In A Rare Moment of Nostalgia My Father Reflects on Obama’s Inauguration

I don’t want to start with the bullet or how you wanted to be president because he was or how in my dreams I can watch the wind surge clean from one side of your skull to the other or how I never wanted you to be president or how hope is its own kind of plague or trepanning or how round rooms make your mother dizzy or how often you forget she has her own knuckles or how trepanning means carving a door in the skull or entrances or broken windows or blood or how much white men hope a well-placed wound can solve or how nobody brings you to god or how only your mother goes to church or how she gripped her knuckles to marble praying or how when he got out of the car your mother clutched my shoulder into a string of bruises or how you have her face or how the skull is a round room or how he got out the car or hope or how I hid the bruises because each of them wore your face                I am saying you looked just like your mother when you were sixteen       you wanted to be president       in my dreams     you are already outside the car     when hope opens the wound     fills the whole round room with blood

Self Portrait as Curtis Jackson C. 2003

Where I am from if that much light enters you they just call you a saint
I stay hungry and laced with desire      collecting teeth by song or bat
White doorag keep me godly      bargain bin halo stay reppin my holy
till the death of me haha but I don’t die I hold death and flex everything
till the bullet waltz up in my bicep      I want revenge so I become it haha
Y’all niggas think      Imma fuck around and succumb      I whip yo head
Break yo face open and let platinum molars jewel my knuckles haha
Trust if some shit pop off       I know my options I stay rocking the vest
Righteous with my nine and spit flaming swords never make a mistake
and think I have ever worn surrender willingly      I put a heaven in a nigga for fuckin wit me       I sent a lot of niggas home and keep my waves fresh sippin on they momma        tears nowitsclearimhereforarealreason because I was born in a broken window andhegothitlikeigothitbutheaintfuckin God.

All The Proof I Need That Prince Isn’t Really Dead

Let’s suppose
the crow is only a crow by virtue of
presumption       the impossible task
estimating the light inside the presumed
dark beyond our eyes’ capacity     a legion
of fires    enough light to name a dove
by extension the chalice of embers
is never empty        even when we are
dead we are never dead only far
Prince is not dead only somewhere
that never knew it needed rain
some city too dim to be a proper heaven
sideeyeing Saturn’s thin crown of dust
and less deserving myths      I wish him
a gown that stretches for decades
for the sun to shed its weary gold
and dress the whole world violet
before the end of it all leaves only
the illumination      the uncountable doves

Julian Randall is a Living Queer Black poet from Chicago. A Pushcart Prize nominee he has received fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT and the Watering Hole and was the 2015 National College Slam (CUPSI) Best Poet. Julian is the curator of Winter Tangerine Review’s Lineage of Mirrors and a poetry editor for Freezeray Magazine. He is also a cofounder of the Afrolatinx poetry collective Piel Cafe. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Nepantla, Rattle Poets Respond, Ninth Letter, Vinyl, Puerto del Sol and African Voices among others. He is a candidate for his MFA in Poetry at Ole Miss.