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Born in Jackson, Tennessee, JUSTICE is a rising film director, screenwriter, and producer. After attending film school at Belmont University, JUSTICE began her career in film and television by crewing on various local productions. While gaining insight into the inner workings of the industry, she simultaneously tends to the hunger of telling her own stories.  JUSTICE believes the world lacks perspectives in Black stories rooted in societal abnormality, social commentary, and speculative fiction. Now, on a warpath to introduce planet Earth to the worlds of her imagination, JUSTICE is steadily showcasing her unique and evolving vision, one project at a time. Currently, JUSTICE is in the pre-production phase of her latest film project, The Infomercial — a biting satire that dismantles the "urban renewal" industrial complex. Through this project, she explores the predatory nature of corporate redevelopment and the radical resistance of those who refuse to be erased. Whether it’s through her nonprofit work of supporting Black filmmakers or her immersive film and media campaigns that blur the line between fiction and reality, JUSTICE’s work serves as a cinematic bulwark against cultural erasure. JUSTICE continues to live and work in Nashville, TN, where she is actively building a legacy that ensures Black stories remain—like the communities they depict—unapologetic and "Not For Sale." THE INFOMERCIAL FADE IN INT. DYLAN’S LIVING ROOM - DAY DYLAN (25, Black Male) sits in his living room, monotonously flipping through TV channels like a magazine. TELEVISION Oh Johnny, I love you more than you will ever know… He clicks. TELEVISION (CONT’D) (Male) Survey says!! (bing sound, then audience says:) Aw! He clicks. TELEVISION (CONT’D) (sirens and gunshot blare) They’re gaining on us! Floor it! He clicks. TELEVISION (CONT’D) Is your home in desperate need of renovations? Suddenly, a piece of drywall falls from the ceiling at his bare feet. His eyes wander up to the ceiling, then back to the television. He stays. TELEVISION (CONT’D) Or maybe times are just tough, and the cost of housing is just too much for you to handle? An EVICTION NOTICE sits on a small coffee table nearby. We now see the small TELEVISION that’s displaying an infomercial. As camera dollies into the TV, we leave Dylan and enter the world of “The Infomercial”... the aspect ratio slowly shifts from 16:9 to 4:3. PHILL LEE (50s, White Male) takes the lead from here: EXT. NEIGHBORHOOD - DAY Phill smiles boldly front of a small, older house. PHILL LEE Whatever the case may be, we’re here to help you … Hi, I’m Phill Lee, and I’m here to tell you about my company, ProjEX, where we take homes like this... The house behind him is nostalgic : a couple flower planters hang by the porch chairs. The window is barred with an A/C unit, and a small bike lies in the slightly overgrown grass. Black people live here... PHILL LEE (CONT’D) And turn them into this... Suddenly, the house and all its surroundings collapse to the ground... it was a backdrop . Phill now stands in front of NEW, MODERN HOME with big, open windows and at least three stories. You know the type... CUT TO: INT. POLITICIAN’S OFFICE - DAY We’re back in 16:9 aspect ratio. A POLITICIAN is sitting at a desk. Phill stands close behind. PHILL LEE (V.O) ProjEX is a state-funded initiative to clean up the unkept neighborhoods of our blossoming city. The politician STAMPS “APPROVED” on a paper and passes it to Phill with a smile. Phill grins back. BACK TO: EXT. NEIGHBORHOOD - DAY (4:3 Aspect Ratio) Phill walks from in front of the new house and down the street. As he continues, the houses behind him look more like the first house in the backdrop. BLACK KIDS and NEIGHBORS are barbecuing, playing ball & cards -- enjoying life’s simplicity in the background. PHILL LEE Let’s face it... you work hard for your home, you deserve to enjoy living in it. CUT TO: INT. DYLAN’S LIVING ROOM - CONTINUOUS (16:9 Aspect Ratio) Dylan listens intently to Phill. PHILL LEE (V.O) (CONT’D) Plus, the city is growing! You don’t wanna be left behind! Through the window, we see Phill and a CAMERA CREW walk past. BACK TO: EXT. NEIGHBORHOOD - CONTINUOUS (4:3 Aspect Ratio) Phill walks into frame and sits on the porch stairs of MIKE INGLEMAN (40s) house. Another UN-GENTRIFIED house. Mike is confused on who Phill is. PHILL LEE We understand... So, here’s what we’ll do: We’ll come in, evaluate the cost of renovation, and we pay for it, full price! Mike’s head snapped to Phill in shock. PHILL LEE (CONT’D) You heard me! Full Price! We bring so much good to the community that the government funds us to serve you! Mike nods, pretty impressed. PHILL LEE (CONT’D) (smiling to camera) Take it away Karen! INT. MIKE’S KITCHEN - DAY KAREN is the voice of the infomercial. We never see her. Mike stands in the kitchen, arguing on the phone. KAREN (V.O) You could call someone to fix it, but that’s expensive! And your landlord may not be prioritizing your needs. Defeated, Mike hangs up his house phone and hangs his head. EXT. MIKE’S ROOF - DAY Mike stands on a ladder, trying to repair his roof. The ladder is wobbling. KAREN (V.O) And although those social media videos are cute, you can’t really “do-it-yourself”, can you? PHILL enters. He looks at the ladder’s placement with a judgmental squint. He "tsks" and straightens the base to be perfectly level—pulling the legs out just enough for Mike to lose his balance. Mike screams as he FALLS off the ladder. Mike lies injured on the ground, slightly rolling amidst the pain. A beat later, A pair of pristine, chocolate-brown loafers waltz in right next to Mike’s head. Phill squats down and lays a piece of paper and a pen on the ground. It’s a CONTRACT. Slowly and still in the grass, Mike rolls over onto his stomach, grabs the pen, and signs the contract. Phill takes the paper and stands to his feet. KAREN (V.O) (CONT’D) So let us do it. The right way. The ProjEX way. With the pen still wedged between his fingers, Mike extends his hand to Phill like a fallen soldier seeking a rescue. Phill reaches back, a savior’s hand descending toward Mike’s palm. But at the last millisecond, Phill’s hand PIVOTS -- not for Mike’s hand, but for the pen. With a practiced flick, Phill nabs the pen, turns, and walks away in one smooth motion. Mike, already leaning his full weight into the anticipated hoist, finds only empty air. Mike face-plants back into the dirt with a muffled THUD. As he hits the ground, we hear his voice: MIKE INGLEMAN (V.O) I’m not gon lie... I was a little scared at first. EXT. NEIGHBORHOOD - MIKE’S TESTIMONIAL - DAY Mike talks to camera, looking off at what is assuming to be the camera crew. He gives the viewers at home a personal testimonial. He’s definitely that overexcited “Unc”. MIKE INGLEMAN I was like, “What’s the catch? What’s the catch?” But... I ain’t found one yet, so sounds like an offer I can’t refuse to me! As he excitedly smiles at camera, two PROJEX WORKERS on the porch THROW Mike’s belongings into the lawn, using no care at all. They’re dressed in full blue or red jumpsuits decorated with spray-painted white stars or stripes. They also have safety glasses and construction masks on. KAREN (PRE-LAP) You betcha it is! EXT. STREET - DAY RAY CEST (70s), Mike’s landlord, also gives his testimonial. He stands in front of what used to be Mike’s house, but is now a construction site. ProjEX Workers are building on-site. Karen continues: KAREN (V.O) Not a homeowner? Not a problem! Landlords love working with us. RAY CEST I love ProjEX! They just take the problem right off of my hands. He grins. KAREN (PRE-LAP) And neighbors love us too! EXT. STREET - DAY JEN TRAFIER gives her testimonial standing in front of her gentrified house. JEN TRAFIER I actually used ProjEX for my home. I loved it. It’s very easy and I’d recommend it for anyone. KAREN (PRE-LAP) But wait, there’s more! A bright blue (PowerPoint) slide takes over the screen with the company’s phone number and information. The infomercial video continues in the top left corner. KAREN (V.O) (CONT’D) If you call right now, we’ll include a free include in-ground pool installation! The video shows a series of shots constructing the house, and placing new belongings and decorations, like Hobby Lobby canvases and pictures of a white family. KAREN (V.O) (CONT’D) That’s right. Call right now at 1-800-615-6455 to schedule your renovation today! That’s 1-800-615-6455. (16:9 Aspect Ratio) As a ProjEX Worker is walking by outside, the kids’ ball rolls over to his feet. He looks over to the kids, who are already running from his glance. A neighbor also pulls out and opens mail from her mailbox…it’s an eviction letter. She sighs and looks to a fellow neighbor at his mailbox, who shakes their head and holds up the same thing. EXT. MIKE’S DRIVEWAY - DAY (4:3 Aspect Ratio) Mike’s house is done -- big, open windows and three stories high just like the one earl. Mike and Phill address the camera together. MIKE INGLEMAN My home looks great. Thanks, ProjEX! Couldn’t have done it without you! He runs away from the camera to the front door of his new home. Phill keeps addressing us at home: PHILL LEE Stop sitting in your old living room and get you a new one. When Mike makes it to the porch, he turns the doorknob, but the door does not open. He jiggles the knob. Nothing. He jiggles it more. MIKE INGLEMAN (still jiggling in the background) Hey... Hey, y’all locked the door. Mike jiggles the knob again. PHILL LEE It’s a renovation so nice, you’ll practically be breaking down your new door. (to Mike) Am I right? (winks to camera) MIKE INGLEMAN (in the background) Aye, man. Y’all ain’t give me no key either. Suddenly, the door to Mike’s house swings open. He turns to find a white family standing in the door frame. MIKE INGLEMAN (CONT’D) (in the background) Mane, who the hell are y’all?! Phill does his best to talk over the quarrel behind him. Phill smiles at camera once more. PHILL LEE Call us today and start living right. We guarantee you’ll love it or you’ll give our money back! Karen? The tension at the door increases. The family is getting scared as Mike yells more. Phill still smiles to camera. The words Karen says roll up the screen. KAREN (V.O) (talking super fast) ProjEX is a registered trademark. For promotional offers, eligibility requirements, terms and conditions, age restrictions, and offer expiration dates, visit our website at www.projEX.com or see store for details. Restrictions may apply. Offer subject to change without notice. Availability varies by location. Not valid with any other offer. Call now for more information. MIKE INGLEMAN (in the background) Whatchu mean this yo’ house. This MY house. I pay the water, utility bill, insurance bill... all the bills for 106 Willington Drive! Proof?! I don’t need no damn proof for my own house. Listen, y’all got 5 seconds to get out my damn door… 1.. 2... 3... 4... Sirens sing in the background. Mike looks back. MIKE INGLEMAN (CONT’D) (running of the porch) Oh shit! PHILL LEE ProjEX, turning hoods into homes. (16:9 Aspect Ratio) The camera crew is still rolling until... CAMERAMAN Annnd cut! Phill taps the cameraman on his shoulder. PHILL LEE Got it? Alright, let’s go. INT. LIVING ROOM - DAY Dylan - still in the same spot - now sits with a lost and overwhelmed look, trying to process what he just watched. Someone knocks aggressively at the front door. Dylan gets up, not in a hurry. INT. FOYER - CONTINUOUS BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! DYLAN Hollon! Dylan quickly pulls a shirt over his head and he goes to open the door. When he does, it’s... PHILL LEE  Hi, I’m Phill Lee and I’m here to tell you about my company, ProjEX. Now, I see that your home here could use a little reno- Dylan slams the door in his face. PHILL LEE (CONT’D) (through the door) I’ll just stick the pamphlet in the door in case you change your mind. The pamphlet pokes through the door frame. Footsteps fade from the porch. Dylan turns to put his back against the door, revealing his “Hood is Home” Tee Shirt , which reads “F***Gentrification”. He walks out of frame releasing a deep breath. FADE OUT ### 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. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Dr. Malika Booker is a UK-based British-Caribbean poet and the award-winning author of Breadfruit and Pepper Seed. Malika Booker  is a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, a British poet of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage, and co-founder of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (A writer’s collective). The Anthology - Two Young, Two Black, Too Different, Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen  was recently published to celebrate Malika Poetry Kitchen’s twentieth anniversary . Her pamphlet Breadfruit , (flippedeye, 2007) received a Poetry Society recommendation, and her poetry collection Pepper Seed (Peepal Tree Press, 2013) was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre 2014 prize for first full collection. She is published with the Poets Sharon Olds and Warsan Shire   in The Penguin Modern Poet Series 3: Your Family: Your Body (2017 ).  Booker and Shara McCallum recently co-edited the issue of Stand Journal, curating an anthology of poems by African American, Black British, & Caribbean Women & Identifying Writers. Booker currently hosts and curates Peepal Tree Press’s Literary podcast, New Caribbean Voices.  A Cave Canem Fellow, and inaugural Poet in Residence at The Royal Shakespeare Company, Malika was awarded the Cholmondeley Award (2019) for outstanding contribution to poetry and elected a Royal Society of Literature Fellow (2022). Her poem The Little Miracles, commissioned by and published in Magma 75(autumn 2019), won The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (2020). Her poem Libation, published in Poetry Review (winter 2022) won The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (2023).  Jonah at the Border Did not Jonah seek to hide on a ship? Hide esp. take cover so as not to be seen or found. 2. Lay low as in secrete, huddle  up, knee to chin, palms cradling the underside of gut, while the poor boat bobbles like dumplings bubbling up in soup. All how he turn is vomit he want vomit in all the bangarang.  How he start reason with he-self like prophet. How he start wonder is when rasta man like he end up crump up down here? ••• Jonah meaning Dove.   meaning sailor or  meaning person on board ship bringing bad luck.  meaning a person jinx… ¹ •••       But when they persecute you in this city flee to the next: for verily I say unto you ²   ••• I read a book once 'Feel the Fear and do it anyway' ³ The author Susan Jeffers made it sound so easy twelve years later I still cannot jump into water (swimming pools or the ocean) for fear of water invading my eyes. •••       But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarnish from the presence…  ••• Man every passage is a risk, see how emptiness erupts  pon we tongue, sandpaper gently scraping we dark skin, that’s how you know is bad, when grated skin comforts more than what we left behind. You aint see the way news reports full up with our perilous crossings, more comforting than land left behind. The way we get painted as crowds of cockroaches  skittering over wooden floorboards. Steups!  