Donte Collins

Written after the death of his mother, Donte Collins’s Autopsy establishes the poet as one of the most important voices in the next generation of American poetry. As the book unfolds, the reader journeys alongside the author through grief and healing. Named the Most Promising Young Poet in the country by the Academy of American Poets, Collins's work has consistently wowed audiences. Autopsy propels that work onto the national stage. In the words of the author, the book is a spring thaw -- the new life alongside the old, the good cry and the release after.

Autopsy

i am alive by luck at this point. i wonder

flock of blue jays, will come carry my black

to its final bed, which photo will be used

smile??

& suddenly your blood stiffens / retreats / rewinds / no one died

is still just wood / unchopped / reassembled / the tree, resurrected

grief is not yet a garden of thorns blooming

& look: you're just a boy / grieving until he too is a thing

his pulse is as thin & damp as an obituary panting beneath quaking

press your pulse to as many strangers as possible: to compare

they would have found dandelion seeds had they done the autopsy: they would have found a field of burning lavender had they cut her open

do you still perform autopsies on conversations

you've had lives ago? are you still wondering what gen

rakes the night sky of its stars, keeps them as leverage, as bulb-less lamps 

in the basement of me. i am alive if alive means to be a moth caught in the

hands of some childish grief. shake me to see if i am still breathing. burn

confession: the want to die is not always the want not to live, but sometimes

the want to live somewhere softer. where the tall grass lulls my body to sleep

[...] you throw a mug across the kitchen & envy its sudden dissection every word your mother last spoke scuttles like mice into your deserted head memory is a ruptured organ memory is a ghost begging for new flesh memory taps a gun to your inner skull & demands you bring back the dead

What is a dream / if not the mind pulling ribbons from my throat

Autopsy quotes

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