American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin [“Probably twilight ...”]

In his volume American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, Terrance Hayes pursues the central American problem of racial violence and inequity through 70 interlinked poems that share form, tone, and subject. Hayes adopts poet Wanda Coleman’s American sonnet model for his poetry, using 14 pentameter lines that reflect traditional English sonnet form, but replacing end rhymes with repetition, internal rhyme, and alliteration. The resulting percussive echoes make the poem, part of a long conversation that runs through the entire series, in which the speaker returns to questions of personal identity and historical context. In these poems, the trauma of Blackness in America unfolds as personal and public. The speaker challenges readers and entreats them to consider the unanswerable question of how a human being can live in a cultural context that negates his existence culturally, spiritually, and physically. Above all, Hayes’s American sonnets envelop the contradiction of being Black and being American, an identity in which one part seeks the annihilation of the other.

The sonnet “Probably twilight…” conducts a one-sided conversation between the speaker and his imagined assassin.