And you blind worms can’t see we as paper dissolving in water, vanishing bodies. These days  when we get flung overboard no whale swallows  us whole to resurrect us on the third day.  ••• But the LORD sent out a great wind into the sea,  and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so the ship was like to be broken. Then the mariners were afraid, and cried every man unto his god, and cast forth the wares that were in the ship, to lighten it of them. ⁴ ••• As I write this poem I remember a Guyanese folksong we sung  in school: Itaname about how hard it is to navigate  the treacherous waters especially the jungle rapids. Captain, captain, put me ashore! I don’t want to do anymore. Itaname too much for me! Itaname gun friken me! Itaname, Itaname! Itaname! Itaname! ••• Today the News headline reads:  Horrifying new detail on death of “Jamaican men in wheel wall of the JetBlue plane: Men found in the landing gear. As I read I consider the biblical line: ⁵ but the Dove found no rest for the sole of her feet so it start climb in then crump up inna the wheel wall and so he lay coumblé trembling body beating against the wheel wall humming if I had the wings of a Dove ⁶  till lips too heavy inna the wheel wall till body start lick up itself pon wall like stick pon drum inna the wheel wall lying crump up crump up black skin resting on white metal inna the wheel wall singing this is what it sounds like when doves cry ⁷  till fingers & toes start tingle inna  the wheel wall  scared so till he could not hear the sound of his own heartbeat inna the wheel wall the sole of his feet turn ice fingers turn ice ears turn ice inna the wheel wall who will put forth his hand and ⁸   pluck him from this flight as he flees inna the wheel wall till he head start get bazodee, when the plane start rise higher inna the wheel wall thinking I’ll fly away oh glory I’ll fly away ⁹   right now from inna this wheel wall till he belly start talk in a strange tongue to turbulence bass inna the wheel wall till he start reason call out Jesus call out God call out ‘À mwè’ inna the wheel wall how he could not even take flight when ice start cover him like coffin blanket inna the wheel wall ••• Then the questions begin:  Tell us, we pray thee, for whose cause this evil is upon us; What is thine occupation? And whence comest thou? What is thy country? And of what people art thou? ¹⁰ ••• For in your poetic vision, a boat had no belly, a boat does not swallow up, a boat does not devour, a boat is steered in open skies. Yet the belly of this boat dissolves you precipitates you into a nonworld from which you cry out. The boat is a womb, a womb abyss . ¹¹ ••• Then they said unto him, What shall we do unto thee  that the sea may be calm unto us? For the sea wrought and was tempestuous. And he said unto them, Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; ••• My aunt tells me in those days they taught you to swim like Bad John: she in that fishing boat, she father belly high beyond pregnant  she brothers grinning in khaki short pants, how they palms circled  she wrists and ankles. How they stretch she out like rope, swing  she round and round then dash she in the water. That is how  they use to teach you to swim in them days. Sink or swim girl   they start shout after they just throw she out like garbage. How  she just make one big splash then start sink, how she never  fight when water start blind and deaf she tail, till she father  had to jump in, haul she out, flip she over then thump she  back, till the entire sea spill out she mouth and nose.        Till she scared water bad bad to this unholy day.  ••• The waters compressed me about, even to the soul; the depth closed me  about, the weeds were wrapped about my head   ¹² ••• It was the day to behead the chickens. The chicks I fed  scattering grain in they brown cardboard box home. Cooing  to them. Stroking they yellow. Then just so dry, they turn full blown and cranky, only pecking ankles, when ah collecting  eggs in the coop. It is the day to behead  the chickens. Watch how sun smiling pon concrete like  is an ordinary day. Watch how birds peck the ripe soursop on we little tree. Father sharpening, he cutlass. While I beg  for them. Meh little brothers catch and clench the top  of their wings in one hand. Father stoops into position.  He places the first offering between he feet. Stands on  them wings. I flee. If you see how fast, I tear up  the wooden backstairs. Then slide under meh bed. Silent.  Meh heart a beating speaker. Fingers shaking, lying  under meh bed reading Nancy Drew. All how ah turn I can’t help think - Is what does summon the legs? What or who decides the direction of our blasted feet? Figure out how I reach under meh bed before even meh brain decide to run. Downstairs in the yard, decapitated friends  flap clumsily into they deaths, with no brain to direct them,  how long do they flap before the body knows it no longer  has a brain, before the body is beyond their fear? 1 Adapted from Online Etymology Dictionary https://www.etymonline.com/word/Jonah 2 (Matthew 10: 23 Kings James Bible (KJV) 3 Jeffers, Susan. J. (1987). Feel the Fear and do it anyway.' Fawcett Columbine 4 Jonah 1:3-5 KJV 5 Daily Mail News Article. 7 th January 2025 US Reporter Joe Hutchinson 6 Hymn lyrics taken from Psalm 55:6 sag by Bob Marley and the Wailers. Also a popular funeral song in the Caribbean Community 7 When Doves Cry – Prince and the Revolution (song) 1894. 8 Genesis 8:9 9 I’ll Fly away – Albert e. Brumley (hymn) 1932 often song at Caribbean funerals 10 Jonah 1:8 11 Glissant, Edouard, 1928-2011. Poetics of Relation. Ann Harbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987. P.5 12 Jonah 2:5 THE INTERVIEW This interview was conducted between Malika Booker and Jae Nichelle on March 18, 2026. Malika Booker Interview Questions Wow, thank you for sharing this poem. You so skillfully weave in this re-imagined story of Jonah with present, personal, and historical moments of migration—all tied together by violence in and around water. What led you to begin with Jonah? This is a great question. My current poetry project creolizes the Kings James Bible, by recasting the characters, locations and language of the KJV within the English-speaking Caribbean and its diaspora.  This epic ekphrasis project enables Black bodies to enact embodied critiques of the enduring impact of plantocracy, colonialism and patriarchy on their lives. So, I lyrically reimagine characters like the Virgin Mary telling her mother she is pregnant and it is not Joseph’s child; or Jesus vulnerable in the Garden of Gethsemane wanting to enact a nine night wake the night before he is betrayed. Mrs. Noah and Samson’s mother interrogate how the act of non-naming diminishes their worth. This reimagined story of Jonah is part of this body of work. Jonah enables me to cast a critical lens on migration globally and its impact on the people undertaking these perilous endeavors. The poem’s lyrical hybrid sequential form allows a micro and macro investigation and demonstration of the complexity of migration and its harrowing impact on the body. Here I can allude to the danger of Jonah’s journey, his disdain scorn and superciliousness towards people who were other and his reluctance to travel, as a metaphorical trope.  It also allows me to explore the western myths about Black people’s relationship to water hinting at the middle passage, while simultaneously alluding to the crossings and deaths that occur every day off the European coasts.  Fear is a throughline in this poem. What is your relationship with fear, especially when it comes up in your work?  The Black body must constantly navigate some element of fear, particularly in the diaspora. This fear (embedded in the white psyche) is responsible for the disproportionately high numbers of deaths in police custody and is an underlying current in our engagement with white society. These elements of fear began the moment we were kidnapped from the continent and continued through the middle passage, and on the plantation economy where our labour was extracted through barbaric measures and continues to present day. So, the Jonah poem enables an interrogation of multiple examples of these fears. Personally, I remember my heightened fear living through Covid with the knowledge that in Britain a disproportionate number of Black people were dying, and that yet again my body was a vulnerable thing. It is this I suppose that has led me to my poetic preoccupation with examining the way we navigate our present lives in the shadow of fear. I hope that the Jonah poem alongside other poems enable us to scrutinize our fears, bravery and a sense of adventure in the face of adversity.  In the final stanza, the speaker instinctively runs for cover under the bed and grabs a book for comfort. It reminded me of a moment in your 2023 interview with Lauren K. Alleyne  when you said you would read under your bed as a child, which opened up the worlds that would later enable you to write. Does being a writer feel like a choice you’ve made or an instinct, something inevitable? I am more of a reader than a writer, who enjoys the act of reading for the worlds I discover and the knowledge I gain. Reading had a profound impact on my life at a crucial stage of my development. As an eleven-year-old, I moved from Guyana to Britain in 1981 and was severely lonely and bullied in the school yard. So much so that I asked the librarian if I could reshelve the books during the break and read to escape the bullies and the cold weather. I would borrow twelve books a week from the local library. Imagine my joy to discover ‘Ruby’ by Rosa Guy about a young West Indian teenager who had just migrated with her family to Harlem and was experiencing the same sense of alienation and bullying as me.  Anyway, I was an avid reader, yet most books I read were filled with white characters residing in worlds alien to my upbringing.  I wanted to read about Caribbean women like my mother and aunts. I wanted books and poems to explore and reflect the vibrant, complicated characters from my community. I remember discovering Toni Morrison and Alice Walker and just knowing that I wanted to emulate what these women were doing with African American characters with Caribbean ones. I could think of nothing else I wanted to do but write. This is my vocation, my compulsion, a practice as necessary to me as breathing. In that vein, I was so moved by this  letter you wrote to your younger self,  where you said writing is “a lifelong vocation and your development hinges on all of the sacrifices it requires.” What have been some of these sacrifices for you?   Everyone wants to please their family. Imagine living with being a family disappointment for years. Mothers, aunts and uncles shaking their heads at this young woman who is wasting her life on this weird dream and squandering her potential. Why could she not aspire to be a good lawyer like so and so’s child? A writer was not the average aspiration for a child of Caribbean immigrants. My mother enjoyed reading Pepper Seed and was proud of it, yet she would still sometimes say “it’s a pity you did not become a lawyer.” When I decided to work in the arts and be a writer, I remember taking a job working in a poetry organization three days a week. I was the Poetry Educational Coordinator – placing poets into educational settings like schools and colleges to teach workshops and the pay was abysmal. On the other two days I worked freelance: conducting workshops in schools, doing arts commissions, and poetry performances.  This work was sporadic; the organizations and schools would take a long time to pay me, and I would spend a considerable amount of my pay on writing courses, so I was often broke, juggling my bills, armed with this seemingly impossible dream of working in the arts and being a writer, while investing in my writer development. I spent over fifteen years attending evening courses, retreats, and residentials committed to learning craft and becoming a better writer.  There was also a rigid determination, as demonstrated by my steadfast commitment to being accepted to Cave Canem. I spent years applying – even though I had never seen a Black British Writer attend Cave Canem before and had no idea if they would accept international writers like me. I applied repeatedly until I was eventually accepted.  I think it was a sacrifice and a blind determination for an unknown outcome, with a surety that this would somehow pay off.  If you could, what questions would you ask your older self? Am I making the right decisions? Is there anything you would do differently with hindsight?  You’ve led a masterclass for poets about how to bring poems to life on stage. What do you love to see most when a poet is sharing their work aloud?  I love, love, love listening to poets share their work aloud. I like when the poet is so rooted within the work that their voice, body, and soul seem to be working at the same time so intent on passionately conveying their words to the audience. I love when the language, musicality, and imagery converge like a well-cooked meal, and the poet assumes the right tone and temperature to translate the words on the page in a way that hypnotizes me as the reader. The best poets are the ones who make my body leave my seat, while blowing my mind and dragging out emotions I did not know I had. The poet who is best at this is Patricia Smith; it is as if her performances have taken me to the Pentecostal church, where my body rocks and I am testifying, occasionally causing a moan to escape my mouth as response to the poet’s call.  If someone were to visit you who’d never been in Leeds before, where would you take them?  I would take them to a Fish Friday at the Caribbean Cricket Club. Then we would go to a Pre-love or fashion event organized by my friends Ebony Milestone and Khadijah Ibrahiim (poet, fashion stylist, theatre maker, curator and literary activist). We must go to Jam Rock Caribbean restaurant. There is an essential pilgrimage to visit the Plaque and memorial sculpture of David Oiuwale a British Nigerian man who drowned after being chased by police officers in April 1969. The 9.5 (31ft) sculpture, named ‘Hibiscus Rising’ is a beautiful hibiscus flower designed by renowned Artist Yinka Shonibare. They could not leave Leeds without going on one of Joe Williams Heritage Corner’s Leeds Black History Walks looking at the African presence in Yorkshire. How can people support you right now? Thank you for this generous question. They can support me by buying my book ‘Pepper Seed,’ following me on Instagram, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Eventbrite, and TikTok, where they can find out about my teaching, mentoring, and performing endeavors. This can also keep up to date with publications like my forthcoming poetry collection, which will be out in Autumn 2027. On Eventbrite, they can join my mailing list and sign up for courses like  ‘Prompt-A-Mania’ (an all-day online retreat dedicated to producing drafts) and my bespoke Malika’s Monday Mentoring program – (offering bespoke 1-1 mentoring). I am also available for commissions, visiting lecturer, and/or performances.  Name another Black woman writer people should know.  Karen McCarthy Woolf – a poet of Jamaican and British descent. Her work is experimental, necessary, and innovative and has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry and the TS Eliot Prize.  Her recent novel in verse Top Dolls  has been described by Bernardine Evaristo (Booker Prize winner) as an ‘Extraordinary inventive, witty, moving and profound.” While her latest hybrid lyrical essay novel in verse and recent collection ‘Unsafe’ has been described “as an immersive mediation on place, the body, nature and the self whether it’s via tattoos, trees or totemic quality of cats” and “A moving, critical and highly intuitive epic weaving together poetry, documentary and lyric essay. For me the book is in conversation with Layli Long Soldier and Claudia Rankine.  A vital part of McCarthy Woolf’s practice is the anthologizing of Black British poets. Her latest groundbreaking ecological and environmentalist anthology is ‘Mature Matters: vital poems from the Global Majority co-edited with the poet Mona Arshi and recently longlisted for the Jhalak Prize. ### 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. Click here to support Torch Literary Arts.

