...but epigraphs when they are not short, ruin the top

of the poem, make it too heavy. They just rarely look
 good on the page. Now, with that said, I do use them
sometimes but they have to be short.
Yeah but also it’s like saying, “Here, I brought receipts.”
That’s true, sometimes they can act like a threshold 
but I do agree, they need to be short. 
There is the also question of permission. What if the 
person you’re quoting doesn’t want to be in your poem?
Often it’s better to just use a short “after” or “dedication”.
      
                     Kevin Nance, Coleman and Linda Bryant-Davis
   
        
      
Tiana Clark wrote a poem,
poems about this, but really
her poem is about her dad.
 
James Wright penned a letter,
letters to his young son, naming it 
prayer. If you will, a kind of           invocation.
 
Tiana feels that people,
could have epigraphs stamped
on their forehead and that they 
 
float like (clouds) clouds (clouds) 
                                    above
                                       her poems.
 
Franz went on to win the Pulitzer.
A Pulitzer, like his daddy and Tiana,
Tiana’s dad didn’t write at all.
 
He did not        my               father  
    write        to  me    either 
or even, on me his simple  name
 
A name,         what’s in it, do you
think?     Perhaps my poems
      need prayer        or   a   little    invitation.
 
Maybe I just need an epigraph,
maybe a dedication. 
Maybe an, *after, Tiana Clark’s Broken Ode for the Epigraph.