as children we ate watermelons over trash bagsin my aunt’s backyardfilled with so many black & blue-eyed crowsit stopped being a spell & they’d eat what fell between our fingers& our skin stayed onwe’d get yelled at for spitting seeds at each other saliva thick with redwe made a war from the sweetest thingsthe flies made a mess of our dancingthe flies made a dance in our messesour mamas thanked God it was not the blood feareda watermelon’s vine would wrap itself around youif you fell asleep under them watching meteorsmelons make magic under midnight moonsI once grew watermelons that flowers could singif I sat there singingthe way my aunts break out into song I mean beautifullike that the flowers would start movingI’m so free I make a river on both sides of my moutha fruit full of kinshipit once grew wild and bitter in the Kalahari Desertthe grandmama of all the watermelons the first watermy grandmamas share a bowl every Sundayand drip the juice on the floorbut never stain a solethe only fruit the dead can eat
what the angels eat
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- November 30, 2024
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“what the angels eat” from A LITTLE BUMP IN THE EARTH: by Tyree Daye.
Published by Copper Canyon Press on April 2, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Tyree Daye.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Tyree Daye was raised in Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the author of the poetry collections a little bump in the earth (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), Cardinal (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), and River Hymns (American Poetry Review, 2017), winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. A Cave Canem fellow and a Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellow, Daye is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, a Kate Tufts Award finalist, and a 2021 Paterson Prize finalist. He was the 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-In-Residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and received an Amy Clampitt Residency. Daye is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In January 2023, Daye served as Guest Editor of the Poem-a-Day series.
“These graceful and intelligent poems honor those who have come before through the vital work of remembering.”
—Publishers Weekly, STARRED review
“Daye’s poems insist that the spiritual and the physical are not separate. He is a writer who celebrates incarnational existence. . . . a little bump in the earth is a heartbreaking and heart lifting book of elegy and beauty in which, thankfully, the dead do not stay dead.”
—Todd Davis, New York Journal of Books
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