Temidayo Testimony Omali Odey , also known as Testimony Odey, is a graduate of English and Literature from the University of Benin. Her writing has been published in magazines and journals, including The Deadlands , Poetry Pause , The FEMINIST Magazine , Brittle Paper , Kalahari Review , Eco-Instigator , Akéwì Magazine , Rising Phoenix Review , and PoeticAfrica . Her work maps the complexities of the human experience, exploring identity, culture, and emotion through lenses of gender, Africanness, love, memory, spirituality, grief, and defiance. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Rongo Artist Residency and MAAR, and has been shortlisted for the African Human Rights Short Story Prize and Brigitte Poirson Literature Prize. Her accolades include the Nigerian Prize for Teen Authors, the inaugural African Teen Writers Awards, the HIASFEST Star Prize, and the Wakaso Poetry Prize. She is a fiction editor at NWF Journal and a fellow of the Ugly Collective. In her free time, she enjoys films, reading, singing, and philosophical conversations. She shares her work and thoughts on social media as @testimonyodey. A HUNDRED, BRILLIANT SUNS You cannot believe you won it. The sun licks your skin wet as you walk home down Agwan-Sarki Street with Eze. He says in Pidgin, “No be say after you travel, you go forget me o.”  You care about him, no doubt, but the only person you do not want to forget is Amara. Amara with eyes the colour of coconut shells. “This one you’re not answering me, I hope you’ve not already started forgetting me,” Eze jokes. A mirthful melody flows from within you, and in that moment of joy where your world is suddenly brighter than it has ever been, you pat his back and assure him solemnly, “Don’t worry, beloved, I will remember you in Paradise.”  The bend leading to your father’s compound is filled with overgrown weeds and tiny sunflowers. A seer need not open one’s eyes to see that in a few days the ugly weeds will choke the hundred brilliant suns to death. You want to save them all before that happens, fill a jar with the light and water they need to prosper. But some things you’re never meant to have the capacity to keep, no matter how much you love and want to save. Sooner or later, even in your utopia-like jar, the suns will wilt, become things made for darkness simply because they were always seeds meant for earth alone.  The compound is wide open. In it, a small, homely structure. A stark contrast to the magnificent glass mansion the retired governor of your state built in his village with diverted funds that could have helped your father mount a better structure. On the worn-out cushion, relatives squeeze themselves like sardines in a can. Each mutters prayers of protection for your journey. It is impossible to count how many times you say “amen.” They come at you like spears – the prayers, the jokes, but most of all, the glances. It feels as though their eyes are sharp microscopes gliding over every inch of your skin, and what they are searching for, you cannot tell.  “See how he’s behaving like oyibo  already,” Amaka, your younger sister, says. You suck air through your teeth and throw her a bombastic side eye. You’ve always behaved like this. How did it suddenly become an imitation of a white person? If Amara were sitting beside you, she would roll her eyes and ask you to give no thought to Amaka’s words. “She’s just a child, and children say stupid things all the time. Just a few hours more, and you’ll be left all alone...with me,” she’d whisper in your ears. The breath from her lips would tingle, your ears would feel funny, and that same funny, tingling sensation would spread through your whole body until you’d be shifting uncomfortably on the cushion, trying to hide an erection.  ☼ Yesterday, your mother leaned by the kitchen door. An aunt was grinding beans and red pepper with a blender. The smell of eggs boiling weaved its way into the parlour. You planned to take some moi-moi to Amara in the evening.  “God is so good,” your mother sighed. It was what she said whenever she felt engulfed with sadness. “May God grant you success so by the time you become a big man in America, you can come and take me out of this suffer-head country.”  Your aunties comforted her with soothing hands and words of encouragement like, “From your mouth to God’s ears. Things will be better, as long as God has secured this Visa for him.”  You imagined God holding the visa, playing a game of Eeny Meeny Miny Moe with all the people who earnestly desired to be told, “Congratulations, your visa application has been successful!”, and his lucky finger landing on you at the end of the game. Your mother sniffed, and something in you crackled. You hated to see her cry, felt your own tears stuck in your throat while hers were a river down her cheeks. Just a few months ago, one of your uncles in Texas had applied for an American Visa Lottery on your behalf. Pray he gets lucky, he had said. God must’ve been tired of seeing the roughly cemented floor leave imprints on your mother’s knee, of listening to her soft wails and pleadings asking him to show up for her son like He did for the three Hebrew children in that strange land of Babylon, because the next time your uncle called, excitement ran through his voice like blood in veins as he said, “He won it! Oh my God!”  If only your father were alive to see this day, he would have thrown a big party with white chickens bought from Orozo market. Papa went to work and never came back. You could still see your mother’s lips moving in ceaseless prayers. Surely, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was not about to turn His back on her. But only the next minute, a man called and said a six-foot dark-skinned elderly man had been found dead. The card in his pocket contained the number which he dialled. Your father always kept an identification card in his pocket. As soon as your mother dropped her phone, her lungs gave way, and she ran to Aunty Ogechi’s house. You had taken care of your younger siblings for the whole day while your mother was gone. You were only in JS2 and did not know how to tell them that someone who had just kissed their foreheads and said the Lord’s prayer with them as they ate breakfast was gone, just like that. Sometimes at midnight, you found your mother muttering unbelievably to herself, “So, my husband don die?”  When neighbours and relatives came in black clothing to offer their condolences, your mother would tell the story of how your father died to anyone and everyone: “One stupid okada man knocked him off the road as he was crossing! Imagine! My husband has been crossing this same road for decades… which kind bad luck be dis, God? ” she would whisper, her voice hoarse and stretched taut. As the first son, you felt a need to become the new ‘father.’ But your father never cried, and there you were, muffling your tears on the custard-coloured bed foam your father once slept on.  The moi-moi in your hands smelled of sauced smoked fish and ugwu. You had done a proper calculation of time before leaving home: by nightfall, Amara’s parents would be back from the community health centre where they worked as clerks. If you left now, you’d be able to spend two to three hours with Amara before they arrived. A cloud shielded the sun in the late afternoon sky as you walked to her house. You had not even knocked twice before the doorknob twisted. The look in her eyes spoke of betrayal and anger.  “What have I done this time, my love?” you said as she moved aside to let you in. “You’re travelling,” she said as a matter of fact. “I don’t understand…”  She rolled her eyes before sitting beside you on the three-sitter. “I’m leaving early tomorrow. We can’t afford to quarrel now,” you said when she wouldn’t say a word. Her fingers retied a loose Bantu knot, and she straightened her faded emerald A-gown. “We can afford to. After all, you’re the one travelling across seas where a white woman will steal your heart.”  That’s not true, you wanted to say, but how would you know what was true of a time and place you hadn’t lived in? So, you said instead, “I have sworn on my dead father’s grave that you’re the only woman I will marry, Amara, and I mean it. I will only spend a few years in America and come back for you, I promise.”  It was barely a whisper: “Like you promise-promise swear on your life promise?”  You guffawed, the sound becoming one with the brightness that filled the room, and said, “Yes, yes, I swear on my life promise.”  She told you of plans to learn shoe-making in the city soon, of opening a shop of her own at the end of the day, and of writing you a letter every day in her diary up until the day you would return for her. You enjoyed the way her lips moved as she talked.  “Can I kiss you?”  One nod from her and you felt like you just won another lottery.  You savoured the taste of unzu on her lips like it was the most delicious thing on earth. Perhaps it was. It was the best kiss of your life. Or not. Really, you had nothing to compare it to. Never had you kissed anyone apart from her before. Before you slept that night, you replayed the tryst, wondering how many years it would take for you and her to recreate such a moment again.  ☼ Everyone follows you outside when a blaring horn pierces the air. Eze brings out your black travelling bag. Your younger brothers run to open the gate. Amaka wraps her arms around your back, and your shirt stifles her cries. You run your hands through her roughly plaited hair, already overdue for a good wash with Petals Shampoo and Conditioner. “Don’t leave us,” she whispers. The driver comes down from the car, a polite smile plastered to his face as he greets everyone. Your mother wails, her body trembling as she shakes with tears. She says, “My son is leaving me” again and again. You say, “I swear I’m not. How can I?”  As the driver carefully places your bag in the boot, Uncle Eke says to your mother, “Stop crying, your son has not left to die.” Amaka sits on the floor and holds on to one of your legs, saying, “Brother, will you buy me that oyibo  shoe Cinderella used to wear in that cartoon?” Throwing your head back in a guffaw, you say, “Where in the world would I find a glass slipper?”  “So, you no go buy for me?” she cries. You say in finality, “If I see it, I will. But if I don’t, you’ll have to wait for your Prince Charming to give you one, okay?” She nods and spreads her lips wide. You can tell she is daydreaming about her Prince Charming. You imagine she conjures up images of a handsome, white man with brown eyes and hair, exactly like the Prince in Cinderella’s cartoon.  The driver glances at his wristwatch and sighs. He can sigh all day for all you care. After rounds of hugging, you walk to the car door. Before you can open it, your mother runs to you. You don’t care that it feels like she is squeezing the life out of you in her embrace. Your arms encircle her slender frame, the tears you have been managing to keep from falling finally rolling down. Slowly, she lets you go just enough to raise her arms above your head and put her rosary on your neck. “May God guide you and direct your path. Where men fail, you will succeed. You will not die,” she says, tears choking up her words. You kiss her forehead, tell her you will come back, take her abroad, and give her a better life. Her trembling intensifies. She wipes her eyes dry with the back of her palms. You want to kiss her forehead again, but you’re afraid of breaking into tears all over again. The driver starts the ignition. Amaka runs forward, her big black eyes in plea as she holds your hands. “Come back fast-fast, you hear?” Everyone laughs, and you whisper in her ears, “When I come back, I’ll get you a big job and a big car.” You have no idea why you have just said that. Would you really be able to do that when you come back? You like to imagine you would, that you’d return rich and somewhat powerful. On the road, you think of everything you’re leaving behind. When the driver speeds on the highway, you run your fingers over your mother’s rosary. You have never been much of a believer. But as the car drives into Nnmandi Azikiwe International Airport, you hope God plays another game of Eeny Meeny Miny Moe that ends with his finger pointing at you. GLOSSARY “ No be say after you travel, you go forget me o. ” / Let it not be that you forget me when you travel. oyibo / white person “ So, my husband don die? ” / So, my husband is dead? which kind bad luck be dis, God? ” / What kind of bad luck is this, God? ### 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. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Chiagoziem Jideofor is Queer and Igbo. Her work has appeared in Poetry , Michigan Quarterly Review , South Carolina Review , berlin lit , The Lincoln Review , Passages North , Commonwealth’s ADDA , the minnesota review , Sho Poetry Journal , MAYDAY , and elsewhere. She currently lives in Knoxville, Tennessee. when you claim to be from nowhere in particular  a seed doesn’t just fall off is what my grandmother would say   her ideation as crow, as sudden interest  in such conversations about origin, how she perches on the low kitchen stool, prepared for this back and forth ### 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. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Bettina Judd is the award-winning author of Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought  and patient. Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist and performer whose research focus is on Black women's creative production and use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. Her book Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern University Press, December 2022) argues that Black women’s creative production is feminist knowledge production produced by registers of affect she calls “feelin.” She is currently Associate Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. Her poems and essays have appeared in Feminist Studies , Torch , Mythium , Meridians and other journals and anthologies. Her collection of poems titled patient. which tackles the history of medical experimentation on and display of Black women won the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Book Prize and was released in November of 2014. As a performer she has been invited to perform for audiences within the United States and internationally. Black Notes in Grief (an excerpt from Feelin ) It is the sound that opens wide everything else. We touch on death in Black studies because we must. Because the condition of Black life is so often described by our proximities to death. ¹ (As in, “The only thing I have to do is stay Black and die.”) In the study of Black death, one must touch (mustn’t they?) the feeling of being in death’s wake. I wonder, in the notes to this chapter, how Black grief is in the structure of Black studies—if not this Black study. The pursuit of this question, How is grief structured within Black studies?  