By Morgan Parker, from the poetry collection Magical Negro, which will be published by Tin House in 2019. Parker’s collection There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé was published last year by Tin House.

For one thing, I hate stillness. On the front porch,
waiting, I see an animal I don’t recognize:

feet of a bird, wings of a leaf. The grotesqueness
of attachment, the loudness of the woods, I knew it

when I was dead before. I died for my sins
and because of…