Poem-a-Day - "In the Event Of" by Shane McCrae

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December 1, 2021 

In the Event Of

Shane McCrae

Officer how you know I’m dancing is the body

-cam. Look, I’m riding centuries of whips, the first half



Of the ghost, arms out the window up, the second half

Arms flat on the pavement, palms down, now the ghost is whole



My arms stretched forward, like I’m bowing, but if I

Were standing, stretched above my head. Officer how



You know I’m dead is that I seem to bow to you

Copyright © 2021 by Shane McCrae. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 1, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“I wrote this poem in protest against the almost-continuous killing of Black people by the state and its agents, and as an explanation of a gesture such agents might mistakenly think they recognize.”
Shane McCrae

Shane McCrae is the author of Cain Named the Animal, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2022. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, he teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

Sometimes I Never Suffered
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)

“what the dead know by heart” by Donte Collins
read more
“juxtaposing the black boy & the bullet)” by Danez Smith
read more

Thanks to Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read a Q&A about Kaminsky’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year
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