requires a distance from the matter of grief that I would rather relegate to the notes. This book is about feelin after all—about leaning into the affective sedulity of Black creativity and to pursue this question without attending to the experience of grief seems like an ironically performative byproduct of the “race for theory.” ² It’s much easier to talk about than do or be in grief. In the context of this project, it would be disingenuous of me to pursue this question without feelin because the real question about grief in Black studies, about Black people and grief, is . . . . . . . . . ? Because the real question is uttered in a language difficult to transcribe on the page. It is ineffable, this thing called grief, and expository propositional prose sanitizes its contents. The content of this chapter is grief—as well as I could communicate it as I wade through my own experience of grief in the process of writing this book. I wade through grief with Black studies to do this work and also to make sense of Black terror, loss, sadness, and all of the other unnamed affective experiences that grief attends to. Even that attempt to structure grief is too clinical. In my grief, Black studies, particularly Black feminist studies has been my companion—a wrenchingly honest friend. Sometimes too honest, but always there. Such brutal honesty is what I hope to learn from word work—from Black feminist writing that I reference, and from my community of friends that take Black feminism to praxis. These notes are a contemplative commons, an acknowledgment of the “wake work,” to invoke Christina Sharpe, that precedes my own. ³ The notes stop where the meditation on grief, here titled, Salish Sea begins in text, but the citations within these notes inform the poems on a cellular level. I thank Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Saidiya Hartman for crafting examples of this kind of poetic citational practice. ⁴ As these notes close, I imagine myself in a room full of these cited thinkers that I feel. (Imagine, if you will, yourself in the room as voyeur, or if you feelin me, participant.) We are talking and sharing our experiences, we present evidence, pour over archival artifacts, and wonder at what we find. We pontificate, reference, and speechify. We might even laugh. There is a point at which they all must go home, away from the din of our party and as I close the door behind them, their words, thoughts, and feelings have not left me. But, in the silence of the room in which I physically (work with me) remain, I meet myself and all of what could not be said before and after our meeting full of life-breath and sorrow comes up through my belly into my chest, my throat, and eyes. It fills me and overflows—becomes the room. This is what could be recorded. It seemed to be embedded in the language of Black life. The blues is a Black condition. The roots of the musical genre are explicitly drawn from the processes of cultural, spiritual, and bodily displacement and subjection. It would seem that a study of the aesthetics that shape the blues and its descendant musical styles would also be a study of grief, if not grievances (a point I discuss further below). Grief and grievances are cellular to the aesthetics of Black music. As Amiri Baraka notes of the antecedent of the blues, field hollers “were strident laments, more than anything.” ⁵ So cellular were these wordless affective musical riffs to Black music that for Baraka, they could be considered lyrics—lyrics that communicate the ineffable and the identifiable (i.e., This is my grief.) Follow me here. I know that the ability to think through the aesthetics of a genre does not a study of grief make. There are way too many tributaries, and often, they are less difficult to sit with than grief. But the blues would certainly be core to an aesthetic interrogation of a study of Black grief. The riff marks the communicative possibilities of expressing the ineffable contours of grief’s feeling. There is a story about Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain” that comes to mind here: for the record, George Clinton told Eddie Hazel to make grief out of his guitar. In his words: I told him to play like his mother had died, to picture that day, what he would feel, how he would make sense of his life, how he would take a measure of everything that was inside of him and let it out through his guitar . . . when he started playing, I knew immediately that he understood what I meant. I could see the guitar notes stretching out like a silver web. When we played the solo back, I knew that it was good beyond good, not only a virtuoso display of musicianship but also an unprecedented moment of emotion in pop music. ⁶ The aesthetics of the riff—the circular ascending and descending repetition, the distorted and imperfect tonality of Hazel’s guitar, the vocal-like melismatic divergences express grief as it is felt, sonically. Hazel’s song-length solo was so mesmerizing that Clinton had the rest of the band dropped from the final recording save for a simple melancholic melody on second guitar that points to where Hazel occasionally lands. As the quote suggests, Clinton understands this song to be a signal of the band’s maturity as musicians—that their ability to express emotion matched their technical proficiency. Emotional dexterity within musical proficiency is fundamental to the aesthetics of funk and blues—to be proficient in spanning affective registers through musicianship and grief made that clear. The lesson of the riff is instructive here. As studies of Black folks consider the social conditions of Black people, so they must consider the structures of feeling by which Blackness in Black studies must operate. The “social experience in process” to borrow from Raymond Williams, is ongoing as we feel, think, study, live, write, and teach Black studies. ⁷ The aesthetics of the riff tells us that there is no singular note that encompasses a singular feeling (i.e., grief or pleasure or anger) and no singular series of notes either. Not a solid line pointing us in one particular direction, but “notes stretching out like a silver web.” A study of pleasure would so encounter, nay, become a study of grief—such is the web of Black studies’s dexterous structure of feeling. “Loss?” Recovery uncovers what stays lost. Mamie Till Mobley remembers the painstaking and dreadful process of recovering the body of her son: “I looked deeply at that entire body for something, anything that would help me find my son. Finally, I found him. And lost him.” ⁸ Her son, difficult to recognize because of the brutality of racist violence that ripped him away from life and her mothering arms, is only recoverable through memory. Emmett’s body both a recovery (through memory of his life) and a final rupture (violent death). What is lost stays lost but the open chasm of something was here remains as memory. Saidiya Hartman notes, “the slave was the only one expected to discount her past.” ⁹ This loss was the ongoing process of forgetting homeland, mother. Hartman goes on to describe the folklore of coercive forgetting: Everyone told me a different story about how the slaves began to forget their past. Words like “zombie,” “sorcerer,” “witch,” “succubus,” and “vampire” were whispered to explain it. In these stories, which circulated throughout West Africa, the particulars varied, but all of them ended the same—the slave loses mother. ¹⁰ Perhaps this is the fundamental difference between discussing grief and discussing loss—loss does not require memory whereas grief does remember what has gone. Memory can be lost, too. Hartman’s return to the site of lost memory intones grief through her encounter with memory, mind, and mother, by returning to the place of forgetting. This site-specific experience of remembering what was meant to be forgotten is what Toni Morrison calls rememory. ¹¹ Rememory is the glitch in space/time between what is meant to be forgotten in a past and what is reencountered as memory in the present. Here she presents the concept in the voice of Sethe: I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened. ¹² Whom or what reminds you, refuses release of the tether and makes past time as lucid as the present and carries some message about the future. Or as M. Jacqui Alexander says, “Spirit brings knowledge from past, present, and future to a particular moment called a now.” ¹³ In this bending of space/time, rememory enacts sacred touch—witness from the dead, the unborn, and not to be forgotten. Hartman finds recovery to be illusive as the rupture between Africans and descendants of African slaves expands beyond the width and depth of the Atlantic Ocean. Whatever is thought to have been forgotten has been etched in rememory as hauntings, familiars, and familiar sites of terror that live with those who remember. Rememory means nothing is forgotten though it may be lost, and that memory, along with that loss, makes way for grieving what has gone. I sat down to work on this very book and could only wail in poems. I call this a whale/wail of poems. Much like a crown of sonnets, but named for the grieving orca whale J35 aka Tahlequah, who carried her stillborn calf for seventeen days after its birth. Like a crown of sonnets, the final line of each preceding fourteen-line poem starts the first line of the next poem and the final poem ends with the first line of the very first poem in the sequence. There is no master poem in this sequence, but it does consider what comes after. To be living a footnote to a text about Black life which is inevitably about death. Yet, here we are the in the notes trying to make sense of this wail of poems—trying to build some context for why grief is important for this study. What I am saying is that Black studies is enshrouded by grief. I am feelin Black studies in my grief. Grief is Black studies’ affective sedulity. It is Black studies’ errant and unproductive feeling that challenges Western civilization’s organizing systems of knowledge. Even as Black studies asserts productivity—toward freedom, against academy, challenging knowledge itself—grief bookends such claims with “circles and circles of sorrow”—the repeating riff, the everything and nothingness to which Western civilization finds no order, use, or value, particularly in the living ghosts of not quite humans. ³³ The number doesn’t matter, shouldn’t matter. This chapter is not about the dead but about the conditions of life for those left behind to live and remember. I may count the ones I mourn. They were my 11, my 12, my 13, but to count them just increases the number and forces me to ask myself, who do I choose to mourn? I recount their names in this wail. Their accumulation, their numbering is an effort to communicate a feeling of loss that cannot be neatly processed. As Woubshet notes of compounding loss in the early era of AIDS, “the pain, the confounded psyche, the exhausted body and soul—of each loss are compounded by the memory and experience of the losses just before.” ³⁴ The steps of grief, the periods of mourning, the promise of linear time’s healing properties fail when accumulation becomes stasis. To count may give credence to the “mathematics of unliving” that, as Katherine McKittrick notes, produces Blackness through a sum of violence and violations. ³⁵ What is missing, unrecognized—unrecognizable—in the archive and its tabulations is the evidence of grief. Grieving responds with the enumeration of the dead with its same song wail. Chaotic and uncontained. This Black study in grief is interested in that which is and must be unaccounted for. This Black grief is an accumulation of feeling How do you grieve that which is ongoing? Or as Hartman queries, “How might we understand mourning, when the event has yet to end? When the injuries not only perdure, but are inflicted anew? Can one mourn what has yet ceased happening?” ³⁸ Injuries, inflicted anew. For instance, the fear of police violence in the course of grieving. In the summer of 2016 when doctors told my mother, uncle, and me that my grandmother was absolutely dying and there was no other course of action to take to stop the process, I went into hysterics, crying and begging my grandmother to stay with us at her bed. Nurses called security as my uncle shook me into a calmer state, telling me that security would drag me out of the hospital. Sexist and racist medicine has so sanitized the course and culture of death and dying to make such an outburst of grief from a Black woman intolerable if illegible. By making death the domain of the (white) and male-dominated medical field, the family is estranged from the process of dying. My outburst is dangerous chaos, not a rational course of the grieving process that accompanies the death of someone who is loved. As Sharon Holland notes, “The family is constructed as unstable, relative to the ‘neutral’ and universalizing gaze of attending physicians.” ³⁹ The hospital, unequipped for the unruly knowledge of death and dying by the family, is however equipped, through its carceral allegiances, for the emotional outbursts of Black people via security systems and police force, violence, and confinement. Like Black deaths caused by state violence, there can be no Black witness—or rather—Black witness is disregarded as untrustworthy. If as Holland writes, “death, as an unspeakable subject in a hospital ward, is divested of its own language and is consumed by the scientific knowledge in the physicians’ possession,” Black grief is the language by which Black death is acknowledged—even its tone and pitch is wildly outside the aspects of bedside care that can be served in the medical field or Western knowledge. ⁴⁰ To think that my own life or the life of my family members might have been in danger because of my expressions of grief is personally overwhelming, but also signifies on griefs accumulated and confluent. My Black grief grieved by the confines of ungrievability. There is no common sense for Black grief that holds space for grieving even as Black death is so common-sense, to be expected, and to be in fact so “juridically sound” as Sharpe notes, that the nation’s functioning depends on the reproduction of Black death. Black expressions of grief may take iconic status in the process of attempts at juridical redress as the widely produced photos of Mamie Till Mobley weeping over her son’s coffin and the photo of Tracy Martin, Trayvon Martin’s father’s open-mouthed wail demonstrate. These images produce the narratives of grief as grievance necessary for certain