The Collection Plate

Poems

Kendra Allen

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780063048485
• eBook ISBN:
  9780063048508
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

A deeply wrought and joyful debut poetry collection from an exciting new voice 

Looping exultantly through the overlapping experiences of girlhood, Blackness, sex, and personhood in America, award-winning essayist and poet Kendra Allen braids together personal narrative and cultural commentary, wrestling with the beauty and brutality to be found between mothers and daughters, young women and the world, Black bodies and white space, virginity and intrusion, prison and freedom, birth and death. Most of all, The Collection Plate explores both how we collect and erase the voices, lives, and innocence of underrepresented bodies—and behold their pleasure, pain, and possibility

Both formally exciting and a delight to read, The Collection Plate is a testament to Allen's place as the voice of a generation—and a witness to how we come into being in the twenty-first century. 

Happy 100th birthday

This

is my first time

at your headstone

& I keep remembering

the day the laws came

to pick me

up from the steps

I told them to take me

to you. Dipped them

into backstreets to get

to the back

of Haas out front.

It’s nighttime.

You been sleep.

And cops at yo door

ain’t an indication

to wake up. They came

in. You told them bye.

You let me sit in

the dark to cry heavy

to call on Our Father, I’m sure

I forgot this was

a kind of home too.

I’m sure I forgot

this was a kind of

home too as I wipe

mud out of you

-r plot’s large intestines.

Like I’m planting

a recall in your back

and you’d remember

one of our names

and you’d become

a baby doll. Re-charging.

If I dug your grave

this is what I’d look like.

Stepping on so many

bodies

to get to yours,

just to find out,

you happy.

To find out you happy

I barely realized

I could miss you

and the Sweet Georgia

Brown plates packed

with mac, cabbage,

& other smothered things

We like to suffocate that way

and suffer that way

That’s why we like to stand in

that line on Sundays

and that’s why they put you

in a nursing home

let the juice spill, down

your chin

and that’s why they let you die

when you couldn’t even

say nothing back

all yo history in adult

diapers. All yo history

in rooms with none of you

in it.

All yo history

in rooms with none of you

in it

and I go back

to re-visit it

acknowledge our fabric.

It was a suggestion

but I need you

again—

to write.

I’m sorry nothing comes

before that need

to remember everything.

The house is now

refurbished, remodeled,

better. All the words

we wanted for your brain.

All your stuff sold and

for what

a vacation.

The yellow gone.

Everything in

the garage, gone.

The chair, gone.

And I can see it

all from the window

of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Publisher’s Note
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Evening service
• Look at the material
• I’m the note held toward the end
• Company is coming over
• Solace by earl
• If I’m not my mother
• The invention of the Super Sadness! was an accident
• I hate when niggas die
• Our Father’s house (i)
• #FreeMyNiggas but free my niggas
• A trilogy everyone watches
• My sex wet
• I come to you as humbly as I know how
• The many times I failed to defend my mother to Our Father
• We had died real quick
• Learning to tread water
• Collection plates
• Our Father’s house (ii)
• All the things that stretch out my lower back
• Naked & afraid
• Afraid & naked
• The water cycle
• Practical life skills
• Melatonin
• Our Father’s house (iii)
• Been back before
• The Super Sadness! feels like anger which feels like
• Let’s leave
• I ain’t never baked a thing from scratch a day in my life
• Our Father’s house (iv)
• Chihuahuas
• I’m tired of yo ass always crying
• If you throw me in this water what you’re telling me is you want me dead
• Most calvaries have dead people
• The maybe memory
• Happy 100th birthday
• Who say good folk ain’t supposed to die
• When I eulogize Our Father
• “No one had told her about the end of love”
• Leave me alone
• If I am the Father
• Birth of black bishop
• Our Father’s house (v)
• Sermon notes
• Gifting back bread & barren land
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Also by Kendra Allen
• Copyright
• About the Publisher