For Douglas Kearney. After Jericho Brown.
by LAUREN K. ALLEYNE
What questions might the world ask of me
after I have buried myself whole?
I have buried myself in the hole
of America, its plastic freedoms,
elastic unfreeness—America,
you have rendered me a corpse of delightful
emptiness. You have plundered me of heft,
ground the God in me to tin and clatter.
God, the grind. The death din and rattle
of markets, marching—everything for sale,
marked. I bought my own drum to march to;
it hangs around my neck like a price tag
made of history. My neck stuck out for no one,
what questions might the world ask of me?
From Issue 12
LAUREN K. ALLEYNE serves as executive director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and professor of English at James Madison University. She is author of two collections, Honeyfish (2019) and Difficult Fruit (2014), and co-editor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry. Her work appears in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Ms., and has received an NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Poetry (2020).