the president has never said the word 'black'

A poem by Morgan Parker in NYT Mag.

a poem by morgan parker

Apology In Hopes of Men



These days I’m looking good.
Voiced over
with a glossier me.
Wearing giggles
to the knee, keeping
elbows off your lungs
and out of the dirt. Half-trying
to be secret, slip
into a room
unannounced. Glide softly
onto the couch and wait
for you to speak
first. Will you
hear me coming, pink
upper lip
to incense stick? Deep-cut
Aretha behind
the ears where synth
was planted once.
As a woman
I ignore what is
half-assed and full of water.
I understand
our troubles
passed down: I tuck them
into my loafers
and cross my legs. No complaints
here. I take my time.
I get excited
over time.
Hands to myself
as I am told.
No longer wonder what if
somehow a little mystery
could hurt. No longer swear
to god it’s when
I’m dead
I will shut up.

Morgan Parker is the author of Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night (Switchback Books 2015), selected by Eileen Myles for the 2013 Gatewood Prize, and There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (Coconut Books 2016). She received her BA in Anthropology and Creative Writing at Columbia University and MFA in Poetry from NYU. Her poetry and essays have been featured in numerous publications as well as anthologized in Why I Am Not a Painter (Argos Books 2011) and The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket Books 2015). A Cave Canem fellow and poetry editor for Coconut Magazine and The Offing, she also contributes writing to Weird Sister and co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series with Tommy Pico. She lives in Brooklyn and at www.morgan-parker.com. 

poetry reading

I will be reading poems Friday, November 14th at La Sala for the launch of the latest issue of No, Dear (guest edited by Morgan Parker).

Lineup includes:

Jeffery Berg (yours truly)
Joseph Bradshaw
Charity Coleman
Mel Elberg
Camonghne Felix
t’ai freedom ford
Renee Gladman
Jen Levitt
Melody Nixon
Liz Peters
Alexis Pope

Facebook event deets here.

LA SALA at Cantina Royal

Brooklyn, NY 11211

7 - 9 PM

a poem by morgan parker

The History of Black People

  after Jean-Michel Basquiat after White People


The saddest triptych
is in our blood.

Once I said, Our troubles
are passed down.

I would rather
dance hoodwinked

with the devil than be
alone. I would rather know

the moon without
seeing the moon.

Florida, Kentucky hemlocks
grow—this isn’t

a dream— and they lose
the word for white. We make

our enemy disease
in our blood.

If you cut open my heart
it’d be midnight at the greatest

party of all time: a small
Shawn Carter, Audre Lorde

A black boy’s hairline
feasting on difference.

On the first page of every library book
there’s a question mark

for us, backs bent out
of exclamation. We don’t know

any of your words
but our children have licked

them up in pools of sweat.
Have you ever felt

like a square peg in a round hole?
Do you sometimes dream

of a handful of Skittles
sprawling on the February lawn?

Imagine the fear of night’s sugar.
Imagine your bones are damned.

Do you ever wake up fevering
the dark, ashamed of trusting?

If our legend was allowed
it would sing alligator’s scales.

It would be written in red clay.
In the beginning was red clay

warming in my hands
vibrating Blue Train.

It was an open and shut case.
It never lived to shuck for gems.

Or, it could be joy
stinging womanly

lips—treasure
of slippery crescent.

Sometimes I feel teeth
in the grass below my feet.

I think my body could live
somewhere else ultraviolet.




A version of this poem originally appeared in Issue 3 of Spook magazine.





Morgan Parker's first collection of poems, Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, was selected by Eileen Myles for The 2013 Gatewood Prize and is forthcoming from Switchback Books. Recent poems are forthcoming from Tin House, jubilat, and Forklift, Ohio. A graduate of NYU's Creative Writing MFA program and a Cave Canem fellow, Morgan lives in Brooklyn. She works as Education Director at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) and Poetry Editor of Coconut Magazine.

a poem by morgan parker

Quiet Alcohol


It is our usual holiday.
You ask if you can trouble me for a glass
of whiskey. Someone asks me offhand
about the hate in my spine. I say,
Fuck babies, and my mother
didn’t like the flowers I bought her
and do you see what I mean?
My mother is always a different person.
These are standard answers. But lately
in pale light I examine bruises
I hope are from you, teach myself mechanics
of clear evenings and I am
steeped in insults for you.
I want quiet alcohol
untouched by light and fingertips,
settled safely under half-moon,
crests dilating with slow breath.
There are no feelings here
and I do not want to go home. Soon
we will be underwater, life forms
in air pockets. And I do not trust
this place to scoop us up, teach us
to move, hips following current,
arms like pillars expanding and stretching
under highway glow. You know
I always cry at holidays.


Morgan Parker lives with her dog, Braeburn, in New York City, where she is an MFA candidate in poetry at NYU. She holds a BA in Anthropology and Creative Writing from Columbia University. She is the recipient of the Arthur E. Ford Poetry Prize, and her work has been featured in The Columbia Review, The Blue & White Magazine, and on Scatteredrhymes.com.