Fatty Legs

A True Story

Not my girl

Stranger at home

A Stranger At Home

A True Story

Fatty legs : a true story

A stranger at home : a true story

When I was eight

Fatty legs.

Fatty legs : a true story

African American poetry : 250 years of struggle & song

Library of America ;

Introduction / Bury me in a free land: 1770-1899 -- Lift every voice: 1900-1918 -- The dark tower: 1919-1936 -- Ballads of remembrance: 1936-1959 -- Ideas of ancestry: 1959-1975 -- Blue light sutras: 1976-1989 -- Praise songs for the day: 1990-2008 -- After the hurricane: 2009-2020

ONE: BURY ME IN A FREE LAND 1770-1899. On imagination ; On Recollection ; On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield. 1770 ; To S. M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works ; To His Excellency General Washington / An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatly, Ethiopian Poetess, in Boston / [Bars Fight] / A Mathematical Problem in Verse / To Eliza ; The Slave's Complaint ; On hearing of the intention of a gentleman to purchase the Poet's freedom ; Division of an estate ; The Art of a Poet ; George Moses Horton, Myself / An Appeal to Woman ; The Grave of the Slave / Concatination [Selected Pottery Verses, 1834-1862] / The Natives of America ; Reflections / Armand Lanusse: Epigram ; Camille Thierry Ideas ; Pierre Dalcour: Verse Written in the Album of Mademoiselle _____ ; Victor-Ernest Rillieux: Love and Devotion/ Les Cenelles -- America ; To Cinque / Hope and Confidence / A Life-Day / The Emigrant / Song for the First of August / A June Song ; A Parting Hymn ; In the earnest path of duty / Toussaint L'Ouverture ; Self-Mastery / from The Rape of Florida ; A Question / The Slave Mother ; Bury Me in a Free Land ; Learning to Read ; A Double Standard ; Songs for the People

TWO: LIFT EVERY VOICE 1900-1918. The House of Falling Leaves / Driftwood / America ; Character or Color--Which? ; Late Mother / Paul Laurence Dunbar / A Prayer ; And What Shall You Say? ; Supplication ; A Woman at Her Husband's Grave / Dr. Booker T Washington to the National Negro Business League / A Litany at Atlanta / We Wear the Mask ; A Negro Love Song ; When Malindy Sings ; When de Co'n Pone's Hot ; An Ante-Bellum Sermon ; Sympathy ; A Death Song ; Compensation / Violets ; I Sit and Sew ; The Proletariat Speaks / The Black Finger ; A Mona Lisa ; El Beso ; You ; Rosabel ; The Eyes of My Regret ; Trees ; Tenebris ; Grass Fingers ; To Keep the Memory of Charlotte Forten Grimké / Wooing ; A Spade Is Just a Spade ; Here and Hereafter / Retrospect / When I Die ; The Lonely Mother ; Who Is That A-Walking in the Corn? ; from African Nights / Lift Every Voice and Sing ; Sence You Went Away ; O Black and Unknown Bards ; My City ; Go Down Death / from The Fledgling Poet and the Poetry Society / Ode to the Sun / To a Little Colored Boy / The New Negro

THREE: THE DARK TOWER 1919-1936. Japanese Hokku ; Negro Woman ; Effigy / Heritage ; Lines written at the Grave of Alexander Dumas ; Fantasy ; To a Dark Carl ; Dirge for a Free Spirit ; I Build America ; Epitaph / The Return ; A Black Man Talks of Reaping ; Southern Mansion ; The Day-breakers / Ma Rainey ; Old Lem ; Slim Greer ; Strange Legacies ; Southern Cop ; To a Certain Lady, in Her Garden ; Let Us Suppose / Portraiture ; Black Baby ; Impressions from a Family Album ; Coveted Epitaph ; Denial ; Idle Wonder / Longings ; Goal ; Farewell ; Having Had You ; Four Poems--After the Japanese ; For a New Mother ; I Look at Death / Yet Do I Marvel ; Incident ; Tableau ; Saturday's Child ; Heritage ; from Epitaphs ; From the Dark Tower ; Uncle Jim ; Scottsboro, Too, Is Worth Its Song / No Images ; Nineteen-twenty-nine ; My Lord, What a Morning ; Down-Home Boy ; Carry Me Back / The Mask ; Solace / Dead Fires ; La Vie C'est la vie ; Oblivion / My Last Name / Notes Found Near a Suicide / The Negro Speaks of Rivers ; The Weary Blues ; Mother to son ; Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret ; Beale Street Love ; Cross ; Personal ; Midwinter Blues ; Bound No'th Blues ; Dream Variations ; I, Too ; Song for a Dark Girl ; Let America be America Again ; from Montage of a Dream Deferred ; Madam and the Rent Man ; from Ask Your Mama / The Singer ; The Maestro / The Heart of a Woman ; Cosmopolite ; Black Woman ; Old Black Men ; Common Dust ; I Want to Die While You Love Me ; Interracial / Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem ; Poem ; Invocation / Jamaica Market / Christmas in de Air ; The Harlem Dancer ; Harlem Shadows ; If We Must Die ; On Broadway ; The Tropics in New York ; The Lynching ; America ; My Mother ; "The white man is a tiger at my throat" / Man and Maid / Shadow / Requiem ; This Is My Vow / October Prayer ; Flag Salute / Black and Blue ; The Tree of Hope / At the Carnival ; White Things ; Sybil Warns Her Sister / Five Vignettes ; Her Lips Are Copper Wire ; from Cane ; from Essentials ; Be with Me

