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34 Poets Of Color Summarize 2017 In Verse

If 2017 was a poem, what would you call it?

This was the question Tabia Yapp the founder ofBEOTIS, a boutique agency that represents leading writers, speakers and multidisciplinary artists of color posed to a group of contemporary poets she admired.

The open-ended question provided respondents with ample space to play. Some poets answered the prompt in two words, while others filled up pages, all while attempting to describe a time categorized by so much fear, anger, hope, action and love.

Were only two months into 2017. At times, it feels like the year has already stretched beyond its 12-month boundaries. Yet at the same time, 2017 still doesnt feel quite real. Just as Black History Month comes to a close, the following poets are helping us make sense of this uncertain moment in history,using language as a guide.

Behold, 34 poets of color summarize 2017 in verse*:

1.Alok Vaid-Menon

Alok Vaid-Menon is a nonbinary artist with a lot of feelings.

2.Camonghne Felix

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Camonghne Felix, M.A., is a poet, political strategist, media junkie and cultural worker. She received an M.A. in arts politics from NYU, an MFA from Bard College, and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo and Poets House. The 2012 Pushcart Prize nominee is the author of the chapbook Yolk, and was recently listed by Black Youth Project as a Black Girl From the Future You Should Know.

3.Yosimar Reyes

Yosimar Reyes is an undocumented American poet and activist, who was born in Guerrero, Mexico, and raised in East San Jose, California.

4. Ada Limn

Ada Limn is the author of four books of poetry including Bright Dead Things which was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry award, and named one of the top 10 books of the year by The New York Times.

5.Hieu Minh Nguyen

Hieu Minh Nguyen is the son of immigrants. He is the author of two collections of poetry, This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014) and Not Here (Coffee House Press, forthcoming in 2018).

6. Fatimah Asghar

Fatimah Asghar is a Kundiman Fellow and a member of the Dark Noise Collective. She is the author of the chapbook AFTER (YesYes books, 2015) and the co-creator and writer of the highly anticipated web series Brown Girls.

7. Clint Smith

Clint Smith is the author of Counting Descent (2016) and a doctoral candidate at Harvard University who has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and the National Science Foundation. A 2014 National Poetry Slam champion, his writing has been published in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, The Guardian, Boston Review, Harvard Educational Review and elsewhere.

8.Danez Smith

Danez Smith is the author of Dont Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017) and the award winning [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014). Danez is a 2017 NEA Fellow and member of the Dark Noise Collective.

9.Eboni Hogan

Eboni Hogan is a Brooklyn-based poet, playwright, actress and curriculum writer who has performed in over 65 U.S. cities, as well as internationally in Ghana, Germany and Austria. She is the 2012 Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion and habitually bougie.

10.Paul Tran

Paul Tran placed Top 10 at the National Poetry Slam and Individual World Poetry Slam in 2015. They live in Brooklyn, where they serve as Poetry Editor at The Offing and Poet In Residence at Urban Word NYC.

11.Oompa

Oompa is a hood, black, queer slam poet, rapper and Beyonc aficionado from Boston seeking to make space where the world says there is none for her. She just released her debut album November 3rd in 2016 after making final stage with House Slam at the National Poetry Slam in Decatur, Georgia.

12.Joshua Aiken

Joshua Aiken won the 2016 Martin Starkie Prize for his poem Disappearing Act(s) while studying at the University of Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, and is an alumni of Washington University in St. Louis where he was a proud member of WU-SLam, a spoken word poetry community.

13.Janani Balasubramanian

Janani Balasubramanian is a writer of speculative fiction whose art and editorial work has been featured in The New Yorker, Guernica, Creative Time Reports, The New Inquiry and more. Theyve presented work at 160-plus stages across North America and Europe, including the Public Theater, MOMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Janani is currently working on Sleeper a dystopian trilogy about sleep, dreams and physics.

14. Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib is a poet, writer and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is a columnist at MTV News and a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow. His first collection of poems, The Crown Aint Worth Much, was released by Button Poetry in 2016.

15.Safia Elhillo

Safia Elhillo is a Sudanese-American writer and educator living in Washington, DC. Her debut collection of poetry, The January Children, is available from University of Nebraska Press.

