#marcus wicker

[firstfullmoon]

Marcus Wicker, “Prayer on Aladdin’s Lamp”

[tiaochan]

from Dear Mothership by Marcus Wicker

[lunchboxpoems]

ATLIEN FREESTYLES OVER “WHEELZ OF STEEL”

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.          —Toni Morrison

A paralytic sickness   bias  white flame burning thru red & blue cells A ring around   the revolver barrel   roulette wheelz    Russian clan- destine war   imagined happened &    thus foreseeable   Moral schism hard for them to swallow as cod liver oil: filet mignon    backmasked: rods & cotton   scalps & cod   Give a woman a fish & watch her envision an end to famine   [which is the beginning of living upright]   Teach a man to fish a market   & he will lure you w/   the chummy glint of an iced out life as he guts your public for trophies   Do check for trout lips   at mention of any “system” | counter-   clockwise prison   built to omit marrow in its trappings   E.g. shackles into handcuffs   into plantation industries into wireless   tethers into “job growth”   Landlord says raining dollar bills where i hear bills   dollar   raining   When i say precipitous one of us pictures a cliff     though we share the same broken     elevator pulley-     steel eyez If only in the beginning someone said   i wish us both to do more than survive

MARCUS WICKER

[lifeinpoetry]

When I let the idyllic quiet

thistle—when a boorish hiccup engulfs me, Jonah-like— when all I can think about is all I hold dear, what I deserve

to hold, & whether I am worthy of being held, I think of my country’s undying dispute: Who crossed whose boundaries

imposing relief? Who’s snowing who? It wasn’t me. It’s only me.

— Marcus Wicker, from “In the Winter of My Inaugural Anxiety,” published in The Adroit Journal

[cgcpoems]

I'm wondering what it takes to kill a thing's root.

from “About the Time Two Ducks Advised Me on Matters of the Flesh” by Marcus Wicker, in Maybe The Saddest Thing

[blacksandbooks]

Silencer

Marcus Wicker

ISBN 132871554X

“Tough talk for tough times. Silencer is both lyrical and merciless–Wicker’s mind hums in overdrive, but with the calm and clarity of a marksman. You have to read these poems.”   —Tim Seibles, author of One Turn Around the Sun and finalist for the National Book Award A suburban park, church, a good job, a cocktail party for the literati: to many, these sound like safe places, but for a young black man these insular spaces don’t keep out the news—and the actual threat—of gun violence and police brutality, or the biases that keeps body, property, and hope in the crosshairs. Continuing conversations begun by Citizen and Between the World and Me, Silencer sings out the dangers of unspoken taboos present on quiet Midwestern cul-de-sacs and in stifling professional settings, the dangers in closing the window on “a rainbow coalition of cops doing calisthenics around/a six-foot, three-hundred-fifty-pound man, choked back into the earth for what/looked a lot, to me, like sport.” Here, the language and cadences of hip-hop and academia meet prayer—these poems are crucibles, from which emerge profound allegories and subtle elegies, sharp humor and incisive critiques. “There is not a moment in this book when you are allowed to forget the complexities of a black man's life in America. These poems evoke so much—strength, beauty, passion, fear. There is the quiet, ironic pleasure of life on a cul-de-sac juxtaposed with the tensions of always wondering when a police officer's gun or fists might get in the way of the black body. The stylistic range of these poems, the wit, and the intelligence of them offers so much to be admired. There is nothing silent about Silencer. What an outstanding second book from Marcus Wicker.” —Roxane Gay “Marcus Wicker’s masterful and hard-hitting second collection Silencer is exactly the book we need in this time of malfeasance, systemic violence, and the double talk that obfuscates it all. Wicker’s poems have the wit and rhythmic muscle to push back against the institutional flim-flam. He writes the kinds of vital, clear-eyed poems we can turn to when codeswitching slogans and online power fists no longer get the job done. These are poems whose ink is made from anger and quarter notes. They remind us that to remain silent in the face of aggression is to be complicit and to be complicit is not an option for any of us.” —Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke and finalist for the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize “Silencer is an important book of American poetry: wonderfully subtle, wholly original, and subversive. Politics and social realities aside, this is foremost a book that delights in language, how it sounds to the ear and plays to the mind.  We have suburban complacency played against hip-hop resistance, Christian prayers uttered in the face of dread violence, real meaning pitted against materialism, and love, in its largest measure, set against ignorance.  To say Silencer is a tour de force would be an understatement. What a work of true art this is, and what a gift Marcus Wicker has given to us.” —Maurice Manning, author of One Man’s Dark and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize "Silencer disarms and dazzles with its wisdom and full-throated wit. Wicker’s highly-anticipated second collection snaps to attention with a soundtrack full of salty swagger and a most skillful use of formal inventions that’ll surely knock you out. Here in these pages, sailfish and hummingbirds assert their frenetic movements on a planet simmering with racial tensions, which in turn forms its own kind of bopping and buoyant religion. What a thrill to read these poems that provoke and beg for beauty and song-calling into the darkest of nights." —Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Lucky Fish and poetry editor at Orion Magazine “With Silencer, Marcus Wicker writes a country, and that country is this country, these United States, right now, and that country is also black. In poem after poem, and with one of the best ears in the game, Wicker demonstrates the simple and difficult truth that we, as Americans, make each other, inescapably—Wicker’s America is a black America because it is America. But Silencer isn’t, for all that, a place of congratulatory hugs and campfire songs. How could it be? It is a place where we are seen: ‘Black squirrels, / they fit in, get along. Know no one. / They see other black squirrels & run.’” —Shane McCrae, author of In the Language of My Captor and The Animal Too Big to Kill

