president Barack Obama in the poem. It would be embarrassingly reductive to read these absences as mirror representations of Smith’s true political beliefs. In fact, not a single inaugurated president appears in the poem at all. This dearth points to the poem’s most democratic of declarations: Smith’s presidents are not elected by the people. Smith’s presidents are the people. These persons are praiseworthy not for the offices they hold, but for the intimacy they institute as they uphold others. Perhaps this is one of Smith’s grandest talents: diving into the pool of a poem at one angle (for example, “my president,” in the singular sense) only to emerge in a new framework (the multitudes of presidents) that makes us see poetry and its meanings anew. For example, consider “fall poem.” Its title subconsciously implies a traditional nature poem, idyllic and dreamy, where we are lulled by imagery of the changing seasons. Yet the piece is anything but: the leaves have done their annual shimmy. now the streetlight with no soft green curtain cuts a silver blade across my bed & my body. i didn’t want to start with leaves even though I love how the trees turn the color of aunts & should-train-line to ground each October. no one wants to hear a poem about fall; much prefer the fallen body, something easy to mourn, body cut out of the light body lit up with bullets. see how easy it is to bring up bullets?
is it possible to ban guns? even from this poem? i lie in the light, body split by light, room too bright for sleep thinking of the leaf-colored bodies, their weekly fall In a tonal shift tectonic enough to render us with literary whiplash, falling leaves are juxtaposed starkly against fallen bodies. One can almost hear the soft, resonant echo of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” Furthermore, in the sharp pronouncement that “no one / want to hear a poem about fall; much prefer the fallen / body,” Smith draws attention to the fetishization of suffering and violence. And in their use of fall as an allegory for gun violence, we must grapple with how accepted, how easily environmental and inevitable that collective unwarranted death, particularly of colored bodies, has become in the United States, almost as natural seeming as the shimmy of bright leaves from an oak. Hence, Homie is not just an anthem. It is also an elegy. A requiem. An eloquent and yet guttural moan, where, as Smith writes in “for Andrew,” there’s “nothing left to leave me / but sound.” The poet alerts us to the collection’s elegiac enterprise when earlier in “how many of us have them?” they write: “the wind is tangled / with the dust of the dead homies, carrying us over / to them.” And then, in lines that slice through the skin: “i miss them. all the dead. how young. how silly / to miss what you will become.” This breath of anguish leaks out in every single line of “fall poem,” a funeral procession that proclaims that as much as Homie is full of humor and hugs, it’s also heckled by haunts, alive and dead. In fact, the elegy of the collection begins even 117