16.Denice Frohman

Denice Frohman is an award-winning poet, writer, performer and educator. She is a 2014 CantoMundo Fellow, 2013 Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, 2013 Hispanic Choice Award winner, and performed at The White House in 2016.

17. Eve L. Ewing

Eve L. Ewing is a sociologist of race and urban education at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, a poet and an essayist. Her debut colleciton of poems, Electric Arches, is forthcoming September 2017 via Haymarket Books.

18.Elizabeth Acevedo

Elizabeth Acevedo is a National Poetry Slam Champion with two collections of poetry, and The Poet X (HarperCollins, 2018) is her debut novel.

19.Jacqui Germain

Jacqui Germain is a poet and freelance writer based in St. Louis, with poems published in Muzzle Magazine and The Offing, and essays published in The New Inquiry and The Establishment. Shes the author of the chapbook, When the Ghosts Come Ashore, published through Button Poetry/Exploding Pinecone Press, and is still trying to figure out her own public and private resistance.

20.Jayson P. Smith

Jayson P. Smith is a Brooklyn-based writer, curator, performance artist and current Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow with The Poetry Project.

21.Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong is the author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times 2016 Top 10 Critics Pick and winner of the 2016 Whiting Award.

22.Nate Marshall

Nate Marshall is from the South Side of Chicago. He is the author of Wild Hundreds and an editor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop.

23.Cameron Awkward-Rich

Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016) and the chapbook Transit (Button Poetry, 2015). A Cave Canem fellow and poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine, his poems have appeared/are forthcoming in Narrative, The Baffler, Indiana Review and elsewhere

24. Ariana Brown

Ariana Brown is an Afromexicana poet from San Antonio, Texas, with a B.A. in African diaspora studies and Mexican-American studies. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, a 2014 national collegiate poetry slam champion, and is currently working on her first manuscript.

25. Kwame Dawes

Kwame Dawes is the author of City of Bones: A Testament (TriQuarterly, 2017).Dawes notes that his title is for an era that spans 20082020.

26.Nabila Lovelace

Nabila Lovelace is a first-generation Queens native; her people hail from Trinidad and Nigeria. Sons of Achilles, her debut book of poems, is forthcoming from YesYes Books.

27.Aja Monet

The revolution will be livestreamed on facebook and instagrammed by your favorite thot, triggered on twitter, so uber cool not to uber, the only bloodshed will be freebleeding or my pussy is borderless, you mean to tell me they dont have starbucks on this march? i wish a mothafucka would, dear 1968, you aint aged one bit, nothin new under the sun, the more things change the more they stay the same, this revolving door, my president is a puppet, white house of horrors, when the pedophile priests bless america, or the crooked babalao, voodoo these divided states, birth of no nation, if you know whats good for you, kill capitalism, get free or die tryin, rosie the riveter ushers in new law and order, black magic will not be photoshopped, liberate these psychic streets.

Aja Monet is a Caribbean-American blues poet.

28.Porsha Olayiwola

: porsha o is joy in dystopia : ready to die, again : how to out breathe the ghost inhaling all around you : watch me dance on the grave of everything that tried to kill me : why is the blood so shiny so pretty splattered : the black dyke avoids being devoured, again : how attendance at therapy appointments and guided meditations heal humans : how i got whole : we do not run, here : here, i am the riot : watch me burn this place to ash

Porsha Olayiwola is the 2014 Individual World Poetry Slam Champion, the 2015 National Poetry Slam Champion, and the co-founder of House Slam. She identifies as a black, lesbian poet, a hip-hop feminist, an educator and a organizer.

29. Patricia Smith

Beowulf Sheehan

You, so blatantly golden, the helm of every keening ship, so our plummet and our mirrors, so the steel-eye and bellow, you, ass perpetually clenched, sinking in your suit jacket, so our blunder and kismet, the tips of your dwarfish fingers bled raw with currency, you, relentlessly training your teeth, spit-glued crown defying every wind, you are the back-bended sniffler lost in the shadowed end of the school yard, you, legless savior, nailed to the same cross you carry.

