Terrance Hayes Poems

Now that my afro's as big as Shaft's
I feel a little better about myself.
How it warms my bullet-head in Winter,
...

I said Folk was dressed in Blues but hairier and hemped.
After 'We acoustic banjo disciples!' Jebediah said, 'When
and whereforth shall the bucolic blacks with good tempers
come to see us pluck as Elizabeth Cotton intended?'
...

I take my $, buy a pair of very bright kicks for the game
at the bottom of the hill on Tuesday w / Tone who averages
19.4 points a game, & told me about this spot, & this salesman
w / gold ringed fingers fitting a $100 dollar NBA Air Avenger
...

Pretty soon the Negroes were looking to get paid.
My partner, Big Trend, wiped his ox neck and said

He wasn't going to wait too much longer. You
...

Who I know knows why all those lush-boned worn-out girls are
Whooping at where the moon should be, an eyelid clamped
On its lightness. Nobody sees her without the hoops firing in her
Ears because nobody sees. Tattooed across her chest she claims
...

After dark, the bar full of women part of me loves—the part that stood
naked outside the window of Miss Geneva, recent divorcée who owned
a gun, O Miss Geneva where are you now—Orpheus says she did
...

after Gwendolyn Brooks
I. 1981

When I am so small Da's sock covers my arm, we
cruise at twilight until we find the place the real
...

Ladies and gentlemen, ghosts and children of the state,
I am here because I could never get the hang of Time.
This hour, for example, would be like all the others
were it not for the rain falling through the roof.
...

If you subtract the minor losses,
you can return to your childhood too:
the blackboard chalked with crosses,
...