Inheritance

Taylor Johnson

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781948579780
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Inheritance is a black sensorium, a chapel of color and sound that speaks to spaciousness, surveillance, identity, desire, and transcendence. Influenced by everyday moments of Washington, DC living, the poems live outside of the outside and beyond the language of categorical difference, inviting anyone listening to listen a bit closer. Inheritance is about the self's struggle with definition and assumption.

CONTENTS

Since I quit that internet service,

Pennsylvania Ave. SE

Nocturne

Lincoln Town Car

Bolaño blued

Consider the deer

THIS SIGN IS AVAILABLE

self/hood

Ecclesiastes

Go-go ode

[New Impressionz Found myself a clappa]

[ABM Can’t feel my face]

Magnitude and Bond

Club 2718

A kind of wildness descends and across the expanse the attendant wind drones its one fecund song

On Ignorance

Aubade

W 177th & Broadway

This is a review for Blue in Green by Miles Davis

Brooklyn Poem

metaphysics

Art Movie

I set out to touch it all over

My idea of abstraction is white lightning

Trans is against nostalgia

Semiotics

Lorde Blue

Conjecture on the nature of inconvenience

from the never

Chiaroscuro

Virginia Slim

The black proletarianization of the bourgeois form isn’t Kanye West’s gospel samples

Black existential exegesis

8th & Ingraham

June, DC

Hunger

Self-portrait in cyanotype

States of decline

Rigorous Practice of Listening

Virginia Slim

Containing Continuity

Derrida/Coleman

Similes

On my way to you

FIRST THERE WAS THE EARTH IN MY MOUTH. HENRY DUMAS // KEF 21

SINCE I QUIT THAT INTERNET SERVICE, I’m thinking more about the transitive properties in books. The words, the palimpsest of images accruing in my brain, but more immediately the book in my hand. The cover worn at one end from sweat and gripping it when it comes close. Close as in when I stood up, let one deep exhale, when I came to the lines Of all fearless happiness /from which reaches my life I sing—and find it underlined by a beloved stranger. It’s like turning the record over. Knowing you’re hearing what I’m hearing. Easing up on the edge of the chair. It’s like we’re holding hands now at the edge of a white silence, from which we are to make a music of our being here, of being moved. Wherein our music compliments and holds close each other’s sound. Sound in the wet room of the tree I met you in. Nothing is said about the water, or the fearless trees angled toward and against the light. Light that did fall on me, made much of me. Light that sings through me. So I’m singing.

PENNSYLVANIA AVE. SE

Bless the boys riding their bikes straight up, at midnight, touching,

if only briefly, holding, hands as they cross the light to Independence.

Bless them for from the side the one on the red bike looks like me,

his redbrown hair loose against the late summer static heat.

The boy who is not me (see how I did that) fixes his mouth to say

something I will never hear I love you or I’m so sad though

more than likely Catch up. Bless the boy who is me on his bike

because he was a witness to my witnessing and did not turn away,

did not make of me a disappeared, burned thing—instead nodded as boys do.

Bless the distance and the knowing there. What my mind makes of these boys,

bless that long hallway I’m always going through.

Bless what could be mine or me.

Bless the boys I wanted to be or wanted.

NOCTURNE

What was rampant in me was not wisteria. Perhaps decay, or loss of reflection.

No one like me gets old, or so I thought, even as I watched the days fade into each other.

Was I no one? Whi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Since I quit that internet service
• Pennsylvania Ave. SE
• Nocturne
• Lincoln Town Car
• Bolaño blued
• Consider the deer
• This Sign is Available
• self/hood
• Ecclesiastes
• Go-go ode
• [New Impressionz Found myself a clappa]
• [ABM Can’t feel my face]
• Magnitude and Bond
• Club 2718
• A kind of wildness descends and across the expanse the attendant wind drones its one fecund song
• On Ignorance
• Aubade
• W 177th & Broadway
• This is a review for Blue in Green by Miles Davis
• Brooklyn Poem
• metaphysics
• Art Movie
• I set out to touch it all over
• My idea of abstraction is white lightning
• Trans is against nostalgia
• Semiotics
• Lorde Blue
• Conjecture on the nature of inconvenience
• from the never
• Chiaroscuro
• Virginia Slim
• The black proletarianization of the bourgeois form isn’t Kanye West’s gospel samples
• Black existential exegesis
• 8th & Ingraham
• June, DC
• Hunger
• Self-portrait in cyanotype
• States of decline
• Rigorous Practice of Listening
• Virginia Slim
• Containing Continuity
• Derrida/Coleman
• Similes
• On my way to you
• Acknowledgments
• Recent Titles from Alice James Books