wednesday feels like a funeral
or rather
a wednesday
in a body
such as mine.
what i know
of hate
i learned early
and then every
day after that.
this is my niece’s
home. this is where
my nephew plays
until he doesn’t.
this is where my grandmothers
smoked themselves into graves &
my grandfathers lost their heads
in many ways.
what other place i know
than this hate crime with
geography attached. i don’t
speak nothing but this. my only
tongue is this broken-winged pigeon.
my only song is this crooked
anthem. O say
i don’t remember
& i can’t forget.
________
Nate Marshall is from the South Side of Chicago. His first book, Wild Hundreds (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. He is a visiting assistant professor at Wabash College. He earned his MFA at the University of Michigan, where he served as a Zell postgraduate fellow. His work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Indiana Review, The New Republic and elsewhere.
