in lieu of a poem, i’d like to say
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
Copyright © 2019 by Danez Smith. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 29, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“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
Danez Smith
Danez Smith is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017) and [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014).