The line “tryna end things” is inspired by a lyric from the song “Work” by Rihanna featuring Drake, which was released on the 2016 album Anti. Their lyrics are “If you come over / Sorry if I’m way less friendly.”
“levels of social trust”: David Brooks, “America Is Having a Moral Convulsion,” The Atlantic, October 5, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/collapsing-levels-trust-are-devastating-america/616581.
“a 2021 study suggests”: Arnstein Aassve et al., “Epidemics and Trust: The Case of the Spanish Flu,” Health Economics 30, no. 4 (2021): 840–857, https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.4218.
The lines “We must change / This ending in every way” were inspired by the final sentence in Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” which reads “You must change your life.”
“What a piece of wreck is man” is a phrase inspired by a monologue by Prince Hamlet in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, which reads “What a piece of work is a man!”
The line “we become what we hunt” is inspired by this passage from Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex: “The sperm whales’ network of female-based family unit resembled, to a remarkable extent, the community the whalemen had left back home on Nantucket. In both societies the males were itinerants. In their dedication to killing sperm whales the Nantucketers had developed a system of social relationships that mimicked those of their prey.”
“Wine-dark” is an epithet frequently used by Homer in The Iliad and The Odyssey to describe the sea.
Terence was a formerly enslaved person who went on to become a famous playwright around 170 b.c.e. This line, “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto,” is one of his most famous, and translates to “I am a man, I consider nothing that is human alien to me.” Maya Angelou mentioned this quotation in Oprah’s Masterclass series.
The line “No human is a stranger to us” calls back to Terence’s sentiments.
The line “This is not an allegory” speaks to a quote from Plato’s Republic (translated by Paul Shorey) on Hephaestus being cast from heaven by Zeus: “But Hera’s fetterings by her son and the hurling out of heaven of Hephaistos by his father [Zeus] when he was trying to save his mother from a beating, and the battles of the gods in Homer’s verse are things that we must not admit into our city either wrought in allegory or without allegory. For the young are not able to distinguish what is and what is not allegory.”
For continuity of the book’s voice, for many quotations and original documents used in the erasure poems, I have inputted the ampersand in place of “and,” as well as the first-person plural “our/we/us” instead of other narrative pronouns. Punctuation and capitalization have also been modified occasionally where appropriate.
Hensleigh Wedgwood, A Dictionary of English Etymology, vol. 1 (London: Trübner & Co., 1859), 72.
The line “how we want our parents red” is inspired by Federico Garcia Lorca’s poem “Romance Sonámbulo,” which repeats the line “Verde que te quiero verde,” or “Green, how I want you green,” throughout.
Mention of “the dead” in reference to what is stored in a pithos is influenced by Giorgos Vavouranakis, “Funerary Pithoi in Bronze Age Crete: Their Introduction and Significance at the Threshold of Minoan Palatial Society,” American Journal of Archaeology 118, no. 2 (2014): 197–222.
“Postmemory han is a paradox”: Seo-Young Chu, “Science Fiction and Postmemory Han in Contemporary Korean American Literature,” MELUS 33, no. 4 (2008): 97–121.
The title “Who We Gonna Call” is a reference to the original “Ghostbusters” theme song, to the film of the same name, by Ray Parker Jr.
The line “a slur is a sound that beasts us” is inspired by lines in Lucille Clifton’s seven-part poem “far memory,” in part six, “karma,” which reads “the broken vows / hang against your breasts, / each bead a word / that beats you.”
Cecilia was a sixteen-year-old Yakama tribal member from Toppenish, Washington, who died of the flu at the Chemawa Indian School, a US government–run boarding institution in Salem, Oregon. This poem “erases” a letter of condolence from the superintendent of the Yakama Indian Agency to Cecilia’s mother, Grace Nye. Cecilia was one of thousands of Native Americans who perished from the flu epidemic. It was a devastating blow for the Indigenous population on the heels of near-annihilation from genocide, abject poverty, disenfranchisement, disease, and brutal forced relocation.
