Black Listopia I feel like an idiom that drips from Baldwin’s pen “that” angry Black woman negotiating sin I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO! A thing to be had Thick lips, curvaceous hips, or a fashion fad You can’t set me like diamonds Or string me like pearls Pick on my afro, then appropriate my curls I [...]
By Kai Coggin a praise poem, after JP Howard, for my Sisters praise you Black Woman because you never be praised enough let me lift your collective name here let me strip you of all your forced-on shame here praise you for the stars that unfold when you smile praise you for the way moons [...]
Summer 2021 By Erin Murphy Everything is free, it seems: parking, treats for dogs whose owners browse free-range brown eggs. Last month scores of documents were found in a nearby attic, dry rotted and tattered. One offered 30 dollars for the capture of a Negro man named Amos with coarse trousers, a tolerable good felt hat, [...]
By Pat Andrus For Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, George Floyd, seven-year-old Aiyana Mo’Nay Stanley-Jones, Eric Garner, Dante Parker, Atatiana Jefferson, ninety-two-year-old Kathryn Johnston . . . A broken baton a dead rat 5 jailers with guns. How the life loses its state of pure being. How a bone breaks and one rose falls. [...]
By Karen Morris Garcia Lorca called me last night (Before you get in a twist, he called you too. You didn’t pick up.) He said, “Disappearance and Death are real.” I suggested he text but, texting’s too flat for the poetics of death. “Sure,” you said to no one out loud, ridding yourself of the [...]
By Geoffrey Philp After Jericho Brown I ride around this city feeling as if I’m always a target, like the one at a gun range where cops used mug shots of African-American men to improve the shots of their snipers—photos of black men who weren’t dead, but whose images would be useful to kill the [...]
By Mark Williams after Walt Whitman O Captain! Some Captain! Our fearful trip’s not done, The ship is foundering, front to back, the prize we sought’s not won. The port is far, the chants I hear, the people all protesting, While follow eyes the unsteady keel, the vessel grim and shaking; But O heartless, heartless heart! O [...]
By Joel Fisher The black pain explodes Where he dropped Disintegrating to flowers And in that moment Shot and shot and shown The heavy-gauged Is a mourning of Its blue-grey trigger The reality that On this pavement Stained just as red We hold, self-evident Black Lives Matter Joel Fisher is currently an undergraduate reading [...]
By Nikia Chaney memories are like the ringing of bells sharp bells she hangs on the trees on the hair of her little girl the little girl who shakes her braids to feel cool beads bang on the ear the shoulder blade we walk to catch sweat and dew in the morning sweat and salt and [...]
By Amy Abugo Ongiri Asa Sullivan didn’t want to go back to jail and he shouldn’t have had to. But, on June 6, 2006, neighbors in a rapidly gentrifying area of San Francisco called the police to report what they believed to be suspicious behavior. Though they did not have a search warrant, police entered [...]
