“Speed Trap”

A Poem by Kevin Young

September 30, 2021  By Kevin Young
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Stray couch wounded
beside the road
Butts-n-Ribs
Next Exit
100% Virgin Hair
CAJUN FLAME
RESISTANT GARMENTS
Supercool Fashions
Mens Wear
225-925-0000
Dad’s Emissions
“Empowering a Chosen
Generation”
The Table Is
Bread
WE BUY GOLD
Soul Food Seafood
Stock Yard Café
“HOT”
BOUDIN
IVY PRIDE TAMALES
Candlelight Dancing Girls
Armadillos, poor
pilgrims, splayed
along the ditch—
Leroy Bar
Best Burger
FALSE RIVER
Washing machine
in the yard
WIN $5000
A WEEK
“FOREVER”
Sodapalooza
Is Back!
Welcome to Port
Baree Speed Trap
sprayed on FEMA trailers
piled like empty
cartons of cigarettes—
No shoes No shirt
No sagging
Best Buy Caskets
Please, Do Not
Flush Any Paper
Down Toilet
LAKE END
The television on
my uncle’s porch
loudtalking no one
REVIVAL NIGHTLY
The wind the empty
rocking chair rocks in—
WINGS 40¢ EACH.

_______________________________________

Stones, Kevin Young

From Stones: Poems by Kevin Young. Copyright © 2021 by Kevin Young. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.



Kevin Young
Kevin Young
Kevin Young is the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. He previously served as the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Young is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose, including Brown; Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015, long-listed for the National Book Award; Book of Hours, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Jelly Roll: a blues, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry; Bunk, a New York Times Notable Book, long-listed for the National Book Award and named on many “best of” lists for 2017; and The Grey Album, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award, a New York Times Notable Book, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. The poetry editor of The New Yorker, Young is the editor of nine other volumes, most recently the acclaimed anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020.






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