FOUR: BALLADS OF REMEMBRANCE 1936-1959. To Satch (American Gothic) ; Nat Turner or Let Him Come ; If the Stars Should Fall / Narrative ; Night and a Distant Church ; It's Here in The ; Spyrytual / from A Street in Bronzeville ; Beverly Hills, Chicago ; The Bean Eater ; We Real Cool ; A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon ; The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till ; The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock ; The Lovers of the Poor ; Malcolm X ; The Second Sermon on the Warpland ; Paul Robeson ; The Life of Lincoln West ; The Boy Died in My Alley ; Infirm ; I Am a Black ; An Old Black Woman, Homeless, and Indistinct / To Julia de Burgos ; Ay, Ay, Ay of the Kinky-Haired Negress ; Poem of the Unborn Child ; Farewell in Welfare Island ; The Sun in Welfare Island / The Small Bells of Benin ; Etta Moten's Attic / from Ebony Under Granite ; Mojo Mike's Beer Garden ; Four Glimpses of Night / Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One ; The Morning Duke Ellington Praised the Lord and Six Little Black Davids Tapped Danced Unto / Those Winter Sundays ; Frederick Douglass ; Middle Passage ; Runagate Runagate ; A Letter from Phillis Wheatley ; Paul Laurence Dunbar ; [American Journal] / The Truth ; Jazz Is My Religion ; The Nice Colored Man / Hawk Lawler: Chorus ; I, Too, Know What I Am Not ; Would You Wear My Eyes? ; War Memoir ; Walking Parker Home ; Crootey Songo ; Heavy Water Blues ; Blues for Hal Waters ; Oregon / from Dark Testament ; Prophecy / A Private Letter to Brazil ; Review from Staten Island ; Man White, Brown Girl and All That Jazz / Young Poet / Harlem Dawn ; A Definition ; Jean-Jaques / Booker T. and W.E.B. ; An Answer to Lerone Bennett's Questionnaire On a Name for Black Americans ; A Poet Is Not a Jukebox / Ballad of American Mores ; Face of Poverty / Dark Symphony ; from Harlem Gallery, Book I: The Curator / For My People ; Molly Means ; October Journey / Between the World and Me ; Selected Haiku