The head nurse Daisy Codding recorded a staggering 150 flu cases and thirteen deaths at the school. As the superintendent writes: “I was so extremely busy that it was impossible for me to tell you the particulars in connection with the death of Cecilia.” Cecilia died more than two hundred miles from her family, which was no rarity among Indigenous children. Under the creed “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” the US government removed tens of thousands of Native American children from their families and forced them into federally run boarding schools for assimilation. As Cecilia’s death shows, genocidal education could indeed “kill the Indian.” The superintendent’s letter ends: “Trusting that Cecilia’s body reached you in good shape and sympathizing with you, I am.” The Chemawa Indian School remains the oldest boarding school for Native American students still operating in the country.
Dana Hedgpeth, “Native American Tribes Were Already Being Wiped Out—Then the 1918 Flu Hit,” Washington Post, September 27, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/09/28/1918-flu-native-americans-coronavirus.
“Members of Oregon’s Congressional Delegation Continue to Demand Answers Surrounding Chemawa Indian School,” Congressional Documents and Publications, Federal Information & News Dispatch, LLC, 2018.
Catherine Arnold, Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), 124.
Arnold, Pandemic 1918, 126.
Arnold, Pandemic 1918, 126–127.
The title “DC Putsch” is a reference to the Beer Hall Putsch, or Munich Putsch, a failed coup d’état by Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party, on November 8 and 9, 1923. After this coup, Hitler was arrested and charged with treason.
During the First World War, the US Army was still racially segregated. Most African American service personnel were placed in noncombative roles, separate from whites. Over 100 Black physicians served as US Army Medical Corps officers, along with 12 Black dental officers, 639 Black infantry officers, and 400,000 Black enlisted men. Fourteen Black women served as navy clerks. Discriminatory administrative barriers prevented trained African American nurses from joining the war effort, but the public health crisis of the 1918 epidemic finally allowed eighteen Black nurses to be the first of their race ever to serve in the Army Nurse Corp during the epidemic and the war’s aftermath.
“Roy Underwood Plummer”: “Cpl. Roy Underwood Plummer’s World War I Diary,” Smithsonian, National Museum of African American History and Culture, last modified June 17, 2021, https://transcription.si.edu/project/26177.
“dutifully kept a diary”: Douglas Remley, “In Their Own Words: Diaries and Letters by African American Soldiers,” National Museum of African American History and Culture, last modified May 18, 2020, https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/collection/in-their-own-words.
“Most African American service personnel”: “African Americans in the Military during World War I,” National Archives, last modified August 28, 2020, https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/wwi/war.
“finally allowed eighteen Black nurses”: Marian Moser Jones and Matilda Saines, “The Eighteenth of 1918–1919: Black Nurses and the Great Flu Pandemic in the United States,” American Journal of Public Health 106, no. 6 (June 2019): 878.
The title “War: What, Is It Good?” is a play on the song “War” by Edwin Starr, from the 1970 album War & Peace.
“The 1918 influenza killed”: Kenneth C. Davis, More Deadly Than War: The Hidden History of the Spanish Flu and the First World War (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2018).
“the British pioneered cable cutting”: Gordon Corera, “How Britain Pioneered Cable-Cutting in World War One,” BBC News, December 15, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42367551.
“refusing to print doctors’ letters”: Becky Little, “As the 1918 Flu Emerged, Cover-Up and Denial Helped It Spread,” History, last modified May 26, 2020, history.com/news/1918-pandemic-spanish-flu-censorship.
“The British Army Postal Service delivered”: “Letters to Loved Ones,” Imperial War Museums, last modified December 14, 2020, https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/letters-to-loved-ones.
“General Orders No. 48”: “Soldiers’ Mail,” The National WWI Museum and Memorial, last modified July 8, 2021, https://www.theworldwar.org/learn/wwi/post-office.
“reported its post office”: “Archive Record,” The National WWI Museum and Memorial, last modified September 1, 2021, https://theworldwar.pastperfectonline.com/archive/A346097B-03F6-49BE-A749-422059799862.
“condolence cards sold out in 2020”: Michael Corkery and Sapna Maheshwari, “Sympathy Cards Are Selling Out,” New York Times, April 28, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/business/coronavirus-sympathy-cards.html.
