Tag: Poem

When you were / in the Everglades we canoed from Flamingo and through the canals.

My feet moved down another street / and I saw the shape they would draw / on the map in my mind.

Look at my heartbeat / and its consequence, / that cup warm on my palm

How would I know / when I’m empty and quiet like breath?

But I do miss the hymns, / the small, hard apples with their dimpled skin. I do miss / things.

As a student, I stitched / a cadaver together / while my professor / said you must / be a predator . . .

I ain’t dead and in this form, / I can matrix my way out of your bullet.

I was also spat across an ocean

and clung to the edge of an unwilling continent.

Selected by Sonia Sanchez as a winner of the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest

I ask my brother if he can hear cicadas where he is. My brother doesn’t know what cicadas are. He is 40 years old. He asks me to repeat it.

Selected by Sonia Sanchez as a winner of the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest

in your carpeted office you lay my life down / and say open up to that small room in my sternum.

a slave ship hauls / bodies as cargo and / both the surface and ocean floor / rifts. even the clouds break / open in sobs.

loving mother, come watch me be patient, / watch how i describe things that never leave my mouth

Selected by Sonia Sanchez as a finalist for the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest

Selected by Sonia Sanchez as a finalist for the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest

Remembering poets Lynda Hull and Michael S. Harper, with original portraits

Two white men carrying briefcases walk in on a congressional meeting held by African leaders dressed in Western attire. Clapping at the president who resembles Léopold Senghor. He uses words like “revolutionary” and “independence” and they garner an applause.