Psychology for Black Folk

Called us four-legged beasts
wearing shackles as accessories
when we really have wings
created for flits among petals
to leaps over treetops
voices for calling tribes to war
for summoning the dead in us
not for lowing and moaning
eating what our feet trample
chewing our cud until slaughter
We form ranks to carve
our names in the skies
march the air until we inhabit
the gods we gave life

Len Lawson is the author of Chime (Get Fresh Books, 2019) and the chapbook Before the Night Wakes You (Finishing Line Press, 2017). He is also editor of Hand in Hand: Poets Respond to Race (Muddy Ford Press, 2017) and The Future of Black: Afrofuturism and Black Comics Poetry (Blair Press, forthcoming 2021). Among his accolades, he won the 2016 Jasper Project Artist of the Year Award in Literary Arts, the inaugural 2018 NC Poetry Society Susan Laughter Meyers Fellowship in Poetry, and the 2020 SC Academy of Authors Carrie McCrary Nickens Fellowship in Poetry. He has received other fellowships from Tin House, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, Callaloo, Vermont Studio Center, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts among others. Currently, he serves on the Boards of Directors for SCWA and The Jasper Project. In 2021, Len earned a PhD in English Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and begins as Assistant Professor of English at Newberry College.