I am not the spook by the door,
not the sidekick, not Hollywood’s

affable Black friend,
not the invisible woman.

When I tell the story—
I get lines.

I get the guy, the broken heart,
the close up, the soliloquy.

I am the one trying to bury
my dead brother, not the one

who is afraid. When I tell
the story, I kill the Minotaur.

I sever the head of Medusa.
I am Odysseus and Skywalker

and Rocky. The gunslinger
in the black hat is coming for me.

I am the antihero at the center and
“King Kong’s got nothing on me.”

I am Macbeth at the end; my head
on a pike. This tragedy is mine.

I am not a spear carrier.
I am king.

Ellen June Wright lives in Northern New Jersey. She is a retired English teacher who consulted on guides for three PBS poetry series. Her work was selected as The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week in June 2021, and she is a Cave Canem and Hurston/Wright alumna and received 2021 and 2022 Pushcart Prize nominations. Find her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/EllenJuneWrites

Paul Mpagi Sepuya was born in 1982 in San Bernardino, California. He received his BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2004 and his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2016. Sepuya has had solo shows at Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis (2011); Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York (2017); Team Gallery, New York and Los Angeles (2017 and 2019, respectively); Document Gallery, Chicago (2018); and Fotomuseum Amsterdam, Netherlands (2018). His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions at institutions including the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2015); Artist Institute, Hunter College, City University of New York (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2016); New Museum, New York (2017); Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2018); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2018); and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2018). Sepuya was awarded the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Los Angeles Emerging Artist Grant in 2017. Sepuya lives and works in Los Angeles.