What Had Happened Was

Therí Alyce Pickens is Charles A. Dana Professor of English and Africana at Bates College and author of Black Madness :: Mad Blackness, also published by Duke University Press, and New Body Politics: Narrating Arab and Black Identity in the Contemporary United States.

This
On This Day  2
The Amateur Gardener Considers a Time of Death  3
On March 12, 2020, Breonna Taylor  5
On Losing; A Hypothesis  6
Customary Calculus for Chronicity  7
Getting Dressed  9
Depression, Jacob Lawrence, 1950  10
If Lyndon B. Johnson hadn’t had his heart attack  11
Remember the episode of Bones when  12
Ode to Checking My Shit  13
Anatomy of Soap  15
my lover says (my mind)  17
I found out I have something  18
Ursa Corregidora and Mary J. Blige Contemplate Life without Children  19
That
Dispatches from the Pediatric Floor  22
Collar Is What Hangs around the Neck  23
I am watching a documentary about food, again  25
Corona Poem  26
T  27
On sex  28
Palimpsestina  29
The Amateur Gardener Contemplates Trauma  31
Apostrophe to Inspiration  32
Chronically Ill  34
On recompense  35
I tell her some of her ancestors must have snitched on Harriet Tubman  36
What You Don’t See When Ben Vereen Guest Stars as Will’s Father on The Fresh Prince, May 1994  37
Mind You
What Had Happened Was  40
& The Third
Variation on a Theme  56
Potential Ode or Elegy Out My Window  57
Neighborhood Watch  58
Coming Home  59
Ranunculus  61
It was just before Thanksgiving  62
June, 1018  63
Ursa Corregidora Goes to Junior High in the 1990s  64
Some Suicide Are Slow  65
I got into a Twitter beef with Lolo Jones over a blind white girl  67
What Cliff Should Have Told Theo on the Pilot of The Cosby Show, September 1984  68
Antony and Cleopatra, dir. Simon Godwin, National Theatre, 2019  70
my lover says (he doesn’t remember)  72
I meet a man with a stutter  73
Let Me Holla at You Right Quick; or Notes  75
I Ain’t Forgot about Y’all; or Acknowledgments  81