Summary

“Pastoral” describes a dream of the speaker’s in which she is gathered with “the Fugitive Poets” for a photograph (35). The Atlanta skyline stands behind them, however it is blocked by the photographer’s backdrop, “a lush pasture, green, full of soft-eyed cows” (35). As they get into place, the photographer says, “Say ‘race’” and takes their picture (35). “I’m in/blackface again when the flash freezes us” the speaker says, and after the photograph she tells everyone her father is white and rural, to which they respond by asking her, “You don’t hate the South?” (35).

“Miscengination” is a ghazal poem that begins with the story of how the speaker’s parents, a white man and a black woman, left Mississippi to get married in Ohio in 1965. The speaker then recounts how her father was reading War and Peace when she was born...