With gratitude and debt to Yusef Komunyakaa’s “You and I Are Disappearing,” Tyehimba Jess’s contrapuntal poems in leadbelly and Olio, Evie Shockley’s “les milles,” W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” The Fugees’ “Ready or Not,” Natalie Diaz’s “Catching Copper,” Marwa Helal’s Invasive species, George Abraham’s Birthright, Frank Ocean and André 3000’s “Pink Matter,” William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Hamlet, Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness & Being, and Bob Marley and the Wailers’ “War.”

//Isaac Ginsberg Miller is a PhD Candidate in African American Studies at Northwestern University, where he is also a member of the Poetry and Poetics Graduate Cluster. His chapbook Stopgap won The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Chapbook Contest and was published in 2019.