Tyree Daye, who was awarded the 2019 Whiting Writers’ Award, is the author of the poetry collection River Hymns, winner of the 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. He received his MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University and serves as an assistant professor of English at St. Augustine’s University in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The Shape of God

by Tyree Daye

I hold on to the shape of a star
the way my aunts hold on to Jesus’s gown,
his whiteness they have never trusted on anyone else.

I keep a star’s shine in my eyes behind the red they get after gin.
I stand under its shape,


I see like a bat how the dead must see the living.
People on couch
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