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# Two Poems by Morgan Parker
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/two-poems-by-morgan-parker/
- Published: 2014-10-03T11:02:05.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:43:57.000Z
- Description: Our poetry editor, Joe Pan, has selected two poems by Morgan Parker for his series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.
- Author: Joe Pan
- Tags: Poetry, Hyperallergic Poetry, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:03 (2014, 2015, part 1)

*Our poetry editor, Joe Pan, has selected two poems by Morgan Parker for his* [*series*](http://hyperallergic.com/tag/hyperallergic-poetry/) *that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.*

\* \* \*

![9138380017_cfc46c25fb_k](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/10/9138380017_cfc46c25fb_k.jpg)

Glenn Ligon, “Palindrome #1” (2007) (photo by thejakeroberts/Flickr)

## Black Ego (Original Sound Track)

Language back then was a fly behind  
my eyelid and I was getting even harder

to love. Was the cigarette falling  
from my grandfather’s sleeping lips,

how I still can’t figure the need for saviors.  
A little bit about me: Never learned

my real name, and sometimes I think  
I see his fedora in the smoke I make.

The way they tell it, the sand and river  
are real, and I move in them.

I say *you don’t want any of this shit* 
*right here*. It is easy for me to forget

about molecules. I began, which is  
not the same as being uncovered.

My real name *easy as prints on glass*.  
My real name *can’t help myself*.

Origin was a mystic bounce:  
it’s fair to say

I can’t sit still. First bass line  
settled into the wood floor of my chest

like a gasp. Here is a possible scene  
from a black and white movie about me:

I’m a man on my couch, legs wide  
and wondering, or drooling wine

and Oreo crumbs into my cleavage  
and I am still broke.

I boil water in sepia light.  
*I know a little something*,

another Morgan narrates, *about what makes* 
*the blues blue*. A creamy song shakes

the window like a wave. *Sights just don’t* 
*do it for me anymore*, and I toss back

my motionless hair as if it isn’t a symbol,  
as if I have swallowed Lana Turner’s eyes

from a cordial glass. I keep trying  
like a fool to be sincere: There are only

nails in me. I was meant to stay  
hungry, to lick my own sword.

## Lower The Pitch of Your Suffering

*after* [*Kameelah Rasheed*](http://www.kameelahr.com/howtosufferpolitely?ref=hyperallergic.com)

Homie said remember  
you done shed that.  
You galactic. You  
anaconda. He said funeral  
instead of wedding.  
He said funeral instead  
of elegy. The thing is not yet  
dead. I know I wake  
with a mouthful of salt.  
I came through numb waters  
a garter snake  
dragging rosaries  
and years. I think  
spider bites are ancestors.  
I think spilled  
drinks are ancestors.  
I never believed.

\* \* \*

Morgan Parker is the author of *Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night* (Switchback Books, 2015), selected by Eileen Myles for the 2013 Gatewood Prize, and *There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé* (Coconut Books, 2016). A Cave Canem fellow, graduate of NYU’s Creative Writing MFA program, and poetry editor for *Coconut Magazine*, Morgan lives in Brooklyn where she is Education Director at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA). You can find her at [www.morgan-parker.com](http://www.morgan-parker.com/?ref=hyperallergic.com).

“Lower The Pitch of Your Suffering” takes its title verbatim from a work of the same name by artist Kameelah Rasheed.