in lieu of a poem, i’d like to say

Danez Smith

apricots & brown teeth in browner mouths nashing dates & a clementine’s underflesh under yellow nail & dates like auntie heads & the first time someone dried mango there was god & grandma’s Sunday only song & how the plums are better as plums dammit & i was wrong & a June’s worth of moons & the kiss stain of the berries & lord the prunes & the miracle of other people’s lives & none of my business & our hands sticky and a good empty & please please pass the bowl around again & the question of dried or ripe & the sex of grapes & too many dates & us us us us us & varied are the feast but so same the sound of love gorged & the women in the Y hijab a lily in the water & all of us who come from people who signed with x’s & yesterday made delicacy in the wrinkle of the fruit & at the end of my name begins the lot of us

Danez Smith is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017) and [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014).

Occasion

Themes

About this Poem

“This poem, or really this list, started in the group chat over a debate about dried fruit. In trying to live by group chat law, I couldn’t snitch on the whole conversation or the space, so instead I made a list of what I could and what I noticed in the days following fruitgate. The draft has found its way to this loose abecedarian, with some little ghost of a draft where Itried to make it a ghazal, that is still, to me, trying to fight doing what a poem does (transform) and stay close to doing what a poet does (notice). Really, the poem was the conversation in the group chat and this list is just my notes on how that poem transformed me, gave me a new thing to see.”
—Danez Smith

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anti poetica

who cares how long i’ve spent with my poems—those shit psalms those rats of my soul—head first thru the window me at their ankles demanding substance, revelation, sudden gravity—shamed of my leafless, drug shanked brain—this grey popper worn hell—that dark dull circle i try to conquer beauty & the state from within. i’m not revolutionary i’m regular. nothing radical in being the enemy of america, the country of enemies. we find our laughter between the horror.

Danez Smith

2023

dream where every black person is standing by the ocean

& we say to her
what have you done with our kin you swallowed?

& she says
that was ages ago, you’ve drunk them by now

& we don’t understand

& then one woman, skin dark as all of us
walks to the water’s lip, shouts Emmett, spits

Danez Smith

2022

Poems

in lieu of a poem, i’d like to say

More by this poet

anti poetica

dream where every black person is standing by the ocean

three Black poems from August

Poems

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in lieu of a poem, i’d like to say

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