Dean Rader has written, edited, or coedited numerous books, including the poetry collections Works & Days, which won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry; and Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), in which his poems and Twombly’s works appear side-by-side. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco.

Self-Portrait Bop

by Dean Rader

  after Langston Hughes

If it hasn’t killed you by now
Just wait. This doesn’t mean you
Can fly. In the quarter, in the
Shadows. The supermarket sea,
A blue safari, a pot of collard greens,
A field of flower seeds. These are things

America never was. America to me
People on couch
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