Friday Feature: Joely Williams
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Joely Williams is an Afro-Boricua poet, letter-maker, and community educator raised in the Bronx and currently living in South Carolina, where she is still adjusting to the concept of sky. Much of her work is rooted in the emotional and physical geography of migration: what it means to leave one place while still carrying its sounds, smells, language, and architecture in the body years later. She writes often about memory, grocery stores, kitchens, mothers, public transportation, working-class survival, and the quiet rituals people build to remain human inside systems that encourage disconnection. She is the author of Even the Spider Keeps Records and Put the Phone Down, We Have a Job to Do, a trauma-healing workbook that blends literature, journaling, and creative practice. Her poems and essays have appeared in journals including PREE, The Woolf, Northern New England Review, In Parentheses, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, SISTORIES, and elsewhere. Beyond publication, Williams is deeply invested in building literary communities outside traditional institutional spaces. She is the founder of the Poetry Letter Club, a handwritten poetry project devoted to slow correspondence, mailed poems, and the idea that literature should move hand-to-hand instead of disappearing into algorithms. Through the project, she sends original poems in envelopes made from recycled book pages to readers around the country. She studied writing and literature through the CUNY system and taught creative writing and visual arts to youth in underserved communities in New York City before relocating to the South. She still misses bodegas with functioning cats and believes fluorescent lighting has done measurable psychological damage to the American public. She can be found online at @poems_neverdie.
Surveillance as Intimacy
They say visibility is protection.
They say being seen is safety.
They say this while recording.
I learned early that observation
is not the same as care.
A camera does not intervene.
A spreadsheet does not flinch.
My body learned compliance
before consent.
Stand still.
Hold position.
Do not obstruct the frame.
There is a difference between witnessing
and inventory.
One says: I am here with you.
The other says: I am keeping you.
I am fluent in being legible.
I know how to arrange myself
so I do not trigger alarms.
I soften my edges.
I slow my movements.
I narrate my own presence
before someone else does it for me.
They call it data collection.
I call it inheritance.
Every system remembers me
longer than any person ever has.
I have been counted
more times than I have been held.
The machine does not sleep,
does not forget,
does not forgive error.
It archives everything
except intention.
I wonder what it means
to be known by something
that cannot love you.
To be interpreted by code
trained on fear.
Even now,
when I am alone,
I feel the outline of a lens.
As if solitude itself
must justify its existence.
I do not resist being seen.
I resist being reduced
to what is easiest to store.
If this is intimacy,
it is intimacy without touch.
Without mercy.
Without the possibility of being wrong.
I want a seeing
that does not extract.
A gaze that does not log
my survival as anomaly.
Until then,
I move through the world
like a correction in progress.
Still human.
Still unreadable
where it matters most.
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Torch Literary Arts is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats.
