Airea D. Matthews

AIREA D. MATTHEWS is the author of Simulacra, winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her work has appeared in Tin House, e Los Angeles Review of Books, Callaloo, Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, American Poets, and elsewhere. She was awarded a Rona Ja e Foundation Writers’ Award, a Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Kresge Literary Arts award as well as fellow- ships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the James Merrill House. One of Matthews’s current projects includes a cross-genre book that explores politics, poverty, race, and class. She is an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College.

Airea D. Matthew headshot

Black Ecstatic Ode

Praise to the father holding his sleeping daughter on the 52nd
Street trolley
To the daughter sleeping through the pothole thrum
Praise to the diabetic with shorn feet and sugarcane blood
To the shooting nerve through the left hip and lower spine
To those flying gods on their routes
Praise to the red-headed Rasta and his ganja-laced T-shirt
To the Vietnam vet at Cass Corridor holding his sign
To the sign which reads: “I’m not homeless, I’m just Black”
Praise to the barbers trying to calm the fatherless boys in their chairs
To the mothers trying not to overhear this soothing
To soothing

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