kinds of movement building and are so legible as productive strategy. Grief itself, however, becomes lost in grievance’s show. As the aftermaths of the attempts at juridical redress for Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin (and on . . .) demonstrate, no such reparation could be found. What else could we expect our grief to do if Black death is, as Sharpe notes, “a predictable and constitutive aspect of this democracy?” ⁴¹ What is our grief—loud and disruptive—if not for us? Remember? They gone. Holloway ends Passed On with such an illustration of the ways of grief to arrest—to flow forcefully through cracks unexpected or unexamined. On her way to view the site of Richard Wright’s remains with her daughter Ayana, she begins to recount her childhood practice of collecting chestnuts to make necklaces, and then: We were relaxed and at ease until we got to the site where those who had been cremated were interred. There I stopped silent, stilled but for the tears that clouded my sight. I thought of my child, our son, her brother, and I could go no further. And so, we left together, her hand in mine, turned toward home. ⁴² Grief is the perfume of our stifled air. Even in the most joyous of our days we may be caught by its waft—blown in by the weather and our weathering. ⁴³ My knees might buckle from its sudden strength and bring me to the earth beneath, senses shaken by gravity’s pull. All that is left is this sound. Further Notes Yemaya and the Maiden of Deception Pass (Kw?kwál?lw?t) Yemaya appears here as mother of the children of water and of water itself. Known also as Yemoja, Yemanj., Iemanj., and Jana.na (all matters of geographic and cultural location), this orisha is revered as an embodiment of motherhood, nurturance, as well as communications and trade cross the waters. As Solimar Otero and Toyin Falola note in the introduction of Yemoja: Gender, Sexuality, and Creativity in the Latina/o and Afro-Atlantic Diasporas this orisha is “also associated with other water deities, such as Ol.k.n in Nigeria and Mami Wata across West and Central Africa.” ⁴⁴ For her followers in the Americas, she often has special meaning as a nurturing mother who protects her scattered children across the waters—connecting them to Africa’s Western shores. As poet Olive Senior writes: “From Caribbean shore / to far-off Angola, she’ll / spread out her blue cloth / let us cross over—.” ⁴⁵ She appears in relation to the Samish spirit/deity Kw?kw.l?lw?t (pronounced Ko-kwal-alwoot) also known as the Maiden of Deception Pass who wades around in the waters of the Salish Sea and sometimes in the wake of canoes. ⁴⁶ Once human, she sacrificed herself to dwell forever in the waters with the king of the sea so that her people could eat. ⁴⁷ She acts as a sea-dwelling guardian who provides her people with sustenance from the waters of the Salish Sea and the surrounding fresh waters. She continues to be a guardian of her people. [Notes to the Notes] 1 Claudia Rankine titles an essay on racial violence with a quote from a friend, “The condition of Black life is one of mourning.” Claudia Rankine, “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning,” New York Times , June 22, 2015, sec. Magazine, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/magazine/the-condition-of-black-life-is-one-of-mourning.html . 2 Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique , no. 6 (1987): 52. https://doi.org/10.2307/1354255 . 3 Sharpe describes “wake work” as new ways of “plotting, mapping, and collecting the archives of the everyday of Black immanent and imminent death” as well as “tracking the ways we resist, rupture, and disrupt that immanence and imminence aesthetically and materially.” In that spirit, this chapter does not “seek to explain or resolve” the structure of grief for a Black collective, but simply grieves and tarries with other studies of grief and grieving. Christina Sharpe,  In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 13, 14. 4 Saidiya V. Hartman,  Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019); Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World  (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 5 Leroi Jones [Amiri Baraka],  Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999), 28, 60. 6 George Clinton and Ben Greenman,  Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017), 103; italics mine. 7 Raymond Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” in  Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132. 8 Mamie Till-Mobley and Christopher Benson, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America  (New York: Random House, 2011), 247. 9 Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route  (New York: Macmillan, 2008), 155. 10 Hartman, 155. 11 See also Rae Paris’s poetic collection that takes up the site-specific aspect of rememory. Rae Paris, The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory ( Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017). 12 Toni Morrison,  Beloved  (New York: Knopf, 2007), 43. 33 From Nell’s moments while thinking of her friend, Sula. Toni Morrison, Sula  (New York: Knopf, 2007), 155. 34 Woubshet, The Calendar of Loss , 3. 35 Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,”  Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 17. 38 Saidiya V. Hartman, “The Time of Slavery,” South Atlantic Quarterly  101, no. 4 (2002): 758. 39 Holland, Raising the Dead , 34. 40 Holland, 35. 41 Sharpe, In the Wake , 7. 42 Holloway, Passed On,  212. 43 Christina Sharpe describes weather as “antiblackness as total climate.” Sharpe, In the Wake , 105. 44 Solimar Otero and Toyin Falola, Yemoja: Gender, Sexuality, and Creativity in the Latina/o and Afro-Atlantic Diasporas  (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), xix, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washington/detail.action?docID=3408785 . 45 Olive Senior, “Yemoja: Mother of Waters,” Conjunctions, no. 27 (1996): 58. 46 Ella E. Clark, Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest  (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 199, https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520350960 . 47 There are various versions of this legend. I was first introduced to the story through a 2015 film by Longhouse Media in conjunction with the tribute to Kw?kw.l?lw?t erected at Rosario Beach in Anacortes, Washington, Coast Salish lands (Longhouse Media, Maiden of Deception Pass: Guardian of Her Samish People,   https://vimeo.com/130576433 ). See also Brent Douglas Galloway, Phonology, Morphology, and Classified Word List for the Samish Dialect of Straits Salish  (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1990), 100–115,  http://muse.jhu.edu/book/65590 ; Kenneth C. Hansen, The Maiden of Deception Pass: A Spirit in Cedar (Anacortes, WA: Samish Experience Productions, 1983); Clark, Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest , 199–201. Copyright © 2023 by Northwestern University. Published 2023 by Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved. THE INTERVIEW   This interview was conducted between Bettina Judd and Jae Nichelle on February 3, 2026. Bettina Judd Interview Questions Thank you so much for sharing this excerpt from Feelin on grief and the short film of your wail of poems. There are a few videos that accompany Feelin  and more from your previous projects, all with such a meditative quality to them. What was producing this film like for you? Did you know, while writing the sonnets, that you would record them? Thank you for engaging the excerpt. It’s really important to me. I didn’t know that the poems would do much at all when I wrote them. They were a practice of processing mourning that correlated to the grief ritual of this whale named Talequah or J35—a female in the J pod of southern resident orcas who had recently given birth to a calf that died within minutes of being born. I didn’t know that there was any essential audio component of the poems until I reached the penultimate poem that required a literal wail. I read the poem a few times in public and it took so much out of me. I decided that it needed to be recorded so that I didn’t have to perform that visceral sonic expression of grief every time. It made sense then that there would be an audio portion and the visual made even more sense as I had all of this footage I took of the Salish Sea—waters that this whale I mourned with calls home.  In the notes, you write, “Black studies is enshrouded by grief.” When did you first feel this realization? I did not expect that these poems would be in the book Feelin  in any particular way. But when I reflected on the process of writing the poems, I saw myself referring to texts in Black studies that identified the ways that I was experiencing this very personal grief that came to a particular head after a series of deaths in my family—particularly the death of my father James Russell Judd. It seemed that I was mourning a new person in my family before I could get over the last death. What Dagmawi Wobushet would call “compounding loss,” or Saidiya Hartman asks, “How might we understand mourning, when the event has yet to end? When the injuries not only perdure, but are inflicted anew? Can one mourn what has yet ceased happening?” I was actively existing within, feeling and thinking through Black Studies.  Feelin is a multimedia experience, reflecting your skill as an interdisciplinary artist and scholar. What has been one of your favorite moments where you experimented with a new medium? The Salish Sea mourning meditation is a project I feel really good about. I managed to create it and place it in a book. It is the first chapter and puts out there, immediately, the stakes of the project as a whole. I think it does that quite rigorously. I’d never really worked with visual media in this way. I experimented with animation here and there. I’d done some animation with poems from my first book, patient.  but they were not integrated with the book in the same way. These animations in “Salish Sea” involved more hand drawing. I played with sound a bit more too. It was fun.  How would you describe your literary practice? Has it changed between publishing your first book, patient , and now? I’m trying my best to write and engage with people and ideas in a meaningful way. I am trying to learn. I think of my practice as one of curiosity. I’m in search of beauty—whatever that may mean. In terms of the change in my literary practice—I think so. I hope so in good ways and some way that aren’t so good. When I wrote patient.  I was writing it in a kind of opposition to my work as a scholar. I was trying to figure out what kind of writer and artist I wanted to be. In many ways, those questions remain open ended. But I was escaping academia through those poems and by writing in a creative community. I was still very much learning how to do research and scholarship and patient.  is a reflection of me processing those earlier experiences in learning how to conduct research.  Torch was your first publication! Can you speak to the importance and impact of those first yeses in your career?  Yes, it was! It was my first official professional publication. Ask my mother, and my first publication was at 10 years old in one of those old vanity presses. Amanda Johnston and I met at Cave Canem and I recited this poem at the fellows reading. She liked it enough to want to publish it. It meant a lot to me because in many ways, I was tying my workshop experience to whether I would pursue poetry at all. Amanda’s ask was one of those moments where I stepped out on faith and everything fell in place. I am  supposed to be a poet. It is  work that people would want to see. I’m a very different writer now than I was then, but without that publication and without that time, I would not be the writer I am now.  In a 2015 interview , you mentioned the poems in your first book wouldn’t have existed without the Cave Canem community. Who or what is holding you and fueling your work right now? I have friends, some of whom I met through the CC community who I share work with, who hold my feet to the fire to write that book, to listen to a poem, to read and critique my work. My mother and my friends Jericho, Anastacia, and Phillip. Now that I am more clearly writing in hybrid styles, I would say my colleagues in Gender and Black Studies as well. And, in Writer’s Digest , you said you hope people will “heed to the words of Nina Simone, ‘Stop and think, and feel again,’ especially in this political and social moment.” What are you feeling these days? Whose words are you holding on to? I’m still feeling Nina for sure. Still aware of the importance of the power and intensity of music to change my condition—to make me calm or brave, to remain in sensation at a time when it would be quite reasonable to check out, disassociate, flee the body for fear of feeling the terror that this moment in this country and world demands. Not so much words at this time, but vibrations. Sounds that remind me to come back into my body. Alice Coltrane’s Ptah the El Daoud has been good to me recently. Which of the cities you’ve lived in has the best food? In every city where I have lived, I have had a kitchen.  But really it depends on the cuisine. I am really enjoying what I am experiencing in Atlanta right now.  What is your current obsession? My dog, Kujichagulia.  How can people support you right now? Me? Take care of each other. Organize. Know your neighbor. Be brave. Vote. Feel. Grieve. Scream the wins as loud as the losses. Do not let what is happening in this moment go over without resistance. Turn off AI searches. Read a book. Defend your local library. Check my books out of it. Return them. Tell someone about them. Name another Black woman writer people should know. Tafisha Edwards https://theoffingmag.com/poetry/the-double-blind/ ### 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. Click here to support Torch Literary Arts.