FIVE: IDEAS OF ANCESTRY 1959-1975. Still I Rise ; Phenomenal Woman / Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note ; Look for You Yesterday, Here You Come Today ; Notes for a Speech ; The Liar ; Short Speech to My Friends ; Three Modes of History and Culture ; SOS ; Black Art ; Why's 12 / King: April 4, 1968 / Blues ; All God's Chillun ; The White River ; Sam Lord / "in the inner city" ; miss rosie ; good times ; admonitions ; "being property once myself" ; the lost baby poem ; from some jesus ; cutting greens ; homage to my hips ; "the light that came to lucille clifton" ; jasper texas 1998 ; why some people be mad at me sometimes ; "i am accused of tending to the past" ; Jump Rope Rhymes (transcribed) ; study the masters ; to my last period ; wishes for sons ; "surely i am able to write poems" ; "won't you celebrate with me" / How Long Has Trane Been Gone ; Orisha ; Rape ; Jazz Fan Looks Back / Son of Msippi ; Black Star Line ; Outer Space Blues / I Am a Black Woman / I Would Be for You Rain / High on the Hog / Black Power ; Nikki-Rosa ; For Saundra ; Ego Tripping ; A Poem for Carol ; Legacies / American History ; Dear John, Dear Coltrane ; Nightmare Begins Responsibility ; Reuben, Reuben ; Tongue-Tied in Black and White ; Last Affair: Bessie's Blues Song ; The Love Letters of Helen Pitts Douglass / Do Nothing till You Hear from Me ; A Coltrane Memorial / Medicine Man / What Would I Do White? ; These Poems ; I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies ; Poem about My Rights ; Poem for Haruko / Blues for Some Literary Friends & Myself ; For Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers / A Poem for Myself ; The Idea of Ancestry ; The Bones of My Father ; Haiku ; For Freckle-Faced Gerald ; The Violent Space ; Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane ; For Eric Dolphy ; Feeling Fucked Up / On Being Head of the English Department / Coal ; Revolution Is One Form of Social Change ; A Litany for Survival ; Power ; Lunar Eclipse ; Inheritance--His / But He Was Cool ; Don't Cry, Scream / Swallow the Lake ; Hair / Malcolm X--An Autobiography ; Don't Say Goodbye to the Porkpie Hat / 26 Ways of Looking at a Black Man / Howlin Wolf ; Big Maybelle / Beware: Do Not Read This Poem ; Paul Laurence Dunbar in the Tenderloin ; The Reactionary Poet / sonnet ; poll ; the poor houses ; othello jones dresses for dinner ; American Jazz Quartet / how i got ovah / for our lady ; A Poem for My Father ; A poem for my brother ; from Philadelphia: Spring, 1985 ; haiku (for Osage ave and Doorknop) ; haiku (for mungu and morani and the children of soweto) ; two haiku (for Clarence H. Watson and The Count) ; tanka (for papa Joe Jones who used to toss me up to the sky) ; haiku (for domestic workers in the african diaspora) ; haiku ("man. you write me so") ; tanka ("like dark old men the") ; haiku ("like ermine when i") ; haiku ("i want to make you") ; blues ; Song No. 2 / Whitey on the Moon ; The Revolution Will Not Be Televised ; Home Is Where the Hatred Is / After Vallejo / Inauguration ; Song / One for Charlie Mingus ; Poem for My Father ; After Hearing a Radio Announcement: A Comment on Some Conditions / A Far Cry from Africa ; Codicil ; Blues ; from The Schooner Flight ; Sea Canes ; Volcano ; Easter ; from Omeros: Chapter VIII / Women / blues for franks wooten ; from Maumau American Cantos: Canto 4 / How Stars Start ; Dance of the Infidels ; Boogie with O.O. Gabugah ; The Old O.O. Blues ; A Poem for Players

SIX: BLUE LIGHT SUTRAS 1976-1989. Twenty-Year Marriage ; I Can't Get Started ; Two Brothers ; The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981 / from Haiti / Titta / Soul Make a Path Through Shouting ; Sally Hemings to Thomas Jefferson / from Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra / What It Means to Be Dark ; Mastectomy ; from American Sonnets / Harriet in the Promised Land / Blackbottom ; The Weakness ; On the Turning Up of Unidentified Black Female Corpses ; Black Boys Play the Classics / Leaving Eden ; from The Arcanum Poems ; Father / Tour Guide: La Maison des Esclaves ; Turning Forty in the 90's ; Wednesday Mourning ; Heartbeats / The House Slave ; David Walker (1785-1830) ; Adolescence--II ; Banneker ; from Thomas and Beulah ; Canary ; The Return of Lieutenant James Reese Europe ; Hattie McDaniel Arrives at the Cocoanut Grove ; from Sonata Mulattica / The Dance ; The Supremes ; from Brutal Imagination / Brown Girl Levitation, 1962-1989 ; Concerto no. 7: Condoleezza [working out] at the Watergate / Some Pieces ; Hand Me Down Blues ; Dark Mirror / This Bridge Across ; Time with Stevie Wonder in It ; Chris Gilbert: An Improvisation / Vernacular Examples ; Palaver ; Sotto Voce / For My Mother (May I Inherit Half Her Strength) ; For Claude McKay / Goldsboro Narrative #4: My father's Viet Nam tour near over ; Goldsboro Narrative #28 ; Goldsboro Narrative #33 ; Goldsboro Narrative #7 ; Annual Visit of the Quiet, Unmarried Son / Heavy Corners ; Civil Servant ; For My Own Protection / "C"ing in Colors: Blue / Surplus Future Imperfect ; Woman, with wings ; Should you find me / Deep Song / i done got so thirsty that my mouth waters at the thought of rain / Fragments from the Diary of Amelie Patiné, Quadroon, Mistress of Monsieur Jacques R _____ / from The Women of Plums / Annabelle ; More Girl Than Boy ; Letter to Bob Kaufman ; Blue Light Lounge Sutra for the Performance Poets at Harold Park Hotel ; February in Sydney ; from Dien Cai Dau ; Venus's-flytraps ; My Father's Love Letters ; Anodyne ; Ode to the Maggot / Falso Brilhante ; Song of the Andoumboulou: 31 / Gra'ma ; Try to Understand Papa ; Throwing Stones at the All White Pool ; Fade to Black / Life in a Sterile Environment: A Case Study ; The Day before Kindergarten: Taluca, Alabama, 1959 ; A Reconsideration of the Blackbird ; An Anointing ; Poem for My Mothers and Other Makers of Asafetida ; The Lynching / from Muse & Drudge ; from Sleeping with the Dictionary / A Strange Beautiful Woman ; Sleepless Nights ; Lonely Eagles ; Star-Fix / How I Became the Blues / The Broken English Dream / The Black Back-Ups / All the Way Home ; from Dreamer / Trying for Fire / from for colored girls who have considered suicide / Building Nicole's Mama ; Don't Drink the Water / from Free! / Inside the Blues Whale ; Scrapple ; Washing the car with My Father ; John Henry Sleeping in High Grass / from Letters to a New England Negro

