Pushcart 2026 L: Roger Reeves, “When the Prince of Heaven Sleeps” (non-fiction) from Emergence #5

When I think of a sleeping Ali, I also think of other images of iconic Black men in domestic spaces, and the way that that domesticity, in my eyes, acts as a protestation of capitalistic time, a slipping of the yoke of extractive labor. Their bodies sitting in a wooden chair at a kitchen table or tending to a garden or a flock of beloved pigeons on a roof removes them, even if only momentarily, from laboring on behalf of accumulation, consumption, and the eager eye or ear; thus, placing them outside of time. Their bodies in domesticity, in the banality of the four walls of a house, on a shopping trip, or on the roof offers a countermelody, a counternarrative, to the public nature and narrative of Black men as denizens of the street, the club, the arena. Poet Roger Reeves gives us the opportunity to consider four Black men, famed in sports or performance, in less public settings: Muhammed Ali asleep, Mike Tyson tending his flock of pigeons, DMX caring for his orchids, John Coltrane…