"It Was Summer Now and the Colored People Came Out Into the Sunshine" by Morgan Parker

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend July 2, 2018   It Was Summer Now and the Colored People Came Out Into the Sunshine   Morgan Parker

They descend from the boat two by two. The gap in Angela Davis's teeth speaks to the gap in James Baldwin's teeth. The gap in James Baldwin's teeth speaks to the gap in Malcolm X's Teeth. The gap in Malcolm X's teeth speaks to the gap in Malcolm X's teeth. The gap in Condoleezza Rice's teeth doesn't speak. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard kisses the Band Aid on Nelly's cheek. Frederick Douglass's side part kisses Nikki Giovanni's Thug Life tattoo. The choir is led by Whoopi Goldberg's eyebrows. The choir is led by Will Smith's flat top. The choir loses its way. The choir never returns home. The choir sings funeral instead of wedding, sings funeral instead of allegedly, sings funeral instead of help, sings Black instead of grace, sings Black as knucklebone, mercy, junebug, sea air. It is time for war.                Copyright © 2018 Morgan Parker. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "This is one of the last poems I wrote for my collection Magical Negro, which has an epigraph from Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, from which the poem title comes. Magical Negro deals largely with intergenerational connection and Black American iconography, and the gap between Angela Davis's teeth is one of the mascots that shows up in a few poems. I wanted this poem to be, in Glenn Ligon's words, 'negro sunshine'—a collective embrace and armoring. The last line of the poem wrote itself." —Morgan Parker   Morgan Parker is the author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (Tin House Books, 2017), Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night (Switchback Books, 2015), and Magical Negro, forthcoming from Tin House Books in 2019. She lives in Los Angeles.   Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths Poetry by Parker   There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (Tin House Books, 2017) "What Would Gwendolyn Brooks Do" by Parneshia Jones "Violence, I know you" by Khadijah Queen "For My People" by Margaret Walker July Guest Editor: Adrian Matejka   Thanks to Adrian Matejka, author of Map to the Stars (Penguin Press, 2017), who curated Poem-a-Day this month. Read more about Matejka and our guest editors for the year. Help Support Poem-a-Day   If you value Poem-a-Day, please consider a monthly donation or one-time gift to help make it possible. Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today's poets each weekday morning. The free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. Thank you! Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038