SEVEN: PRAISE SONGS FOR THE DAY 1990-2008. Blue ; The New Religion / The Venus Hottentot ; Nineteen ; Ars Poetica #28: African Leave-Taking Disorder ; Ars Poetica #100: I Believe ; Praise Song for the Day / loose strife ; Doug Flutie's 1984 Orange Bowl Hail Mary as Water into Fire / Verbal Mugging / Prayer of the Backhanded ; Bullet Points ; 'N'em ; Another Elegy ; The Tradition / A Balance of Blues & Angels / nap-i-ness / Natural ; Black Funk / Wednesday Poem / Frequently Asked Questions #10 / View of the Library of Congress from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School / Sugar and Brine: Ella's Understanding ; Salt / burial ; A Small Needful Fact / Santa Ana of Grocery Carts ; Teeth ; Ode to the Little "r" / Seeing the Body / Black Mary Integrates the School House / Touch ; Satchmo Returns to New Orleans ; The Golden Shovel ; Carp Poem / How to Listen ; Euphoria ; Ferguson / The Gospel of Barbecue / Charity on Blind Tom ; General Bethune on Blind Tom ; Blind Boone's Vision ; Minnehaha / Jesse Owens, 1963 ; Rope / Thirty Lines About the Fro ; My Father's Kites / Drop it Like It's Hottento Venus / Hostage / Plantation ; from Voyage of the Sable Venus ; "Lucy Terry Prince Prepares for Her Marriage" / Ode to the Diasporican / from Good Stock Strange Blood / from The Big Smoke ; Robot Music / What the Oracle Said / The Keepin' It Real Awards / Blackout 1977 / gayl jones ; cecil taylor ; johnny cash ; I ran from it but was still in it / On Confessionalism / Written by Himself ; Raisin / Bembe-Faced ; Arroz con Son y Clave / Blue ; Cotillion ; A Great Noise ; Speak Low / I want to not have to write another word about who cops keep killing / from Citizen: An American Lyric / The Difficult Music ; The Lucky One ; Hesitation Theory ; My Mother Was No White Dove / from The Lost Letters of Frederick Douglass ; statistical haiku (or, how do they discount us? let me count the ways) ; ode to my blackness / Don't You Wonder, Sometimes? ; The Universe Is a House Party ; Declaration / Offering ; Snow / Ode to Gentrification / Flounder ; Drapery Factory, Gulfport, Mississippi, 1956 ; Graveyard Blues ; Pilgrimage ; Miscegenation ; Incident / Strip ; RR Lyrae: Matter / Wind Talker ; Work Ethic / Dissidence ; Gwendolyn Brooks / "The reeds shook. A wide flat ass cradled in leather pants. This" / Amethyst Rocks / Money Road

EIGHT: AFTER THE HURRICANE 2009-2020. How Can Black People Write about Flowers at a Time Like This / La Negra Takes Medusa to the Hair Salon / Cento Between the Ending and the End / America Will Be / A Postmodern Two-Step / upon viewing the death of basquiat / Massa's House / Nashville / Dear _____, / My First Black Nature Poem(TM) / I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store / Aunt Flo and Uncle Phineas / (Afterward) One Corner More / After the Hurricane / Kansas / Kudzu / The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings / One Country / Still When I Picture It the Face of God Is a White Man's Face / Closer / #sayhername / The President's Wife / Violins / History / Black Can Sleep / Children Listen / Why Is We Americans / Object Permanence / Gnawa Boy, Marrakesh, 1968 / Fisherman's Daughter / dinosaurs in the hood / Your National Anthem / Prayer / Ode to Herb Kent