I Can't Talk about the Trees Without the Blood

Winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize For me, trees will never be just trees. They will also and always be a row of gallows from which Black bodies once swung. This is an image that I cannot escape, but one that I have learned to lean into as I delve into personal and public histories, explicating memories and muses around race, elegy, family, and faith by making and breaking forms as well as probing mythology, literary history, my own ancestry, and, yes, even Rihanna. I Can't Talk About the Trees without the Blood, because I cannot engage with the physical and psychic landscape of the South without seeing the braided trauma of the broken past--I will always see blood on the leaves.