Patricia Smith is a poet, teacher, performance artist and author. Smith is a professor at the College of Staten Island and in the Sierra Nevada College MFA program, recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, a National Book Award finalist and the author of eight critically acknowledged volumes of poetry, including her most recent, Incendiary Art.

30.Julian Randall

By this I mean less sexually (though if thats your thing by all means get down with yourself) than there is nothing better suited to me to talk about survival than the idea of Morning. Ive thought nearly every day of this new year about a casually brilliant quote from Natalie Diaz What happens after the unimaginable? The morning after, and the one after that. 2016 was almost across the board a year in which we faced so many events that we could only describe as being the unimaginable; I cite that every single time somebody mentions Prince dying I feel it all over again as if for the first time because my brain starkly refuses to hold onto the fact that hes gone.

And yet, in the face of so many apocalypses (here I mean the tertiary definition of apocalypse, brought to my attention by the genius Junot Diaz, meaning revelation because I will not give this year or any other the dignity of being my presumed end) we are still here. Wounded, but here. Oppressed, but here. Grieving, but here. Fighting, and aint one of the criteria for fighting to be here, present, alive? And how truly awe worthy, fight worthy is that? Alive, after all this time. Thats as constant as dawn, whether the clouds ensnare the senses or not somewhere behind all that, the sun, daybreak. That to me is the Morning After it becomes morning in America.

As unimaginable tragedy and hurt settles into reality that we (here I am speaking specifically to marginalized folks, especially my own communities as a Queer Black & Afro-Dominican person) are in so many ways also the unimaginable. How many generations of survival and endurance and an irreducible desire to live have brought us this far? Does that not make us something unimaginable? Does that not give us the power to bring a morning too?

Julian Randall is a living queer black poet from Chicago pursuing his MFA at Ole Miss. He can be followed on Instagram and Twitter @JulianthePoet.

31. Aziza Barnes

retitiling 2017 A logic: cop is to take & pig is a cop & Jimmy is a Johnson & Johnson is a dick & Dick is a Richard & Chip is a Frank & Frank is honest & Also a suggestion & Dick is a suggestion & Short for a fuller name & Coarse is a word for hair & Hair is dead & growing & Dead is brown often on plants & Green is money unless its young & Guap is bread is cheese is where we put pesticides & A pest is a hairy pussy & pussy Is a pet or a chore or a slave & A slave is brown so is dead so is hair so is also growing & Dick or Short for the fuller name is a weapon or An honest suggestion or Something to cop or Something to pig & pig is often an element of a verb to pig often it is a direction out which is to eat a lot of unnecessarily & a jimmy is also a way to loosen what been locked also a verb to jimmy which is also something to cop but short for the name theft which is to eat too much & coarse Is the opposite of fine which is Handsome & Too thin for light & Unable to braid & also just Okay & okay is how Andrew Jackson signed his checks which is also how Richard Blaine signed his checks in Casablanca OKAY which is a movie about a Dick that Jimmyd a fine slave or a Richard that Johnsond a nation for some young or a man that stole a woman for $10,000 francs & called it a name that didnt relate or a shared name with a commander to genocide of Native Americans & of which I am one & if OKAY wasnt OKAYD there would be more of me & dick had a black piano player Or dick had a suggestion for a dead music which is Latin song & Rome is where Latin was & the aqueduct Was a system of moving dirt from water from the people or a system of a pest to eat versus a pest to drown which is what happened to many coarse bodies or women bodies or slave bodies in certain lakes in the Americas where Richard Blane is from & saved by throwing a fine green on a plane for his coarse green love or his hair grown dead or his OKAY gone OKAY or his unable to braid suggestion of a cop which is also a pig which can be a pet if it behaves well.

Aziza Barnes is blk and alive. Winner of the 2015 Pamet River Prize, Azizas first full length collection i be but i aint is from YesYes Books 2016. They are a Cave Canem Fellow, co-founder of The Conversation Literary Festival and co-host of the podcast The Poetry Gods.

32.Dominique Christina

The year is no poem. It wont be called anything With light inside it. It snatches milk from The mouths of infants A lion devouring shrines and sunlight.

2017 is a weapon.

