
Miracle Removal by Kevin Young
i.m. Helen Hill
This world is rigged
with ruin.
Rain,
and its remains.
In the yard drought
fills the empty jars—
houses on stilts
still lean.
Sweet as revenge, the grass
devours the abandoned
dream house, unfinished kitchen
where cows now graze.
What angels
I would wrestle.
Kevin Young currently serves as the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and has been the poetry editor at The New Yorker since 2017. He was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020. He previously served as the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. His most recent collection, Stones: Poems, will be released on September 28th, 2021 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group and is now available to preorder wherever books are sold.
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