Patricia Smith

Patricia Smith has been called “a testament to the power of words to change lives.” She is the author of seven books of poetry, including Incendiary Art (2017), winner of an NAACP Image Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), which won the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (2008), a chronicle of the human and environmental cost of Hurricane Katrina which was nominated for a National Book Award; and Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection published by Coffee House Press. Smith collaborated with the photographer Michael Abramson on the book Gotta Go Gotta Flow: Life, Love, and Lust on Chicago’s South Side From the Seventies (2015). Her work has appeared in Poetry magazine, the Paris Review, the New York Times, TriQuarterly, Tin House, the Washington Post, and in both Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. Source

And He Stays Dead

You can convince your young body to slide on the cloak of savage—

bare your teeth towards the clock and pretend you don’t feel the hollow.

Or you can slap your own face, winding back time, beating yourself

witless until years blur and you convince yourself it isn’t real. The hollow

Is not menaced by your trilling. It decides to take your body inside it.

You pile on layers of woolens and fiction, trying to appeal to the hollow

As it owns you. Everyone asks Why is your voice so drained, so moon?

It’s because you are feverishly slipping on mantras that should heal the hollow,

But it just grows larger, and you flail around inside it. It is shaped so

stupidly like a father. You can’t find your knees to kneel. The hollow

Will be damned if it gives you a chance to pray your way out, so you

will yourself limp and succumb to damage. Passing days seal the hollow.

Daughter, wear your father like a cloak. Flaunt the blue, the gone

stink of him. Those woes are yours, crafted to reveal. You’re hollow.

Published:

2019

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Death & Loss

Identity