Earth is reeking. And we obsidian-backed, wingedcling to the funk in a language that never fails: Peace vibes.Wonderment & all that pimp shit. An ambrosia we inventto savor roses through the stink. Like witchgrass effacinga wheat bed with a gangster lean, bias paralyzestheir country—white flame searing through red & blue cells.Branded into whosoever drinks. America, the perforatedstraw in a single fold; stop creasing my visage with grief!If only in the beginning someone said: I wish us the sun& everything under it. Perhaps then we’d survive by friendship,happiness, justice, love. Say: Together we can do the necessary.If only from the jump pled everyone at the house party:Mothership, teach me how to be neighborly. How to gather lightin. Then release. Mother, please teach me how to be human.
Dear Mothership,
Feature Date
- May 7, 2024
Series
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
Copyright © 2024 by Marcus Wicker.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Marcus Wicker is the author of Silencer (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)—winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award—and Maybe the Saddest Thing (Harper Perennial, 2012), selected by D.A. Powell for the National Poetry Series. A 2023 – 2024 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow, his honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Award, a Pushcart Prize, and Ruth Lilly Fellowship, as well as fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Cave Canem. Wicker’s poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Oxford American, and Poetry Magazine. He is an Associate Professor at the University of Memphis, where he teaches in the MFA program.
Winter 2024
Baltimore, Maryland
Johns Hopkins University
Editor in Chief
Dora Malech
Senior Editor
Kosiso Ugwueze
Managing Editor
Phoebe Oathout
The mission of The Hopkins Review is to publish today's vital voices and visions in literature, culture, criticism, public-facing scholarship, and the arts. Established in 1943 by Elliott Coleman and relaunched in 2007 by John T. Irwin, it celebrated its 15th year of continuous publishing in 2022 with a commitment to creative excellence and its dynamic, diverse, and inclusive present and future.
Contributors to The Hopkins Review have included literary and scholarly luminaries such as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Harold Bloom, Stephanie Burt, Erica Dawson, Stephen Dixon, Denis Donoghue, Claudia Emerson, Tony Eprile, Marilyn Hacker, Terrance Hayes, Vanessa Hua, Millard Kaufman, Frank Kermode, Richard A. Macksey, Jill McCorkle, Shane McCrae, Alice McDermott, Carl Phillips, Natalie Shapero, A. E. Stallings, Adrienne Su, Colm Tóibín, Helen Vendler, Claire Vaye Watkins, Afaa M. Weaver, C. Dale Young, and many others.
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
