King Me

By Roger Reeves

Copper Canyon Press has long been a supporter of young and emerging poets, and we continue that tradition with Roger Reeves’ highly anticipated first work, King Me.

When Reeves was young, he was a Pentecostal preacher. He also hung out in a barbershop, and listened to the "barbershop talk." From these experiences, he absorbed distinct cadences and ways of speaking.

After Reeves left the Pentecostal church, he funneled his verbal energy into poetry.

Reeves studied rocket science at Princeton and is now working on a Ph.D. in Chicago.

When asked what his book was about, he said "What it means to be a black man in American society."

Theme in the book includes sister's bipolar disorder, and the traumatic undertones of her condition going untreated.

Title comes from when Reeves would play checkers with her sister and she would holler "King me! King me!" He loved that swagger and demand.

Cover art is owned by rapper Jay-Z

• Language: English
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Release date: Aug 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781619321366

Book preview

Pledge

I, Roger Reeves, hereby pledge that I will not come back

to this city, if this city will not come back to me.

I leave the children waving their flags and wrists

at a dark sky, without worrying about the coconut tree

dropping its wintered fruit upon their heads.

I leave the man with his one leg turned backward

to walk this street twice as pure contradiction.

I leave the heron on the roof, the dachshunds

scrambling over the cobblestone in their black

patent-leather shoes, and the flies to open wide

and swallow as much melon as they can before evening comes

and that same melon is between my lips.

I leave puddles at the end of driveways

and in them, to float, tiny fronds of a flower

that I cannot name but the woman beside me can.

I leave the fresh bread in wire baskets and the old women

to point at the rolls they wish to place in their mouths.

I leave the opera house, its green domes draped in gold,

the cobbler and his glue, the mechanic and his belly,

and yes, I leave rain to wash every bare foot in this city.

I leave the children’s thirst on the metro

next to a pink pen that no longer holds ink.

I leave the numbers by which I know this city,

its epistemologies and apartheids, its mornings,

its slips of paper, its slivers and its seeds,

its dry floors and short showers, its roosters

that cannot distinguish between the blue of morning

and the blue of night. I leave the coffee spilled

onto the floor of the bus, your hand between my legs—

I leave, I leave—this will surely leave a stain.

Before Diagnosis

The lake is dead for a second time

this January. And no matter

how many geese lay their warm breasts

against the ice or fly across

its hard chest, it doesn’t break,

or sink, or open up and swallow them.

The ice is frozen water.

There is no metaphor for exile.

Even if these trees continue to shake

the crows from their branches,

my sister is still farther away from her mind

than we are from each other,

sitting on opposite ends of a park bench

waiting for evening to swallow us whole.

In the last moments of a depressive, a sun.

In the last moments of a sun, my sister

says a man is chasing a goose through the snow.

Cross Country

When I ran, it rained niggers. Early in October—

the first creases of autumn, a flag-weary sky

in which yellow birds, in flight, slip through the breast-

bone of God and tear at the coarse threads

that keep the morning knit tightly around his heart.

What was it that they sang about the light, their tongues,

the thistles they pluck from the bitter bark

of an allthorn then thrust into the breast of whatever god

or good animal requires eating, a good piercing?

These blond bodies thrashing about above me

were death’s idea of the morning passing. Here,

below this golden altar, the making and unmaking

of my body. The kettle-clank and souring sumac

of a man yelling at the light slipping in and out

of my mouth. What name must I carry above the dust

of this field? Bruised ear, blank body, purple tongue, bloody

God bleeding do you hear me? Deer piss and poison ivy

made pungent by the dew and morning sun rising, do you hear me?

When I ran, it rained niggers. In a ditch along the road,

a pair of wild boars, slain and laid tusk to tail, point,

as if required, in two directions at once, toward my body

pressing the last bits of a hunter’s moon into the tar

of this road and away from the meadow-red light coming

up through the chaff rising above this hectored field

and the man yelling. Nigger in the cicadas tuning up

to tear the morning into tatters. Nigger in the squawk

and clatter of a hen complaining of a hand reaching

below her bottom