The poet they probably shouldn’t have sent. I watch anime and am sometimes accused of reading books. I'm writing a long gay giant robot story in verse—probably this millennium's best yuri mecha epic poem, through lack of competition.


'Now praise those names on tombs of steel engraved | And toll this rotting country’s countless bells.'


hecker
@hecker

This Sunday night’s poet is Elizabeth Alexander. Her Antebellum Dream Book, like several of her other books, is practically a tour of American Black history, and contains a wonderful poem about one of my fellow Kentuckians, “Narrative: Ali.” It’s too long to include here, and I don’t want to excerpt it, so instead here’s “Elegy,” another poem about an American original:


Motherless, fatherless,
born of no one and everything,

Sun Ra touched down in Birmingham,
The Magic City, city of smokestacks

and tin. He would glitter.
Began departure from Philly,

which is Saturn, in a way.
Said he was no age, never was born.

He’s not from no Mars, his sister Mary said.
I peeped through the keyhole. I saw that boy born.

The spaceship left from Birmingham,
city the color of lead, city of trains,

of metal, city of black, black coal.

If you’d like to read more

The Sun Ra Arkestra plays the Chrysalis amphitheater in Columbia, Maryland, October 7, 2017.


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