How Do You Get to Harlem?

By TYREE DAYE

What did I know of skylines,
of a sea of brown faces not in a field,
but walking down Lenox Avenue?

Our cousins from New York talked about Harlem
the way our aunts, with their Sunday stockings
drying over the shower curtain like tobacco leaves,

talked about a heaven. I tried to imagine
a skyline where a patch of pines stood and swayed.

Every summer when they’d visit we’d make a moon around them
and listen to stories about city life,

my mother always in the background shaking her head—
she could hear us leaving already.

My favorite part was the train,

how it can take you
where you needed to be.

 

Tyree Daye is a poet from Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the author of two poetry collections: River Hymns, which won the 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, and Cardinal, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Daye is a 2017 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship Finalist and Cave Canem Fellow. Daye’s work has been published in Prairie Schooner,The New York Times, and Nashville Review. Daye won the 2019 Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellowship, is a 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-in-Residence, and is a 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award Finalist.

[Purchase Issue 17 here.]

From the beginning, The Common has brought you transportive writing and exciting new voices. We are committed to supporting writers and maintaining free, unrestricted access to our website, but we can’t do it without you. Become an integral part of our global community of readers and writers by donating today. No amount is too small. Thank you!

How Do You Get to Harlem?

Related Posts

Sasha Burshteyn: Poems

SASHA BURSHTEYN
The slagheap dominates / the landscape. A new kurgan / for a new age. High grave, waste mound. / To think of life / among the mountains— / that clean, clear air— / and realize that you’ve been breathing / shit. Plant trees / around the spoil tip! Appreciate / the unnatural charm! Green fold, / gray pile.

New York City skyline

Lawrence Joseph: New Poems

JOSEPH LAWRENCE
what we do is // precise and limited, according to / the Minister of Defense, // the President / is drawing a line, // the President is drawing / a red line, we don’t want to see 

rebecca on a dock at sunset

Late Orison

REBECCA FOUST
You & I will grow old, Love, / we have grown old. But this last chance // in our late decades could be like the Pleiades, winter stars seen by / Sappho, Hesiod & Galileo & now by you & me.