A low groan in the dark, A woman in the basement With a wire hangar and a baby No bigger than a mustard seed That she will meet as an ooze in her palms 2017 is the lynch mob discography: Girl bodies Gay bodies Trans bodies Black bodies Poor bodies Nobodies All strung up like Mardi Gras beads on Main Street The stench doesnt stop the parade

Thats America.

2017 is a funeral procession. A lunatics marching orders Conversion therapy Celebrity Apprentice on A terrible loop,

2017 is no poem.

Its the bastard child of Interred bones in the Tallahatchie River A severed spine in Baltimore A boys brain on the street in Ferguson The last breath of a man in New York Traffic stops that crescendoed to murder 2017 is a dustbin Stacked with protest signs and court orders The lickety split shudder Of a nation that ran into its ghosts And only the women were Acquainted with being haunted. Empty cupboard soliloquy queens Snatching their children From public schools and Handing them switchblades

Mommy is sorry.

This is what the teacher wont show you.

Take it.

These bastards need mortality.

2017 is the state house glittered now in menstrual blood.

Girl children baying at the dawn limp moon Oak trees decorated with brassieres Nazis with their teeth knocked out A linguistic resistance With no room for words like alt right When white supremacy is story enough.

2017 is no poem.

Its a pipeline trying To breech an ocean, A woman in a wheelchair At a protest rally, A tear gas canister on the steps of the Capitol.

2017 didnt bring my God with it.

Just hexes and hurricane winds A democracy doomed by The wrong weather wreckage of Rich men and their crucifixion fetish We gon all carry a cross You better believe it Let whatever happens be biblical then. Let the locusts come if they must.

America is a murdered woman Ghosting the world With her cracked levees, Her burned out mosque, Her shot up church, Her impossible promise Her unmarked graves, And I am dumb with calling her name. Despite the yelps of history, My wobbly faith splits heaven wide open Reimagines God as mammy, Starch white apron and a shotgun, Babies suckling at her unremarkable breasts Pushing scripture out from the rubble Saying the battle is finally over and me, War-walloped and heaving, Rummaging through debris looking for Something that glitters…

Oh America, (If that is your real name) Take these bones and perform One last miracle Take these hands and give me Back my mouth Take this mouth and give me back my feet Take these feet and give me back my courage Dazzle this uncaptured girl that I might Live long enough to tell my grandchildren About the year I stopped beseeching God and In the trench grew my own temple. God of the in-between, God of the firing pin, God of the slaughtered lamb, God of a risen god, Unspell me, here.

I am singing you the hymn of my skirt. I am burning yellow dahlias on my One good altar not splintered by shrapnel Or singed with smoke… If there is any prayer left In this world let it be What is left of our hearts, Our coliseum hearts, And the stupid hope that Regulates the metronome Of our blood machinery. The orchestral thrumming, The insistent rumble, Of our broken, impossible hearts, The only evidence Ie ever had That mountains can be moved.

Dominique Christina is a mother, published author, licensed educator, two-time Women of the World Slam Champion, social agitator, intersectional feminist and cultural Jedi. She is sought after to teach and perform at colleges and universities nationally and internationally every year.

33.Jason Reynolds

IF 2017 WERE A POEM

id call it a flaming bag of shit left at the front door at the side door at the back door your door a gathering double-dutch bucking at flames the orange of them plucking at our faces like immature older brothers jarring us from sleep barring us from passage crackling like broken voice smelling of familiar kindling to some to me at my door cotton rope paper add flint for spark shoot shit no water no water this time this time id call it this time us all here like every time this prank the prank of all stupid white boy pranks gets pulled figuring between filthying our feet up or kicking our feet up and letting the whole damn house burn down id call it this time deciding to sacrifice name brands some chapped overworked epidermis and an epidemic of supple unbothered soles eager to know stomp for once id call it this time were prepared to explain the haunting fecal scent to the houseguests wed promised to host over water id call it they are coming from far they will need a place to stay

Jason Reynolds is The New York Times bestselling author of several novels for young people, including Ghostand All-American Boys, which he co-authored with Brendan Kiely. His new novel in verse, Long Way Down, hits stores this fall.

