Angel C. Dye is a poet, scholar of African American Literature, and the author of BREATHE (Central Square Press ‘21). She is from Dallas-Ft. Worth, Texas/Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a graduate of Howard University, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Kentucky, where she was a Nikky Finney fellow. Dye has received fellowships from The Watering Hole and Furious Flower Poetry Center and her work has appeared in About Place Journal, The Pierian Journal, African Voices Magazine, Blue Mountain Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and A Gathering Together Journal, among other places. Dye writes in the tradition of Lucille Clifton, Amiri Baraka, and Sterling A. Brown, striving to carry on their legacies of unapologetic blackness in the face of oppression, radical self-love, and artistic activism. She aims to discover, as Audre Lorde explains, “the words [she does] not yet have,” and is currently a Ph.D. in English student at Rutgers University. Follow her online at her website and on Twitter and Instagram.
The New Normal
a Gigan
by Angel C. Dye
there is a series of words we never said
20 months ago:
pandemic, quarantine, isolation,
asymptomatic, asynchronous, hybrid, virtual
learning, mask, vaccine, variant, virus
how could we have known that fall
before the outbreak would upend our sense of normalcy
we might have gathered more than leaves
and thanked God for only angels made of snow
now there are angels more numerous than snowflakes
there were too many words left unsaid
if we had known we would have sent the text
and made the amends, hugged tighter
not cancelled on our friends
instead we have hidden our faces,
kept our distance in hopes of keeping ourselves
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Torch Literary Arts is a nonprofit organization established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. TORCH has featured work by Colleen J. McElroy, Tayari Jones, Sharon Bridgforth, Crystal Wilkinson, Patricia Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Elizabeth Alexander, and others. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats.
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