Table of Contents
Icarus xi
A Thousand Cardinals 3
Biracial Ghazal: Why Everything Ends in Blood 6
This Land Is Where We Buried Everything That Came Before You: African American History and Concepts of Ownership in Early Elementary Education 7
Friday Night Lights #1 8
In A Rare Moment of Nostalgia My Father Reflects on Obama's First Inauguration 8
Taxonomy Regarding My Mother 10
I Think Everybody Has a Year They Never Really Leave 11
Summer After 12
Elegy for the Winter after Taina Was Cancelled 13
Chicago 16
Wasn't the Minotaur Buried Horns First: Vulnerability and Identity in the Mythic Body 17
A Poem about Trees That Is Not Actually a Poem about Trees 18
Nearly 7 Years after the Pact a Boy Whose Nose I Nearly Broke Hits Me Up for Brunch 20
In the Netflix Trailer Obama Says "I Don't Fit in Anywhere" While Anthony Hamilton Pulls a Burning City Out of His Mouth 21
Obama Says "Mutts Like Me" in the Mirror Every Morning While I Get Ready for School 23
The Academy of Acceptable Loss 24
Pregame Prayer with Complete Citations 29
Coverage 30
You Got McDonald's Money? 33
Friday Night Lights #20 34
Friday Night Lights #51 36
The Spook Who Sat by the Once Bombed City: Psychological Explorations of Ancestral Memory Through the Lens of Racial Battle Trauma 37
The Space Between Skins Is Called a "Wound 38
Translation 40
On The Night I Consider Coming Out to My Parents 41
(Self) Inflicted 42
Frank Ocean Sighting #268: Frank Ocean Is Rumored to Speak of Rivers Which Is Likely a Lie (Disc 1) 43
Narcissus 46
The Author Is Often Mistaken for Obama's Long Lost Son 47
Insomniac Soliloquy 49
My Father Watches Ferguson Vol. 1 50
Portrait of My Father as Sisyphus 52
My Father Watches Ferguson Vol. 2 55
Palinopsia 57
Police Dream #607 58
Palinopsia 59
Elegy for the Summer after Django Unchained Came Out on DVD 60
Palinopsia 61
Regrets 62
Ghazalfor the Suicidal Thought 64
Palinopsia 66
The Search for Frank Ocean or a Brief History of Disappearing 67
Variation on a Theme of Generics 70
Leslie Odom Jr. Sings Obama's Anger on NPR 72
Mercy, Mercy, Him 74
Tanka for the 4th of July 75
Zealots of Stockholm or Elegy for the Still Alive 76
Obama Wants to Be Clear about His Legacy 79
Obama Speaks of Rivers but We Have Always Been on Different Shores 80
Negrotopia #3 83
Sad Nigga Manifesto 84
Acknowledgments 87