DANEZ SMITH

they’re back! the babies are back! opened the window this morning, as it’s the time of year for opening the windows, and there they are! the babies! laughing! crying! arguing! laughing! cussing! running! getting in line! getting into fights! laughing! singing! singing! the kids singing down the slide or swinging singing a song stitching the same air they slice making half-moons with light-up shoes. they’re singing! laughing! laughing! playing! The children are playing! someone tell the future, tell the earth, tell July, tell the former-children, the number -one enemy of children, that the children are back! they are laughing! we have not killed them all! there are still children! there’s still time! there are babies and they are playing playing playing and the sun is giggling on their faces and the moon hasn’t yet gone her way she’s standing by her door, counting the children so she can balance the books again through their windows tonight. the children! the book of the dead is not yet final. outside, the rabbits are ready to rob the gardens, the squirrels are back on their mess, the dogs have been evicted back to the yards. and the babies are back. don’t tell the country where the children are. please let the babies see September. please tell my country our children are gone. tell the guns and their husbands that we lost the babies in the snow. tell the politicians their prayers worked, they don’t have to think of the children anymore. i hear the babies though the window. lord, let them stay the only sound. the babies are alive! hide them before America finds out. now what will we do about Time?

How does a life accumulate? How does it write itself on skin, and leave its mark on our insides? Danez Smith reckons with these questions through their explosively present poetry, which mines humor as much as pain. Following their acclaimed poetry collections Homie and Don’t Call Us Dead, their newest compilation of poems, Bluff, will publish in 2024. A scribe of a Black, queer experience, Smith pens a summer dispatch from their Minneapolis home.