“a majority of United States”: “USPS Market Research and Insights: COVID Mail Attitudes—Understanding & Impact (April 2020),” United States Postal Service, last modified May 1, 2020, https://postalpro.usps.com/market-research/covid-mail-attitudes.
The line “What place have we in our histories except the present” is influenced by D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Under the Oak,” specifically the final line, “What place have you in my histories?”
“Letter from Ida B. Wells-Barnett to President Woodrow Wilson,” DocsTeach, last modified September 19, 2021, https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/ida-b-wells-wilson.
“The Names”: Joe Brown, A Promise to Remember: The Names Project Book of Letters, Remembrances of Love from the Contributors to the Quilt (New York: Avon Books, 1992).
“27.2 to 47.8 million people”: “Global HIV & AIDS Statistics — Fact Sheet,” UNAIDS, last modified July 1, 2020, https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet.
National AIDS Memorial, last modified December 14, 2020, https://www.aidsmemorial.org/.
“Red Summer”: July can be hot as hate. But we know this better than anyone. The “Red Summer” of 1919, as well as the immediate years surrounding it, were arguably the worst period of white-on-Black violence ever seen in the United States. From 1917 through 1923, at least a thousand Americans were killed in racial clashes across the country. The bloodshed occurred at the collision of already high-running racial tensions. African Americans, during what is called the Great Migration, left the rural South seeking opportunities in Northern cities. With the end of World War I, white veterans returned home, viewing Black laborers as competition for jobs. Meanwhile, Black servicemen returned from fighting for democracy overseas only to be denied basic civil rights at home. Additionally, the country, particularly its more densely populated areas, was still reeling from the third wave of the deadly 1918 influenza, and whites frequently blamed African Americans for the spread of the illness.
With all these roiling stressors, the Ku Klux Klan resurged, and at least sixty-four lynchings of African Americans occurred in 1918. During the escalating bloodshed from the summer of 1919, at least twenty-five racial riots erupted all over the nation. Hundreds of African American men, women, and children were burned alive, lynched, dragged, shot, stoned, hanged, or beaten to death by roving white mobs. Thousands of homes and businesses burned to the ground, leaving Black families homeless and jobless. While white assailants faced no punishment, Black Americans (many innocent) were tried and convicted by all-white juries.
The nation’s capital wasn’t spared the stain of racial terror. At least 39 people died and 150 were injured over a four-day period of violence in late July. Eventually two thousand federal troops were deployed (ironically, many of the white attackers were white military members freshly returned to the capital after WWI).
1919’s season of strife was dubbed “Red Summer” by the NAACP’s first Black executive field secretary James Weldon Johnson (author of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” also known as “the Black national anthem”). Johnson wrote about seeing DC in the NAACP’s The Crisis magazine. “If We Must Die” by Claude McKay, a sonnet, became the Red Summer anthem. Despite the hundreds of deaths it caused, there is still no national commemorative remembrance for the Red Summer (or for the 1918 influenza). See sources below. For a poetry book on the 1919 Chicago riots, see: Eve L. Ewing, 1919 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019).
“1917 through 1923”: William M. Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996).
“sixty-four lynchings”: “The Red Summer of 1919,” History, last modified August 6, 2020, https://history.com/topics/black-history/chicago-race-riot-of-1919.
The line “Ha, we’re so pained, / We probably thought / That poem was about us” is influenced by the song “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon.
The lines “Anyone who has lived / Is an historian & an artifact” are influenced by Anne Carson’s poetry book Nox, specifically the line “One who asks about things . . . is an historian.”
Courtney Coughenour et al., “Estimated Car Cost as a Predictor of Driver Yielding Behaviors for Pedestrians,” Journal of Transport & Health 16 (February 2020): 100831, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jth.2020.100831.
Natassia Mattoon et al., “Sidewalk Chicken: Social Status and Pedestrian Behavior,” California State University, Long Beach, last modified July 22, 2021, https://homeweb.csulb.edu/~nmattoon/sidewalkposter.pdf.
