When Night Fills with Premature Exits

Is there a place where black men can go
to be beautiful? Is there light there? Touch?

Is there comfort or room to raise their black
sons as anything other than a future asterisk,

at risk to be asteroid or rogue planet but not
comet—to be studded with awe and clamor

and admired for radial trajectories across
a dark sky made of asphalt and moonshine

to be celebs and deemed a magnificent sight?

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“‘When Night Fills with Premature Exits’ was inspired by a meditation on Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet and the idea that Black people cannot conceive a world, even a different planet, where they are not feared. The ‘premature exits’ referred to in the title echo a lifelong sentiment that we die at too fast and at too high of a rate, especially as Black men, because we are not deemed worthy of being free or carefree and because those who target us, as Claudia Rankine eloquently puts it, have a hard time policing their imagination. The poem is written in the form of questions because I am on a daily quest for the answers myself, especially as the father of two beautifully radiant sons. I wanted to express the deeply rooted exasperation and exhaustion that comes with always trying to live and build a life in the gurgle of goodbyes.”
—Enzo Silon Surin

Black Lives Matter Anthology

“Yes, even the most
Bespectacled hallucination cruising the lanes
Of America may find her tongue curls inward”

—“American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin [Even the most kindhearted white woman]” by Terrance Hayes