Danez Smith’s “not an elegy for Mike Brown” is a 24-line, free verse poem, meaning that there are no consistent patterns of rhyme, rhythm, or meter throughout the entirety of the piece. The poem is divided into three distinct sections, marked by two backslashes. Each section is composed of a specific number of stanzas, or groupings of lines. Traditionally, stanzas form the paragraph-like divides within a poem. However, by utilizing stand-alone backslashes, Smith is able to group stanzas of similar tone and thematic content together, giving readers pause at the end of each section to digest the information before transitioning into a new topic or tone.

Section 1 (Stanzas 1-5) discusses Blackness as a lived experience, an experience of exhaustion and loss characterized through the speaker’s immediate tone of defeat. Section 2 (Stanzas 6-12) shifts, focusing on Blackness in relation to whiteness, and finally, Section 3 (Stanza 13) provides a small amount of circularity, calling back to the title with the inclusion of “Missouri” in the very last line, ending the poem on a somber note (Line 24).

The poem’s careful construction not only gives readers time to process new ideas as they are introduced, but it also mimics the

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