wild petrichor, smell of wild rain, caught in the body, wild disrespectful,

Trace Howard DePass

(t)his was the one answer i found. i forget to drink water. another omnitemporal question, this is the one that brought me to answer, how can i be black and wanting to be referred to & not mention my sister’s, my mother’s, my theydie’s, my homies deaths in particular? friend is an evergreen term in temperate cities. my good friend called to tell me what happened & when i get these calls i forget to drink water because i forget water actually exists & i remember that i am someone who gets called. on. i suppose i wasn’t water but was. in. deep waters and i’ve missed a call several times. water in my throat, now at any now, there are some people on the phone documenting a world happening to them & there are some people that need to listen & there we are echoing already gone & trying to leave this place & elsewhere yet can’t go. (t)here is no where. water in my throat i waded in & capitalized on & made recyclable for other content in order to survive at anywhen. i had the capacity for calls & my phone bill ain’t go to collections this month as water collects → my students dap me in the hallway because i know how it is outside these hallways. it adds a gold foil leaf to me being the strong jawn along with shawty, we make capacity & are not like these other boos. i heard grief as a form of love unable to give of itself unable to give of self, a bottled love, unable. am i drive or crushed by flow? water in my throat, i waded in since last election, since last big man who took over, i asked where, with what, do we rebuild together from here? Grief, water in my throat, if you are the unrequited eye of all my life & all the love i have left to give, lost, trippin, cycling, if i mounted you down, steady, changeless on this black lowboy all ← bottled up & put a cap on you, would devotion pour me godless → as it did before the call to, when, for the first time, lost, i cried your water?

(t)here’s altar candles & a vigil’s worth, cheers to rebirth, here’s room enough for forgiveness to live & let go, intent: to be cleaned by flood.

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Trace Howard DePass is the recipient of the 2024 Emily Dickinson Prize from Poetry Society. He is the author of self-portrait as the space between us (PANK 2018) & BOOTless (Diode Editions 2024). His work has been featured with Poetry Foundation, Ours Poetica, NPR’s The Takeaway, SAND, Split This Rock, Poetry Project, Bettering American Poetry, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. DePass is a fellow with Poets House, Obsidian, and Teachers & Writers.

“Dense. Synaptic. All energy and brilliance. The sonic life of a word lengthened into a new structure for thinking: ‘Armorial Time’s climb paradiddles, / drumming child out childhood, nephew].’ Channeling so many frequencies of language and insight, fast through him like light in the alive-alive circuitry that is BOOT-less. Trace DePass makes me think of an exquisite Gwendolynian sound meeting some of the deep, imagistic transmissions of Joel Dias-Porter or Bob Kaufman. Emanation, kiss, plea. See: ‘is this flatline moving me, failed, forward, / feathered closer to grace each time; going / mother after mother i wake up as / a dove picking lilies from her black i…’”
—aracelis girmay

“Formidably inventive and wild. DePass’s poems grieve, provoke, memorialize, and inquire after in a language and rhythm thrillingly unlike anything else.”
—Jenny Xie

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