Poetry Collection: Belonging

Editor’s Note: This is the first in Boston Review’s series of poetry reading lists for National Poetry Month 2021. The second, on empathy, is live now. Check back in the coming weeks for the third and fourth installments.

Boston Review has long believed in the power of art to provide crucial insight into how individuals and communities process the most troubling moments in history. Poetry and fiction can offer a respite from the incessant crush of the news cycle, illuminating the humanity behind the statistics and the visceral impacts of structural inequality. While these poems inhabit different landscapes, all of these poets in some way grapple with the question of belonging—an ever-present but increasingly urgent question while the country remains in the grip of a world-historical pandemic and begins a new presidency.

Among the thought-provoking and moving work in this selection, we have celebrated author Kiese Laymon’s prose poem “And Blue,” which embodies Black love in the face of terror, and poet and academic Naomi Extra’s two poems which explore the meaning of safety within the female body. Elsewhere, writers consider the inheritance of pain, naming and generational loss, racialized violence and remembrance, and more.

—Meghana Mysore

Suite for Trayvon
by Opal Moore

In the scheme of dying
they say you were helpless
the proof lay in your
candy tastes, your
sweet tooth marking you
a child.  

• • •

Two Poems
by Precious Arinze

This entire year is a stillborn choking on its own amniotic fluid. Every day, I am told to count my blessings. Every day, I am crippled with debts. I am sorry I am only able to love the world the way it is in movies. Better dialogues. Better resolutions. The best and worst parts of ourselves rendered in neon lights and punctured with songs. Every scene smeared with the apocalyptic promise of endings, whether deserving or not.

• • •

mountainsong
by RBrown

all the edges blurring i try to hold my body together but it fills up the whole room it is something i cannot hold onto my molecules get further and further apart i go through my day like normal but it is much more difficult with a fog body i cannot hold anything and nothing can hold onto me i float here and there

• • •

Theory of Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics
by Jim Whiteside

He grows a mustache and one sprouts
from my face, too.

He shaves it off,
and mine falls out. There’s a worn place

on my hand where his wedding ring sits,
a pale space for his watch on my thin wrist.

• • •

Whiteface
by Tomás Q. Morín

When you say, Showmeyourhands! Getontheground! 
We could say, Hail Mary, full of grace . . .
What if next time we paint our faces white?
Like a happy clown.

• • •

Memoriam
by Sadia Hassan

I am in Mississippi now where all travel is time travel, a place
where anything is possible:         a girl at the bottom of a river,
a warm muffin from the window of a car as I wait for the bus.

Still, I wait for the impossibility of symmetry.

• • •

And Blue
by Kiese Laymon

if I couldn’t be black, I’d be a bird, a black raggedy one, and we’d be so fly soaring, talking black bird shit, dropping black bird shit and we’d be dipping and diving and saying “watch this, watch this” in the face of terror and that good love, that good love, that good love and we’d know that good love is black, can be blacker even if it look white and red and yellow

• • •

Three Poems
by K. Iver

Picture two
scars liberating a torso. A first name
that doesn’t hiss. Soon, a Brooklyn
apartment. We pretend it finally
happened for you. It really did.

• • •

Two Poems
by Bryce Emley

Do you remember those nights
            I stayed up listening for you,
how I couldn’t stop speaking to the wind?

            Even a good husband is a poor god
is all I could think,
            which must have been wrong.

• • •

’tween my gone people & me
by Tyree Daye

my grandmama and her body is free
her body is a blue earth we’ve dug holes in
but she filled me with old gods
so i can bring her back
i seek guidance from the sun