34.Mahogany L. Browne

When they turn bodegas into boutique grocery stores

When they bounce cops up the block

Like this hipster protection program wont turn back

Lefrak into Harlem turn back Harlem into Chirac

turn back BedStuy into Brownsville turn Brownsville back

Into the Bronx back into Gaza back…

You will taste this strange and bitter American history

Where the Mom and Pop work more hours than the Governor

Where the pesticides overflow our sewer systems

Float our food deserts into neighborhoods

One way in

One way out

Tell me this gentrification be for my own good

Tell me this housing project keep us warfare ready

Tell me Biggie died for our sins

& Ill show you a Brooklyn stoop with a babies name etched in chalk

A hashtag ghost gone already

A price tag on his sisters face

Shes been missing since Sunday

Where choppa lights paint concrete a trail of breadcrumbs

A haunting finding its way back to our homes

The Electoral College is

a lullaby designed to put us

back to sleep.

The ocean is weeping a righteous rage, she got questions for the living:

& what about the sweetheart who would grow to love Tamir Rice? Mike Brown? Korryn Gaines? Akia Gurley?

What about they mamas singing their name before each breakfast?

Or the church praying for their redemption bibles raised in the air?

What about their (almost) children? How about they Daddys smile?

What about they name make them so easy to turn to ash?

How we ghosting black boys for the toys we gift them?

On a Monday

A white body told my black body

It aint earned no apology for the bloodshed

For the nights when my skin grow so cold

I know I must be inches from death

For each death hand delivered to me,

this: silence this: certain dismissal this: post racial reality show this: confederate hug

& dont it bloom like a mushroom sky?

What about the blues? Why it cry like hail? Why it hell like America so so long

Yo: America

Whatchu know about noose ready

Whatchu know about chalk lines & double barrels

Whatchu know about a murder weapon

Or a loose cigarette

Or a baby sleeping on a couch

Whatchu you know about the flag

The confederate fathers

The truck that followed me down a lonely road in Georgia

The names that I rolled off my tongue in prayer?

Saint Sojourner

Saint Harriet

Saint Rekia

Saint Sandra

Bring me home

Or leave me steady

Gun aimed and cocked ready

Con artists turned 45th resident of the White House

While the 44th President is lifted off the grounds

by his shadow & his Black wife

She sideeye all day

She cheekbone slay

While the media aim and shot at presidential legacy

Until weed smoke & a concert make us remember BLK people aint never been human here

Aint we beautiful, those that survived the purging

Those that spill, body splay beautiful from a hateful song

This swing sweet sweet low spiritual aint neva been inclusive

Whatch know about larynx & baton

How you sing him crow in the key of Emmett Till

What fever fuss you awake?

Who else got copd anxiety?

Call it what it is: Post traumatic slave syndrome

Call it land tax until homeless

Call it abortion turned sterilization

Aint no lie like the one against our stillborn children

Aint no lie like the many that shaped our babies into mute cattle

Prison industrial complex reverberates in the tune of elementary

4th graders are the easiest targets

A Math Problem:

If 1 woman, got a 7 Mac 11

& 2 heaters for the beemer

How many Congress seats will NRA lose?

How many votes will it take for a sexual predator

to lift the White House off her feet?

I am practicing this aim

This tongue a shoestring strafe

My tongue say:

Melt the wires of Guantanamo

Yasin Bey coming home aint what we thought it would be

Aint no solace in Mecca

Even Spike Lee left Brooklyn

Here, a slumlord will leave my front steps

Full of rat piss &AirBnB my neighbors apartment

for half my take home pay

Unhinge the city of Rikers

Bring back the reapers

Give them the loot & the stoop

Yea, they good at killin but so was Jefferson.

I mean Washington. I mean CIA. I mean Cointelpro.

I mean they mimic your Grace. I mean its a 2017, America.

A new new year &your face lift be botched.

Mahogany L. Browne is author of Redbone (nominated for NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Works) and co-editor of forthcoming anthology The Break Beat Poets: Black Girl Magic. She is an internationally touring poet and Artistic Director of Urban Word NYC, Program Director of BLM@Pratt, Poetry Program Director at the Nuyorican Poets Caf.

*All biographies were provided by Tabia Yapp and the participating poets.