Jasmine Harris is a multi-genre writer and educational specialist featured in the Hidden Sussex Anthology , Prometheus Dreaming , Syndrome Magazine , and several others. She most recently was the recipient of the Mid-America Arts Alliance Catalyze Grant 2024 and served as the 2023 Arts and Science Center of Southeast Arkansas Arts in Education Artist in Residence. Harris focuses her writing on celebrating Black culture and community, intersectional identities, speculative and visionary futures, and the evaluation of popular culture. As a teaching artist, she has extensive practice in facilitating creative writing through critical analysis of emoting one’s epistemologies. Harris frequently quotes her inspirations as Maya Angelou, Ntozake Shange, Nikki Giovanni, and southern rap. Stay updated with her work and projects through her website or by following her on Instagram @ dr_harris. Valleys When people discuss sibling rivalry, I hold a bubble in my mouth. My brother and I have always loved each other, clinging to one another for hope. Living with our stepfather was like riding a wooden roller coaster, rough and raggedy, ever-changing. And we were like customer service agents; stone smiles plastered on our faces, ready to accept the infrequent, peaceful greeting or braise an endless list of our incompetencies. When he got home from work, there was no limit to the cruelty, so our shared hope became makeshift shields. We didn’t know what would become of us, but we had each other, always choosing love.  Finding solace in hobbies, I’d collect literature like the lord’s rings while my brother found a way to fix anything that was broken. I remember when we both realized that resources available to my parents were not our own; our pockets were empty. Yet as we grew, so did our needs, and like the broken knick-knacks, he fixed that too, without question. I had the luxury of asking, and he would provide, always choosing to love me. *** My clammy palms rubbed the sides of the taupe, airport-like seat attached by bars to a row of others. When I entered the room, the guard dressed in military-like garb, with a poker face to match, had us line up according to last name and seated us in equal distance from one another, with firm points of his finger. I’d changed my clothes only twice for this visit as requested at the entrance of the barbed-wire facility. The first having a shirt too green, the second looking a bit too much like loungewear, and the third resembling the attire of a medical professional, thankfully found at a local general store, was accepted. I’d driven thirteen hours and had a few quarters to lock up my keys and those of anyone who may have forgotten. I retrieved the reloadable card from my pocket, glancing at the vending machine in the cafeteria-like room.  I wasn’t sure what he wanted this time, but I scanned the machines for Sour Patch Kids. Like the unexpected gifts he’d sent to hotels for my birthday trips or walking in the snow so my son wouldn’t spend his first birthday without a cake, I wanted my consideration to match his. We held in our hearts an unspoken agreement between us, a dedication to be a shoulder we all needed in this life to lean on or an anchor as our ships swayed in life’s storms. I took the Styrofoam tray from the guard’s station and began emptying the package in front of them. When I was finished, and they were sure I hadn’t smuggled in an unauthorized snack, I returned to my seat hoping the wait wouldn’t be much longer. Tears filled my eyes as they scanned the room full of people, crouched over, hoping to enjoy our shared, timed intimacy. I couldn’t wait for it to be my turn. For the conspicuous door, seemingly a part of the wall, to open and my brother to emerge dressed in a Dickies suit matching my chair and every other inmate in the room. I couldn’t wait to actually be able to hug him, hear the pitch of his laugh rather than muffled voices on a recorded line, and see the indentations around his eyes wrinkle as we both grinned, planning our lives after this.  *** When I was little, I can remember playing in front of our small apartment complex with my brother, wondering just who we would become. While tracking the journey of the roly-poly bugs, I wondered how we would navigate a world so extensive. So many beings going in varying directions like a traffic-filled Hot Wheels track. As the bugs navigated the obstacles we’d set up throughout the yard, my mind drifted further. I'd watched an episode of 60 Minutes with my grandmother earlier that week since we were out of school for spring break. Grandma said we’d be better off watching stories with her than being maids for our grumpy new guardian.  This episode was about how some people got so lonely it was as bad for their health as chain smoking. The thought of being in a smoke-filled room or lonely enough to die made me dizzy. I began to take deep breaths over and over again until my grandma told me to lie down. I can remember squeezing my eyes tightly as I lay there, hoping God would show us all a little bit more mercy as we traveled on our own highways. Even then, I knew I’d never have to live a life without love, without you.  ### 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. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Cynthia Manick  is the author of No Sweet Without Brine  (Amistad-HarperCollins, 2023), which received 5 stars from Roxane Gay, was named among the “Best Poetry of the Last Year (2023)” by Ms. Magazine, and was selected as a New York Public Library Best Book of 2023. She is the author of Brown Girl Polaris  (a Belladonna chaplet), editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry; and winner of the Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry for her first collection Blue Hallelujahs.  Manick has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, Yaddo, and Château de la Napoule, among other foundations. For 10 years, she curated Soul Sister Revue , a quarterly reading series that featured emerging poets, poet laureates, and Pulitzer Prize winners. Her poem “Things I Carry into the World” was made into a film by Motionpoems, and her work has recently featured in VOICES , an audio play and sisterscape by Aja Monet and Eve Ensler’s V-Day. A storyteller and performer at literary festivals, libraries, and museums, Manick’s work can be found in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day  Series, Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus and other outlets. She lives in New York but travels widely for poetry. The Reality Show of My Dreams Features Black women lounging on goose down pillows. The air is a mist of cucumber lemon and pumped soul jams,  that pull them all to nod  and go wheww chilee .  Mouths twist in delight.  They are of course being hand fed ─  plantain chips for the crisp peanut brittle for the salt and mango chunks on the side of ripe.  Fully hydrated these women are in love ─  with the colors aubergine and macaroon.  They wear church hats so wide,  spirits don’t need to hover to hear what’s going down.  Instead, they curl in hat brims – dozing off and on to the sound of female voices.  Some teaching girls how to unlearn burden,  where melanin was fear then scolding then brass knuckles.  Others describing dreams  of continents forming  and the oldest trunks of bristlecone trees. In this reality select women  are surrounded by foreign  dignitaries and leaders,  who trail behind an every- day parade of afros and braids styled with white lights butterflies, and marigolds.  They ask the right questions.  Answers are in a constant state  of blooming.  Black women are also regulars  at parks and merry-go-rounds.  They read books and rate travel destinations  based on soul food menus  and pictures of baked biscuits,  to see other brown women at ease.  In this reality women stride  through major cities – New York, D.C., and Boston –  like a herd of black  Friesian mares.  On their feet are designer shoes  that feel like butter but only cost 10 pennies.  Some wear an Aunt Jemima’s crown,  red and checkered,  with a pocketed maroon dress to match. Others favor the fedora,  knowing it’s a different  type of blade.   Walking by like a sigh,  they are followed by a trail  of black felines, crows, and canines  who love them so hard,  they sometimes forget  about oxygen. ### 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. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Rakaya Fetuga tells stories through prose, poetry, and performance. From the age of 17, Rakaya landed upon London’s poetry scene, and since then, her words have taken her across the country and the world, performing on stages from Qatar to Cuba. Rakaya’s writing has spearheaded an array of campaigns for the UN, L’Occitane and Cartier amongst others. Receiving writing awards from the New York TV & Film Festival (2024) and Royal Holloway University of London (2015 & 2016), as well as winning poetry competitions such as the Roundhouse Poetry Slam (2018), Rakaya’s words spark joy, challenge, and inspire meaningful reflection in her listeners. With a Master's in Literature & Creative Writing, Rakaya has been published in anthologies by HarperCollins, Pan Macmillan, and Penguin Random House. An advocate for self-expression, Rakaya finds joy in creating spaces of inspiration, connection, and community. Imitation is the Highest Flattery Iqra wasn’t allowed to go to parties. So, she savoured times like these when her parents were away, and she was left under the lax rulership of her oldest brother. Iqra pulled each outfit choice out from the back of her wardrobe and lay them carefully on the bed: a blue, puff-sleeve mini dress (which she usually wore as a top), bootcut jeans paired with a cherry t-shirt (self-customised as a crop top using scissors from the kitchen drawer), and the choice she already knew she would make in the end, her brand new LBD. Iqra had hidden it in the depths of their overburdened wardrobe straight after buying. Not even Umm Salama had spotted it - her sister would surely have picked a fight with her if she had.    Umm Salama was the prison guard Iqra needed to get around on most occasions. She was only three years older than Iqra, but was such a naggy agent of sensibleness, adamant that Iqra would have none of the fun she denied herself.  Iqra got invited to a lot of parties. They were the way for the girls at her private, single-sex boarding school in Kent to construct their own playground of flirtation with the boys from the other schools in the area, and simply to have fun away from the gaze of their housemistresses.  This Easter holiday, Gaia was hosting. It was perfect timing for Iqra because her parents had already left for Abuja a week earlier, catching the cheaper flights before everyone else bound by the academic calendar clogged the airports. Gaia’s own parents were ‘cool’ and were satisfied to order the kids pizzas and step out for the evening, as long as Gaia promised to clean up at the end of the night. Her mum and step-dad both worked in film production and would sometimes leave Gaia with a childminder, which Iqra envied, supposing one of those would be far less annoying than three older siblings and three younger, perpetually elbowing into Iqra’s personal space and eating the last of the dambu nama straight from the packet.    Fancy dress was sometimes an element of their play at the house parties, and a welcome excuse to wear something hot. Gaia told Iqra there was no theme this time, and just to come ‘looking spicy’, an assignment she was sure to excel at. Her new, black, spaghetti-strap mini dress was bought in the Boxing Day sales and had been hiding away the whole term. Iqra tried it on with a t-shirt underneath, and then without, unsure whether she should fill her bra out a bit more so the dress wouldn’t look so saggy at the top.  Puberty tripped up even the most confident of girls. She wasn’t short on self-assurance usually. Iqra believed in a unique middle child theory: being at the centre of the family meant she sucked in all of its beauty with nucleus-intensity. If not that, she had simply been chosen by Allah to be the pretty one. Full lips with an attractive dark outline like a Bratz doll, high-tilting eyes and naturally fair skin, yellow like an Igbo. But she was slow on producing in the chest region. She pushed some hijab undercaps into her bra and went to the bathroom down the corridor from her room to look in its full-length mirror.  She posed with her new bust, one hand on her hip and one at the meeting of her bare thighs. It could work – but she’d wear the t-shirt as well. Iqra imagined how embarrassing it would be for someone to hook a finger into the cotton and pull the hijab cap out. She would have to laugh it off or call the culprit ‘dirty’ for noticing in the first place. All the girls did it. Last week, Gaia was showing off her bum pads in dorm – proper ones, sewn into her cycle shorts.  “I need the toilet!” The voice of Iqra’s youngest sister, Hamdalah, interrupted the outfit preparations. Iqra cracked the door open and Hamdalah rushed into the bathroom immediately. With six brothers and sisters, you were never ever alone for long, even in the toilet or the corridor. Umm Salama was there too now, sitting on the stairs, picking shed hair out of her combs and afro pics.  “You lot are grim! You have to clean these after you use them,” Umm Salama complained.  Hamdalah started to pee without even closing the door, so Iqra pulled it shut behind her, and was noticed by Umm Salama. Her whiney tone flipped instantly to one of self-important, stern authority. “Where are you wearing that to?”  Iqra rolled her eyes, “My room.” She marched back into the bedroom, swinging the door, but Umm Salama sped in to catch it before the slam. Unfortunately, the sisters shared a bedroom and there was no way to lock her out. Iqra continued getting ready, ignoring the judging eyes that followed her from wardrobe to vanity to the shoebox under the bed where her jewellery was kept. “I knew Mum and Dad shouldn’t have sent you to that school. Are you even Muslim anymore?”  Iqra scoffed, pulling her braids into a high ponytail, “You’re so 2D. Being Muslim isn’t about clothes.” “Do all your white friends even know you’re Muslim?”  “Duh,” Iqra retorted. Although when she thought about it, perhaps not everyone did. She didn’t pray at school, and she doubted anyone at Kent Hill Girls had enough Islamic knowledge to know her name was Arabic, a quote from the first chapter revealed of the Quran. The only reason her faith ever came up was at Ramadan when she’d skip lunches and spend extra time sleeping. But for those who didn’t ask, they could quite easily assume she was another of the several aspiring anorexics at school. There was no need to offer up extra information about her homelife and multitude of embarrassing siblings. People were always going to assume something, so she let them.  “And why do you assume ,” Iqra quipped, accusingly, “that none of my friends are Muslim themselves?” She mentally conjured the image of Amira Khan, a girl two years above her, who had once led a peer support session for the girls in her Dormitory House. Hardly a friend but not a nemesis either. Unconvinced, Umm Salama kissed her teeth, “Put some tights on. Noone needs to see your arse.”  Was that it? No more lecturing?  Iqra teetered between wondering what was wrong with her sister and seizing this rare occasion of leaving without a big fight. She took the blessing and let the disagreement end there.   Iqra got to Gaia’s house with the giddiness of the forbidden in her stomach. Even though her parents wouldn’t approve and Umm Salama was cursing her from her bitter little corner of the bedroom, Iqra wasn’t doing anything wrong. When the other girls got hold of neon drinks in glass bottles, she never drank any. She didn’t smoke when they did, and she never let the boys near her. It was just fun, just dancing and just making sure they knew she was in charge of her life as much as they were.  At the front door, Iqra could hear the voices and laughter inside and waited for someone to come let her in. A boy opened the door and screamed “Dayyum,” at her before spluttering with laughter. It was a strange welcome, but not as strange as his appearance. Iqra eyed the boy in the doorway cautiously, his tacky fake-gold neck chain and clip-on earring, the baggy t-shirt and jeans swamping him, his bony white forearms sticking out of the fabric, and most concerning of all, the dirt smeared across his face.  “Who is it?” it was Gaia’s voice calling from inside.  “Your mate,” the boy said, skipping down the tiled corridor, where Gaia passed him with a gradual strut, concentrating on not falling over in her massive stilettos. Iqra stepped inside but left the door open, wanting the light from the afternoon sun to confirm what she was seeing. Gaia too had painted her face – not in the carelessly slathered way of the boy, but she had evenly brushed foundation over her skin that was several shades too dark. She didn’t quite make it to the edges of her eyes, giving her a reverse-panda look.  “Iqra! Hey babe, you made it! Take off your coat – I wanna see your fit,” Gaia pulled down the shoulders of Iqra’s open jacket as far as she could, stopped mid-way by Iqra’s fist clenching the sides together.  “What’s on your face?” Iqra asked in a small, shocked voice.  Gaia giggled, pulling Iqra through the corridor towards the living room, “Oh, we did a theme last minute. Destiny’s Children!” She was smiling wide from her stupid brown face, balancing an expression of innocence and defiance. Music was pumping from the CD player and speaker, which stood beside the TV. No one was dancing, but everyone was standing, and they turned to look at Iqra, along with Gaia, waiting for her to react.  Iqra thought about slapping Gaia’s cheek, transferring the make-up mess to her own white palm. It suddenly occurred to her that she was the only Black person there, the only true brown face at the party apart from one Asian girl that Iqra had no classes with, who stood at the back of the room sipping her juice through a straw. Iqra felt loneliness push through her throat like a swallowed stone. Everyone was looking, but the loud music covered her words enough to have this moment with her friend before addressing the room.  Iqra shook free of Gaia’s grip and instead grabbed the girl by both of her arms. “What is on your face?” she demanded.  “It’s just–” Gaia stammered, going wide-eyed like a guppy. “The shade is Espresso.” “It’s butters,” Iqra said, scrunching her face. She learned from dealing with her younger siblings that her disapproval was more lethal than her rage.  “What?” Iqra scanned the room before she answered. They were still the spectacle. She couldn’t break her front. “You look fucking stupid, Gaia.”  The girl drooped her lips, reddening behind the makeup, the rumble before a tantrum-cry. She heard someone hiss, “ Told  you it was a bad idea.” Quickly, Iqra grabbed her friend Rebecca, who, thank God, had kept to her original shade, and gave her an energised hug.  ‘Don’t Cha’ by The Pussycat Dolls was playing, so Iqra started to sing along, nodding for Rebecca to do the same. Iqra shimmied out of her coat and started to dance, jumping up and down so her braids bounced and hoop earrings flipped from neck to cheek. The room was split – half watching her and Rebecca, who obediently followed Iqra’s dancing lead, and half looking towards Gaia, who had probably run back out of the room to cry.  Iqra wanted to cry. It was she who deserved to cry. The embarrassment was making her nauseous, but she kept bouncing, smiling, singing. Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot, like me? Is this how she looked to them? A Black, espresso-coloured girl. So foreign they could wear her as costume. Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was a freak, like me? She was their freak – and not the sexy kind.   Whatever fog of obscurity she thought may have hidden her religion, there was no mistaking everyone knew she was Black.  So what?  She screamed in her brain. Didn’t they all wish to be her anyway? She was the desirable, unattainable beauty that Gaia could never reach. They were stupidly jealous, Iqra told herself. She was a naturally occurring phenomenon, already perfectly formed for Destiny’s Child. A pearl needing no more refinement than good mascara and a generously filled bra.   After taking mental note of everyone there, every complicit face, and forming a vengeance list in her cranium, she left the party early, wrapped in her coat and a wry smile. Iqra didn’t want to show them an ounce of sadness, and once she was out in the early evening air, she dropped the façade and cradled her fury. Her fury carried her home. Her fury lit fire under the 314 bus wheels and smoked her to her front door in record time.  Umm Salama was in the kitchen scraping the burnt oily bottom of the jollof pot, and laughed that her sister had quit the party so early, her mouth open and red as a dragon’s tongue. Iqra, feeling safe enough to spit fire back, released all her fury on her unsuspecting big sister, shooting a tirade of flaming insults, ending with, “That’s why no one likes you.”  Umm Salama erupted. Not in the way Iqra thought she would, or hoped she would, matching Iqra’s cathartic burn, turning all her pain to ashes. Umm Salama cried instead. A gasping, snotty, hiccupping cry. And Iqra caught the sadness in her throat. That stone of loneliness rising back up her trachea.  Iqra didn’t say sorry, willing Umm Salama to turn this around, to find the fury again, to berate and redeem her. But she didn’t. The sisters both stood crying in the kitchen, unable to stop, hardly able to breathe, all their wet pain pooling on the floor. ### 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. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Samantha Lamont Adams is a Black Milwaukeean, freshwater enthusiast, and Doctoral Candidate in English and Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, currently completing a dissertation about literary and historical relationships between Black Americans and bodies of water beyond the Atlantic Ocean in the early 20th century. She previously studied Creative Writing and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is ever interested in the material and figurative qualities of water and the generative collisions between the sacred and profane.  candy’s cameo [new york, 1975] Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. “Peaches” and “Brown Sugar,” “Sapphire” and “Earth Mother,” “Aunty,” “Granny,” God’s “Holy Fool,” a “Miss Ebony First,” or “Black Woman at the Podium”: I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here I would have to be invented [...] In order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness. —Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987).  You are fantastical. —Candy Love (an actress of the Golden Age of Pornography), as Leona in The Erotic Dr. Jekyll  (1975) Yes,       yes,  every photograph of you was already taken before you stepped on set. despite this leaden american grammar in all its suffocating layers, you are coming. or so I hope. i cannot be vain and call this a project of recovery, for you have always been here, making love and rent  and kissing the beautiful face of your husband and laughing in a fake french accent, committing to the bit and crooning oh monsieur, fuck me please you have always been here on flickering film, frosted aquamarine eyeshadow, offwhite lace of the maid’s bonnet sliding down jetblack hair  your throat a tower gleaming in front of the gaffer your hand tugging at his hair guiding his tongue the stunning gap    between your teeth your hips rolling like water over his face you have always been here or perhaps you just arrived, walking onto set writhing atop low-pile pools of crimson and beige spilling just out of frame inventing yourself anew ### 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. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Unoma Azuah is a Nigerian writer and activist whose research and activism focus on LGBT rights and stories in Nigerian literature. She is the international-award-winning author of three books. photo by Jose Osorio Unoma Azuah teaches English at Wiregrass Georgia Tech. Valdosta, GA, USA. In 2011, she was listed as one of the top professors at small private colleges in the United States in Affordable/Private Colleges and Universities in the United States . Additionally, she is recognized by The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education under the topic, "Honors for Four Black Educators." Some of her collaborative works with organizations like the International Gay, Lesbian, and Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) and PEN America led to reports and book projects like “Nowhere to Turn: Blackmail and Extortion of LGBT People in Sub-Saharan Africa” and “Silenced Voices, Threatened Lives: The Impact of Nigeria’s Anti-LGBTI Law on Freedom of Expression.” Her latest work is entitled, Wedged Between Man and God: Queer West African Women’s stories . Some of her awards include the Aidoo-Snyder award, Urban Spectrum award, Flora Nwapa/ Association of Nigerian Authors award, Leonard Trawick award and the Hellman/Hammett Human Rights award. Her undergraduate degree in English is from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.  She has an MA in English from Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio, and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA. Postcards Western Sahara A parliament of vultures  surround the carcass of a camel. Wind-blown men on horses Cast a side glance at me The sandstorms on their heels tint the air  Dakar three faces the side with buzzing bees the side where balboa trees dwell and the side where splashes of sea waves taunt I was robbed at a place where zinc roofs touched the sun  Cape Town White height  sparkle Addicts, black, lingered around trash cans A woman with bird nests in her eyes smashed her metal bag on my face Figuring out why  took the length of the street: long Abuja for three months I lived in a hotel with my lover and her band To help her mount her music monument  The installation came crashing down on us. London She held the crown I wanted  She let me touch it I couldn’t take it I found love in this town, but lost. Beijing She was straight  But I showed her how to bend to Buddha Our tongues crashed through a worship song She spoke Mandarin I spoke Igbo We swallowed our tongues They couldn’t save us. Chicago The cold drains life Ice blocks are what I grind with my teeth I spend a lifetime seeking the sun I left life in a defrosting gadget Now, withered wings are far flung From these heights I have mounted new wings against the greying sky.  Ontario Blue blood,  blue hue,  the feel of cotton clouds: they know neither the sizzle of pain fried, nor the burn of bones broken.... Hurricane hallucinations:  Silence crashes through my glass door drops a seagull at my feet  where broken glasses lay sea waves gather   the gash on the door streams in sun beams  slants of light strangulating me. traps. me. the sea rises birds shrieking this water laps my face a dog and a tongue a gallon gulps the sea rises there are birds flapping their wings  Flailing arms I drop, deeper my prayers rise like  floating feathers  yet  Hens hum in the distance. THE INTERVIEW This interview was conducted between Unoma Azuah and Jae Nichelle on December 10, 2025. Thank you for sharing these incredible poems! “Postcards” includes so many different cities. As a frequent traveler, how do you find that your physical location shapes your writing style? Of course, new locations are new experiences. At such places, my senses are usually heightened, so I try to absorb everything about that location, from sounds to sights, food, temperature, and energies. Like a meal, it’s often fresh and sizzling. There are some instances, though, where the situation can feel sour or strange. For instance, a few years ago, I was at a local market in Qinghai Province, China, and the lady I was buying shawls from was so curious about my skin. I was taken aback. She asked to touch my arm. I guess she wanted to know if the black of my skin was like a soot that could rub off.  At first, I was offended. However, her eyes lit up with genuine curiosity. Encounters like this make me keep a record of my experiences, the people, and the places. It’s like taking photographs on trips. In this case, instead of a camera for pictures, I come away with poems or stories. So, yes, my physical location shapes my writing style because new places offer me new occasions to absorb the vigor of people and their idiosyncrasies. Traveling is enriching; it’s a fodder for creativity.  “Hurricane Hallucinations” ends with such an interesting turn. What is your philosophy for writing your endings, whether it’s poetry or fiction? Endings are very important to me when I write both Fiction or Poetry. Just like in relationships, the way it ends makes it easier for one to either heal or stay traumatized. Good closures in writing are vital. It’s like that lingering reverberation at the end of a great musical score. It leads you home. It completes the pleasure. It’s a climax. Everything else falls into place. It’s also a way for me to connect with my audience- for them to step into my shoes-to feel what I feel- and to know exactly why I feel the way I feel. Therefore, endings make the micro the macro: it’s about focusing on the small scale and then spanning out to the macro, the large scale. Hence, my philosophy of endings is that it’s imperative for my audience see the larger picture when they are done reading that piece of literature.  In a 2017 interview , you said you enjoy poetry the most out of all the genres. Is that still the case? And what are your rituals, if any, for sitting down to write a poem? That is still the case. Ironically, I write more of fiction and nonfiction these days. Poetry is still that mistress I see sporadically, and I am still discreet about the “affair.” Consequently, for me, poetry is like worshipping at an altar. It’s intense and intermittent. I actually have to wait for the muse to knock me off my butt to write it. As for rituals, I don’t think I have any. I don’t sit down and decide to write poems. It has to hit me like a bolt. A case in point is this: there was a time I was running late for a class I had to teach, but as I drove through rural Georgia at near dusk, I couldn’t resist pulling over to the shoulder of the road just to stare at how the rays of the sun glistened at the tips of leaves on a corn field. I had to get a pen and paper. Incidentally, the energy I soaked in before writing the poem had nothing to do with neither the sun nor the leaves.  This approach to writing poems very much goes against the saying, “Writing is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration.” Therefore, the opposite is the case for me when it comes to writing poems. With fiction, though, I do have some rituals which start with my carrying the story around my head for weeks before I sit down and jot down major plots. I would usually sit in the evenings or at night, I am a night owl of sorts, creating and hashing out characters for a couple of hours, and returning to it every day or couple of days until the work is done.    