Portrait of My Father as a Young Black Man
—Cincinnati, Ohio, 1987
Rage is the language of men,
layers of particulates fused.
Rage is the wine
father pours to the ground
for men whose time has passed. Rage
is gripped in the hands
like the neck of a broom held tight. Rage
gets stuck in the throat, suppressed.
Rage is a promise kept.
Sjohnna McCray, "Portrait of My Father as a Young Black Man" from Rapture. Copyright © 2016 by Sjohnna McCray. Used with permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
Sjohnna McCray
Sjohnna McCray was born in Cincinnati on March 7, 1972. He studied at Ohio University and earned an MFA from the University of Virginia where he was a Hoyns Fellow. McCray also received an MA in English education from Teachers College, Columbia University.
McCray’s poetry collection, Rapture, was selected by Tracy K. Smith as the winner of the 2015 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and was published by Graywolf Press in 2016.