Nicholas H. Wolfinger, “Passing Moments: Some Social Dynamics of Pedestrian Interaction,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 24, no. 3 (October 1995): 323–340, https://doi.org/10.1177/089124195024003004.
I’m grateful for Kira Kleaveland and the whole CBS This Morning team for first giving a home to the poems “Fury & Faith” and “The Miracle of Morning,” among others.
The title and refrain “The Truth in One Nation” is inspired by the quote “The truth is one nation, under drugs, under drones,” from Ocean Vuong’s book On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.
“war has changed”: Yasmeen Abutaleb et al., “ ‘The War Has Changed’: Internal CDC Document Urges New Messaging, Warns Delta Infections Likely More Severe,” Washington Post, July 29, 2021, https://washingtonpost.com/health/2021/07/29/cdc-mask-guidance.
The line “Silence least of all” is inspired by the book Your Silence Will Not Protect You by Audre Lorde.
The poem “Libations” takes on a shape inspired by that of Layli Long Soldier’s poem “Obligations 2.”
Timeline sources:
Ben Casselman and Patricia Cohen, “A Widening Toll on Jobs: ‘This Thing Is Going to Come for Us All,’ ” New York Times, April 2, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/business/economy/coronavirus-unemployment-claims.html.
Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2021).
Derrick Bryson Taylor, “A Timeline of the Coronavirus Pandemic,” New York Times, March 17, 2021, http://www.nytimes.com/article/coronavirus-timeline.html.
Drew Kann, “Extreme Drought and Deforestation Are Priming the Amazon Rainforest for a Terrible Fire Season,” CNN, June 22, 2021, https://cnn.com/2021/06/22/weather/brazil-drought-amazon-rainforest-fires/index.html.
Eddie Burkhalter et al., “Incarcerated and Infected: How the Virus Tore Through the U.S. Prison System,” New York Times, April 10, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/04/10/us/covid-prison-outbreak.html.
Josh Holder, “Tracking Coronavirus Vaccinations Around the World,” New York Times, September 19, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html.
Kathy Katella, “Our Pandemic Year—A COVID-19 Timeline,” Yale Medicine, last modified March 9, 2021, https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/covid-timeline.
“Listings of WHO’s Response to Covid-19,” World Health Organization, last modified January 29, 2021, https://www.who.int/news/item/29-06-2020-covidtimeline.
Thomas Fuller, John Eligon, and Jenny Gross, “Cruise Ship, Floating Symbol of America’s Fear of Coronavirus, Docks in Oakland,” New York Times, March 9, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/us/coronavirus-cruise-ship-oakland-grand-princess.html.
“A Timeline of COVID-19 Vaccine Developments in 2021,” AJMC, last modified June 3, 2021, https://www.ajmc.com/view/a-timeline-of-covid-19-vaccine-developments-in-2021.
The Visual and Data Journalism Team, “California and Oregon 2020 Wildfires in Maps, Graphics and Images,” BBC News, September 18, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54180049.
The line “History has its eyes on us” is a reference to “History Has Its Eyes on You” from Hamilton.
Cameron Awkward-Rich. Excerpt from “Essay on the Appearance of Ghosts.” Copyright © 2016, Cameron Awkward-Rich.
Dustin Lance Black, quote from Academy Originals Creative Spark Series (2014). Used by permission.
Anne Carson, from NOX, copyright © 2010 by Anne Carson. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Don Mee Choi. Quote from DMZ Colony, copyright © 2020 by Don Mee Choi. Used with permission of the author and Wave Books.
Lucille Clifton, excerpt from “far memory 7: gloria mundi” from The Book of Light. Copyright © 1993 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, coppercanyonpress.org.
Lin-Manuel Miranda. Excerpt from the composition “Take a Break,” from the Broadway musical Hamilton. Music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Copyright © 2015 5000 Broadway Music (ASCAP). All rights reserved. Used by permission.
M. NourbeSe Philip, excerpt from “Notanda,” from the book Zong! Copyright © 2008, published by Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Connecticut. Used by permission.
Tracy K. Smith, excerpt from “Ghazal,” from Wade in the Water. Copyright © 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, graywolfpress.org.