Your work, from your acclaimed memoir Embracing My Shadow to your curated anthologies, has platformed lesbian stories, sometimes at great risk to your safety or the safety of others. How do you navigate having both vulnerability and protection when writing from such intimate places? I navigate both vulnerability and protection by being private about my locations, and I share very little to no information about my projects until they are done. I also find ways to disguise projects that may attract hostility, just like I did with the recent book tour of the Queer West African Women’s stories, Wedged Between Man and God . The unfortunate thing about that very significant event was that we couldn’t share the news in the media as the events were happening. That was heartbreaking because it could have attracted more people to come for “conversations” if I advertised it in the media. Nevertheless, we stayed on the side of caution by inviting only friends and allies, and then shared the news about the events after we completed them and were all safely home. Per antagonism, there have been a couple of instances where people spat at me in public and called me a disgrace. On those occasions, I was lucky have people with me who could serve as security assistants in case hostile situations spiral out of control. Still, it’s not all gloom and doom. A number of queer women, too, have recognized me in public and offered me hugs and handshakes and expressed their gratitude for what I do to make them feel “seen.”   Nigeria’s sociopolitical climate around sexuality has shaped much of your work. How do you see the landscape changing, and what impact has that had on queer storytelling since you began writing? There has been quite a bit of progress. There are more queer people who are “out” and vocal in their creative and advocacy work, especially the younger generations: millennials and Gen Z. This is very much unlike the 80’s and 90’s when I was an adolescent trying to navigate the rugged terrain of queerness. I felt so alone. There were no role models in that sense, and nothing in Nigerian literature that I could identify with, except for Wole Soyinka’s character, Joe Golder, in his novel, The Interpreters . But then, Joe is not just a “foreigner,” he is also not bestowed with the best fate. In fact, it felt as if Soyinka had a level of disdain for the character. And there was absolutely nothing about lesbians like me. I still remember the outrage that followed my first newspaper article in the 90’s about queer literature. Now, though, things are a bit better, especially when some of us can hide behind the screens of social media, share our stories, push for queer rights, and spread awareness about our lives. Consequently, the storytelling landscape in Nigeria is expanding. We have not gotten where I’d like us to be, though. Nonetheless, we’re building and pushing, one brick at a time.  When you came to the U.S. from Nigeria, what spaces or people did you find solace and support in? When I arrived in the US over two decades ago, I didn’t have a lot of options for spaces and people I could share a community with apart from my mentor, Leslye Huff, and her spouse, Amina; they gave me a great transition nest. Otherwise, I was mostly on my own. Then again, I was so overwhelmed with trying to settle into a graduate program at Cleveland State University, Ohio, that I barely had time to breathe, let alone seek or find friends. For example, I had to learn how to type, how to use a computer, and how to speak well enough to be understood. I also had to train my ears to understand what my professors and classmates were saying. When I did try to make friends, it was just obvious that most folks I met already had their clique of friends, so trying to be a part of those circles felt like crashing a party.  With time though, I made great friends, and we have maintained/sustained that friendship till date.                What’s a small joy that instantly uplifts you during hard times? The small joys that instantly uplift me during hard times and good times would include reading books, listening to disco and soul music from the 80’s and 90’s, engaging in stimulating conversations, sitting by the sea/ocean watching and listening to waves rise, crash and recede, taking long walks as birds chirp in the distance, laughter and still being able to enjoy delicious Nigerian meals. I also love being present in the moment and enjoying it with a heart of gratitude.                How can people support you right now? I would appreciate more literary engagements and spaces to share my works. I would also appreciate support for my works, particularly for people who are able to buy my books. Additionally, donations and grant opportunities for the Nigerian LGBTQ+ organizations I work with will go a long way. Name another Black writer people should know.  A couple of them come to mind: there is Itiola Jones, the author of Blood Mercy , and this book reimagines Cain and Abel as sisters who are in a traumatic relationship. The second writer is Safia Elhillo. Her work is noteworthy for its representation of black Muslim women and the black diaspora in America.   ### 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. Click here to support Torch Literary Arts.

Allie Morgan (she/her) is a writer, director, and producer in Chicago, IL. She studied entertainment business at Los Angeles Film School and screenwriting at New York Film Academy.  She has written and directed numerous award-winning short films and a proof of concept, and recently started her own production, Muffy Film Productions, which focuses on platforming marginalized filmmakers. When she is not writing and directing her own projects, she also loves assistant directing and producing other people’s projects. She is passionate about telling stories for women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community, and her ultimate goal is to put these underrepresented communities in front of and behind the camera in all of her films. POETRY BY DEAD MEN A black screen. Muffled noise and music in the background. NADIA (O.S.) You've got this, babe! You can do it! NAOMI (O.S.) I don't, I can't. NADIA (O.S.) You can, I promise. FADE IN: 1. INT. NADIA AND NAOMI'S LIVING ROOM - EARLY EVENING (DREAM SEQUENCE) The screen comes into focus. NADIA (late 20s-early 30s, with a distinct septum piercing and purple streak in her hair) sits behind NAOMI (late 20s-early 30s, with a nose ring to match Nadia's septum ring) in a small birthing pool. Meditation chants and music play from a speaker in the background. NAOMI Just pull her out of me! Knock me out! Anything! Nadia moves from behind Naomi so they're face-to-face. Nadia kneels in front of Naomi and takes her face in her hands. NADIA Look at me. You're the strongest woman I know. You are capable of anything you set your mind to. Nadia touches her forehead against Naomi's. NADIA (CONT'D) She's right there. Just a few more pushes and we'll have our baby with us. NAOMI (quietly) Okay. NADIA Remember, there's nothing to fear, but- NAOMI Fear itself. (she takes a deep breath) I have to push. Fade to black. A baby cries off screen. 2. INT. NADIA AND NAOMI'S BEDROOM - LATER THAT NIGHT (DREAM SEQUENCE) The room is lit exclusively with candles. Quiet music plays in the distance. Naomi lies in bed covered only in a sheet. She cradles and nurses the newborn in her arms. Small footsteps come padding down the hallway and into the room. SIENNA (6) enters the room timidly. SIENNA Mama? NAOMI Come meet your sister, baby. Sienna walks over to the bed and crawls in next to Naomi. Naomi puts her free arm around her. SIENNA What's her name? NAOMI Sayrah. SIENNA (slowly) Sie-ruh. Sienna grabs Sayrah's foot and tickles it gently. SIENNA (CONT'D) Hi, Sayrah. I'm your sister. (after a beat) Do you think she knows me? From when I talked to her in your belly? NAOMI Definitely. SIENNA Do you think she remembers all of the poems we read to her? NAOMI (she laughs) Maybe. SIENNA I like her. NAOMI I like her too. Naomi looks back and forth between Sienna and Sayrah. NAOMI (CONT'D) You're still my girl, you know that right? SIENNA Mhm. NAOMI Both of you. Forever. Sienna places a kiss on Sayrah's head and then on Naomi's cheek. SIENNA Mama? NAOMI Hm? SIENNA Did it hurt? NAOMI What? SIENNA To have Sayrah. You said before that sometimes it hurts mama's to have babies. NAOMI A little. But I'd do it all over again. (after a beat) All the pain in the world, I'd do it over and over again if it meant you two could be mine forever. 3. INT. NADIA AND NAOMI'S KITCHEN - MORNING (DREAM SEQUENCE) Nadia stands at the kitchen island in a white t-shirt and black boy shorts. She pours a cup of coffee and sprinkles cinnamon into a mug that says "best mama ever". Naomi enters with Sayrah strapped to her chest. She grabs Nadia's waist from behind. NAOMI Coffee? NADIA Mhm. NAOMI Cinnamon? NADIA You know it. NAOMI I am madly in love with you, you know that? NADIA The feeling is mutual, my love. Naomi sits at the chair. She takes a sip of her coffee. Her eyes roam up and down Nadia's body. NAOMI This with a view? What else could a girl ask for? NADIA That, with a view, plus I'll read to you and the little one while you nap. NAOMI I am going to marry you all over again. 4. EXT. LOCAL PARK - AFTERNOON (DREAM SEQUENCE) Sienna runs around on the playground with friends. Nadia and Naomi sit on a nearby bench with Sayrah in the stroller. Naomi's free hand is on Nadia's thigh and her other hand holds a coffee. Sayrah giggles from her seat. NAOMI What's so funny, munchkin? NADIA You want some of mama's coffee, don't you? Naomi leans the cup toward Sayrah playfully. Sayrah giggles and swats at the straw. NAOMI Maybe when you're a little older. And then mama will take you on coffee dates every Saturday. Sienna climbs to the top of the play structure. SIENNA Mommy, mama! Look! Sienna hangs her legs from the top of the structure, then twists herself around the equipment and jumps to the ground. NADIA Baby, please be careful! SIENNA I am, mommy! promise! Sienna stumbles through the woodchips and runs toward Nadia and Naomi. She grabs Naomi's hand and pulls her off the bench. SIENNA (CONT'D) Mama, come here! I wanna show you something! NAOMI Where are we going, baby? SIENNA It'll be really quick, promise! DISSOLVE TO: 5. EXT. FOREST BEHIND THE PARK - AFTERNOON CONT. (DREAM SEQUENCE) Sienna pulls Naomi's hand and tugs her toward the wooded area. Sienna begins to run faster. Naomi lags behind her. NAOMI Sienna, slow down! Where are we going? Sienna doesn't respond. She keeps tugging Naomi as they get further into the woods. It starts to become darker. Sienna lets go of Naomi's hand. She continues running until she disappears out of sight. NAOMI (CONT'D) Sienna? SIENNA! CUT TO: 6. EXT. NADIA AND NAOMI'S HOUSE - NIGHT (FLASHBACK) Police drag Naomi out of her house in handcuffs. Naomi is covered in blood and tears and snot stains her face. NAOMI SIENNA! SIENNA! SIENNA MAMA! COME BACK! NAOMI SIENNA, GO INSIDE! NADIA, TAKE HER INSIDE! Nadia tries to grab Sienna and Sienna wrestles with her in the doorway. SIENNA Mama! Mama don't leave me! Please! NAOMI Sienna, I love you. Don't ever forget that! The police shove Naomi into the back of the car. Naomi sobs and puts her hand to the window as they drive away. Sienna falls to her knees at the door and Nadia stands behind her. CUT TO: 7. INT. THERAPIST'S OFFICE - DAY (PRESENT DAY) DR. WRIGHT (40s, very serious demeanor) sits at her desk. Naomi sits across from her in a chair. Her eyes have heavy dark circles around them, both of her wrists are bandaged, and her white t-shirt barely fits over her now eight-month bump. DR. WRIGHT And then what? Naomi doesn't respond. DR. WRIGHT (CONT'D) Naomi? NAOMI (distant) Hm? DR. WRIGHT You said Sienna runs off into the forest, and then what? NAOMI When can I see Sienna? DR. WRIGHT Naomi, what happens after Sienna runs into the forest in your dream? NAOMI I wanna see Sienna. Why can't I see Sienna? DR. WRIGHT Naomi- NAOMI Sienna should be with me. Naomi protectively places her hand over her belly. NAOMI (CONT'D) Both of them should be able to stay with me. DR. WRIGHT Naomi, please fo- NAOMI (hysterical) LET ME SEE SIENNA. WHY WON'T YOU LET ME SEE MY DAUGHTER? WHY ARE YOU KEEPING HER AWAY FROM ME? WHY ARE YOU TAKING THEM BOTH AWAY FROM ME? Dr. Wright pushes the emergency call button next to her desk. Within seconds, two medical personnel enter the room and grab Naomi by both of her arms. Naomi flails wildly as they drag her out of the room. Her screams echo down the hallway. 8. INT./EXT. VARIOUS - MONTAGE -- Naomi, Nadia, and Sienna sing together in the car -- Sienna plays dress up in a green dress -- Naomi and Nadia tell Sienna they're pregnant -- Sienna reads poetry to Naomi's belly -- Sienna and Sayrah play together in the backyard SIENNA (V.O.) Mama, if you're reading this, that means today is your birthday. This is my fourth birthday without you and each year I worry I will forget what your birthdays with you are like. Mommy took us on a road trip, and we're wearing the matching green dresses you like so much. We also stopped to get coffees, just the way you like them. Sayrah is so big now and she loves to read and write. I think she gets that from you. She doesn't know you, but I show her pictures of you every day. I hope one day you will be able to meet her. I hope we are still your girls. I hope we always will be. FADE TO BLACK. ### 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. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Chennelle Channer is a Jamaican-born poet and writer. She immigrated to America in her early childhood and was raised between the restless hum of Brooklyn and the measured cadence of South Carolina. Her Caribbean roots shape the rhythm and voice of her storytelling and Jamaica remains the place where she feels most at home.  She earned her B.A. in English with a concentration in creative writing from SUNY Binghamton and is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies at Dartmouth College. Her poetry explores immigration, language, womanhood, and Black familial structures, blending lyric intensity with narrative storytelling. Her work has appeared in Bloodroot Lit. , Clamantis , and Frontier Poetry , where she was named a finalist in the 2024 Open Contest. Beyond the page, she finds inspiration in the subtle patterns of daily life. She enjoys slow mornings, often starting the day with a cup of tea in silence. She cherishes the quiet of the early morning, before the world fully wakes and the day feels unclaimed. Through her work, she hopes readers feel seen, recognized, understood, and valued. GIRLHOOD IN AN AGE OF SUPERWOMEN I think a backseat is necessary now. I’m tired of holding my tongue like chewing the words makes me any less starved. I cried all last night cuz they cut my lights. Tired, I’ve been telling everyone I’m tired. Easier than explaining how the scar on my inner thigh is my testimony. I think a quick death is necessary now. I was warned once of the damage a copper plated slug does. Nothing said of all the ways a bible splits you open. My body, like the inside of an aloe leaf still tender from the lack of loving. I wear my gold cross over my white tee to remind helicopters to pass over. I think a clean slate is necessary now. I’ve got too many afflictions that intersect like the Brooklyn streets that still haunt me. I remember the first time I said it was the last time I’d let a man hit me. Turned a corner into newer, rougher hands. Swallowed whole all the bottles in my bathroom cabinet and somehow survived. I’ve been told that’s grace, I should be grateful. But I’m still bitter, and steeping in it. How can I be soft when I’m troubled and I don’t look like anyone will remember the weight of my name. ### 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. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.