[salttigerpress]

Given the cure for wealth is wealth, give us the generic shit.

Marcus Wicker, Blue Faces, in Literary Hub.

[missedstations]

“Close Encounters” - Marcus Wicker

I was a real cute kid. Ask anybody. My father likes to tell a story about a modeling scout

who spotted us out midday shopping at the Briarwood Mall. Imagine five-year-old me,

all sailor stripes & junior afro, doing a full pull-up on the magazine kiosk: Got any Keats? No doubt

something I’d heard watching Jeopardy with granny, but it mattered not

to the tickled pink lady. Oh, you’re just soooo sweet! What a cutie-sweet! she decreed, handing dad

her flowery card. It wouldn’t stop there. My 10th birthday, whole neighborhood invited,

I strutted down the stairs in a white sports coat like, Look, folks. In case you’re wondering,

I’m the host! My mother told Mrs. Holbrook He was born full-grown with a briefcase. As I’m sure

you will be, little sewn seed, undone. Future me. Dear son, the defacing starts much later.

After desegregation sparks the awkward clutch of Coach clutches on campus busses, but before

the riots in Baltimore. It started a few days before I turned thirty, Invisibility. Home from teaching

the sons & daughters of Indiana farm hands it’s ok to write poems, same briefcase slung

tired across wrinkled linen, you’d have thought I accosted her—Maria—when I stooped down

to pluck my mother a pair of magenta tulips     from her own thriving garden, & she shrieked

Why are you staring at my lawn! Maria who used to slide teen-me a twenty to occupy her

daughter in the playpen while she grabbed a bottle of Bordeaux from the basement

before the real nanny arrived. She must have seen straight through me, into the distant past, alternate

reality when your grandparents’ neighboring residence would have been a servants’, & I

in that moment, for the first time, unsaw her. As primer. A kind of manila cardstock

I’d failed to imprint. Son, sometimes this happens. It happens in gated spaces when you look like

a lock pick. See the 44th president. Scratch that. It happens in gated spaces, as the lone

locksmith. & if I’m being honest, the happy way things are going between

me & E., you may well resemble him.   Don’t count yourself precious. Truth is,

too soon, you will bend down to rob a few bright blossoms from your own land &

look away from the earth to make certain you haven’t been ogled.

This phantom guilt applied to a nape through the eyes of every blind Maria,

here’s the key: try not to let it die. Now run to the closest mirror, quickly

remember how sweet the fleeting love.