Nick DePascal

Early in the first part of his recent book, The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing to his former students at Howard University, reflects on what made this particular cohort and their relationship with him special, honing in on Howard’s importance as a university “founded to combat the long shadow of slavery—a shadow that we understood had not yet retreated.”

...

Walking along the river’s edge,

The water level low this year

The receded river reveals

.

A lifetime’s worth of accumulated

Garbage. A bicycle straddles

A burned out, gutted blue

.

Sofa, spilling its soggy innards

To a sun close and ragged.

I step through tall grasses

.

And reeds and feel the ground

...

Three sisters

Sit in judgment-

Darkly, mutely on the mesa,

Apportioned their appointed part

In the cosmic monotony.

.

A man is shot dead

On ancestral lands (now

“Ran” by the national park

service) praying to

The four directions, hand

On his chest & over

The heart. Belligerent

At the command to leave,

...