allegiance

Acknowledgments

acknowledgments Thanks to the following journals in which some of these poems originally appeared: Boxcar: “i live in detroit”; ElevenEleven: “between old trees,” “confessional poetry,” “(i belong to that voice. it owns what i breathe.),” “message from wolfgang my mother left on the refrigerator”; Torch: “to the man on the bus”; Mead Magazine: “sift,” “another finger for the wound”; Michigan Quarterly Review: “what you’d find buried under charles f. kettering sr. high school”; Rattle: “katherine with the lazy eye. short. and not a good poet.” An earlier version of “you, old meany” appeared in the chapbook between old trees. An earlier version of “flashes—cyan / magenta / yellow” appeared in Voices Rising: Celebrating  Years of Black LGBT Writing. Thanks to Cave Canem, the Provincetown Fine ArtsWork Center, the University of Michigan MFA CreativeWriting Department, InsideOut Literary Arts, and Callaloo for support of this work and my writing process. Much love to all the people who made WriteWordWrightNow —right then. Thanks to Mary Jo Firth’s writing circle in the faraway library. A special thanks to David Blair, Tommye Blount, Andrew Chanse, Nandi Comer, Garrett DeVoe, Eric Dilworth, Demetrius F. Dumas, Lavone Forbes, Vievee Francis, Ross Gay, George Henry, Jamaal May, Shawn Nicholson, Gregory Pardlo, Jeff Perlstein, Scheherazade Parrish, Lawrence Peterson, Jamaul Roots, Brandon Som, and Scott Winn for all the years of support that went into this first book. 115 ...