Available Oct. 10, 2021

My Fellow Gentrifiers
for Anna
The downtown feathers are clever in the ways they erect
their nests. No, they’re artsy, no, cagey. Balloons stitched
in their typhoons. Key to the citadel, scissor-tail to cut
the ribbons. The downtown wings are simply ingenious,
no, ingenuous. Roosting inside buildings & deciduous
trees. Inside clinker-brick rooks in drive-thru cemeteries
where visitors are greeted by a handless Jesus, & statue
of two doves nibbling each other’s napes. They take shoe
laces that didn’t make it over power lines, pink & blue
hair ties, fasten our limbs to a spit & roast us over fire.
The downtown talons are talented, no resourceful. Sharp.
Sharp. Shark. No, foxy in their Red Wing Boots. Right
wings. Wily in how they swoop down, carry off, carry on.

Race to the Riot
GEORGE MONROE (1916-2001)

every sunday we stole coal from the freight cars
to throw at the white kids and they did the same
we didn’t know what hate was we just wanted
to emulate what we saw our folks do we threw
and threw and threw in the name of our landlords
and they threw at us like the land was their lord
that had to be where i got my throwing arm
where i learned to take a licking and keep going
i remember getting stoned in my right leg it left
a mark darker than my eyes my skin or a bruise
it made me smirk but boy did it hurt the best
thing was when our throws landed they turned
darker than the coldest of hearts and thanks
to our sooty hands our teeth were our only white parts

Back Cover Comments

I have never in my life read a poet, a writer, an American artist so beautifully manipulate futurist proclamations and the minutiae of memory. This book is elite art born of Clemonce Heard’s stank genius. Tragic City is here to break the unbroken and possibly shift how place and language can work. Stunning. — Kiese Laymon

Though the nostalgic path that is memory often catalyzes a poets’ lyric search for both language and measured rhythms which define their immediate presence in the world, longing alone will not guarantee an end to the oblivion. One must attempt, as Clemonce Heard does here in Tragic City, to confront the intractable reality that smashes illusions of any civilized code; one must “[groove] with the upright history / of a people.” Heard provides many occasions for readers to meditate on the Tulsa Race Massacre — not as an exercise in “wokeness,” but as a means of launching grace. These poems model benevolence and presence, and I for one will return again and again to their virtues and music.
— Major Jackson, Judge, 2020 Anhinga-Robert Dana Prize for Poetry

Clemonce Heard’s penetrative and muscular debut probes the blatant brutality perpetrated by white men from the towering perch of their self-imposed birthright — with unerring focus on the “tragic city” of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where, in 1921, that mercenary privilege resulted in the utter decimation of the flourishing black community of Greenwood, and the deaths of hundreds of its citizens. Since the massacre is still unknown to so many, Heard urgently transports the reader into the moments of the tragedy, reviving the people and places that gave Greenwood its pulse — then moves into the disquieting present day, where the circumstances that led to that titanic loss still exist, and still resound. — Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art