for Wanda Coleman

“What is an American Sonnet besides fourteen lines, looser in its musicality and inventive in its ability to transform into a handheld microphone, a makeshift podium, or the people’s anthem?” 

– Mahogany Browne, This Is The Country We’ve Come To

america(n)                    noun. (geographic.) (ideological.) (identity.)       

1.a large-scale agricultural, socio-political, cultural, lingual, and technological operation 

in  the americas where “citizens” enslaved people were are legally defined 

as personal property (chattel) of an oligarchy the owner.     

2. “citizens” enslaved individuals as commodities—bought, sold, traded,  

or inherited— forced into unpaid, lifelong labor to produce cash crops like cotton, sugar,   and tobacco, their status inherited by their children. 

3. “citizens” enslaved people were are considered legal property, 

similar to livestock or  tools. they are had no [conditioned 

to believe they have] legal rights, personal freedom, or  control 

over their own bodies or families.

4. a system maintained through extreme, systematic violence and fear, 

with overseers police using the whip guns and judicial entities 

to enforce work and discipline. 

5. what they call these conditions we are living in.

sonnet noun. (blues.) (soul.) (jazz.) (funkadelic.) (country.) (r&b.) (pop.) (rock n’ roll.) 

(house.) (hip-hop.) (ours.)

1. for Wanda Coleman, who is of the (american literary) canon and also not (yet); who wrote the book American Sonnets; who awaits her seat at the table.

2. to forge a lineage – before Terrance Hayes, to Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson, Phyllis Wheatley

3. Wanda’s proximity to anger, and my own. its utility. delicious foreplay, the rage dormant in my belly. a sleeping volcano.

4. from 1850 to 1860, harriet tubman sang these three songs: “wade in the water,” “swing low, sweet chariot,” and “follow the drinking gourd” while freeing slaves on the underground railroad. these were the only three songs she sang. she changed their tempo to tell them whether it was safe to come out or not. 

5. into this ruin, from pico union, from the warehouse fires blooming across los angeles—I write for her. Wanda, who is not dead. 

6. Or, anger is the fourth song.