Dear Mothership

Abstract

Dear Mothership Marcus Wicker (bio) after Robert Hayden Coasted through ozone in chameleoncandy paint SS Eldorado rattledquad jet exhaust boosters at minimumvibration Shield maintained Rained 48KStankonium rust flakes over rampantcotton fields 40kHz south of Atlanta i give to this land a gold record dowryDiamond futures burned particulate-clean of blood & gash Pay the tollwhen i slip between borders our ShadowGalaxy their balkanized flyover states i practice being an american terrestrial male i spore our toothpick flag embers into earthbefore bending the corner of a new world [End Page 4] Marcus Wicker Marcus Wicker is the author of Silencer (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)—winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award—and Maybe the Saddest Thing (Harper Perennial, 2012), selected by D.A. Powell for the National Poetry Series. He is the recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, 2011 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, as well as fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Cave Canem. Wicker’s poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Oxford American, and Poetry Magazine. He is Poetry Editor of Southern Indiana Review, and an Associate Professor at the University of Memphis where he teaches in the MFA program. Copyright © 2022 College Language Association