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Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing, winner of the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Prize. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, he was recently named a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.
. . . Free is not a negro doused
in white, blanched,
bleached, and sent down
the path. Free
almost never means alive, so
please try—
I’m asking for help.
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