* — August 7, 2017
Nicole Sealey — Excerpt from “Cento for the Night I Said, ‘I Love You’”
MarLeah Cole, 2013

Today, gentle reader,


is as good a place to start.


But you knew that, didn’t you? Then let us


give ourselves over to the noise


of a great scheme that included everything.


That indicts everything.


Let us roam the night together


in an attempt to catch the stars that drop.

Excerpts from “Cento for the Night I Said, ‘I Love You’”: The poem is comprised entirely of lines borrowed from the following poets (in order of appearance): C.D. Wright, Mary Jo Salter, Patricia Smith, Toi Derricotte, Philip Levine, Lynda Hull, Langston Hughes and Malachi Black.
*

Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole Sealey is the author of Ordinary Beast, forthcoming from Ecco in fall 2017, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her other honors include an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a Daniel Varoujan Award and the Poetry International Prize, as well as fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, MacDowell Colony and the Poetry Project. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere. Nicole holds an MLA in Africana Studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the executive director at Cave Canem Foundation, Inc.