. This is not yours, if you have not screamed at your sister, into a pillow, averted your eyes from the catheter cascading from his white sheet, walked down the hall from his hospice room in a sticky rage so thick, wanting it to be done. You are not ruined enough for this.
Poem copyright 2026 by Krista Franklin. All rights reserved.
