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Sakena Jwan Washington (she/her)   is a Pittsburgh boomeranger and creative nonfiction writer. She was recently named the 2024-25 Emerging Black Writer-in-Residence at Chatham University where she is teaching MFA in Creative Writing students and developing a limited-edition chapbook as part of the Boosie Bolden Chapbook Series  published by  The Fourth River . She is also the current guest editor for Tributaries , the weekly online publication for The Fourth River. Her work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review , Huffington Post , Jellyfish Review, and others. In 2021, her flash essay, "The Blood Remains" was nominated for the 2021 Best of the Net anthology. She is also one of five Pittsburgh-based storytellers who documented the public art project, "Art in Parks" in the city's Allegheny Regional Asset District parks. She studied English at Clark Atlanta University and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles. More of her work can be found at  sakenajwan.com . Love is Not Loud I got married on a sunny, 80-degree day in late September before two reverends, 101 family and friends, four vendors, and my therapist. Not a physical therapist, but the kind that makes sense of my brain.  I stopped short of the aisle to take a deep breath. The church I got married in had no air conditioning and a slow trickle of sweat tickled the skin beneath the bodice of my wedding gown and sat trapped above my ribcage. I turned to my brother, Daryl, who clutched my right arm next to his torso before walking me down the aisle.  I took his fingers and pressed them to the side of my neck. “Feel my pulse.” It throbbed in a discordant house beat.  He pulled his fingers back and smiled. I can’t remember what he said, beyond a silent wow, but his hooded eyes widened as he grinned. He probably told me it was a good thing. Daryl subscribed to the same ethos as me: love is loud. When the procession song, “You and I,” began the opening chords triggered a wave of carbonated tingles up and across my back. Our musician channeled Stevie Wonder and everyone stood and smiled towards the back of the church.  Daryl and I made our entrance and took our first step down the aisle. I looked to my left. Standing alone in the last row of the center pew was a petite woman with sandy blonde hair. We locked eyes and she scanned me approvingly. It was my therapist Hannah. I invited her months prior, but she declined. “I’m your therapist. I can’t come to your wedding.” I joked that she could pretend to be on my mother’s side because of my mother’s light skin. “No one would know.” But then she showed up anyway. She wasn’t there to make a scene or object to our union, but to witness my metamorphosis. She floated in like an apparition and disappeared before the reception.  I’d been seeing her since the fall of 2009—two years before I met Rick, and five years before we exchanged vows. I was peak messiness. I’d been living in Los Angeles for the previous seven years before I decided to move back to my hometown for Matthew, a man I barely knew. The day I made the decision, I was in a Steelers bar tucked away in an LA neighborhood I’d never been to before. I texted Matthew, “If the Steelers win, I’m moving to Pittsburgh.” When the Steelers scored the winning touchdown in the AFC Championship, my fate was sealed. Over the next six months, we texted daily, spoke on the phone after work, and attempted grainy video calls over Skype. But less than two months after the move, he developed an acute allergy to direct communication and withdrew. On the day he unceremoniously canceled a dinner date with his parents via text, my friend’s husband declared a flag on the play. That same evening when he offered to swing by and take me out to dinner as an apology, he chose a local hot dog joint even though I was dressed like I was going to church. I came to my senses when he went on vacation and made no contact for two weeks. I broke it off in a two-page email and never spoke to him again. This chain of events was no surprise to Hannah. I had her at “we’d gone out twice.”  My first session took place on a dreary, overcast day in October. I slumped in her upright chair and declared myself an idiot.  “Promise me one thing. If you start dating someone again, will you let me know?”  I nodded with resignation. I wanted to do this on my own—the way I’d always done, with self-help articles, romantic comedies, and getting advice from friends whose dating history was equally questionable.  “You need to get more information.” For someone like me who obsessed over true crime dramas and 30-minute docuseries about bamboozled women, I believed that I was in fact an expert on getting more information. I had no wealth for Matthew to con me out of, he didn’t have a prison record, and he wasn’t married. He was a loner, but not a serial killer. Comments left by women on his Facebook page were appropriate and familial. As far as I was concerned, I’d done my due diligence. Plus, he lived in the house next door to my friend’s childhood home. Wasn’t that a sign? A serendipitous opening to the romcom of my life? Over the next five years, Hannah would have to rewrite my definition of love. The love I longed for was an unrestrained, soulful ballad on full blast, a kaleidoscope of butterflies flapping in your gut so hard you had to puke, a 100-year-old wooden rollercoaster that jumped off the tracks, an undertow that gripped your feet and propelled you in a backflip before spitting you up on shore. Love was supposed to hurt before it filled you with all-encompassing ecstasy. Love was supposed to be loud.  My love delusion began in preschool. I was four years old when I got my first taste of unrequited love. His name was Shawn. A pudgy light-skinned boy with big brown eyes and a tight round afro. My best friend, Priya, was already matched in a reciprocal love affair with Shawn’s best friend, so it seemed natural for us to be star-crossed lovers. When the school day began, all the children filed into a small, carpeted area and formed a circle for our morning devotion. Each day, I stood beside Shawn and cupped his hand as we recited the Lord’s Prayer. With our eyes closed, Shawn crushed my fingers until the center of my palm turned dark pink and dug his thumbnail into the back of my hand until it made a deep half-moon impression. Sometimes he broke the skin, but I didn’t let go until we said, “Amen.” I’ve never been one for reading signs, or, in this case seeing the obvious. Love hurt every day in my house, but it was always complicated by the image of a well-adjusted family. Too often, my father used his fist to settle arguments with my mom and brother. Then a few days or years later he would counter that cruelty with a trip to Kennywood, a shopping spree, or a two-week syllabus designed to occupy me during spring break. Love was a house of horrors that sometimes cleaned up nice for the yearly Olan Mills family photo.  Once I hit puberty, rejection became more nuanced. I spent hours decoding context clues, half-admissions, and suggestive statements to uncover my target’s true intentions. If Hannah had been my therapist back then she might have told me to stop fooling myself and pay more attention to their actions instead of their riddles.  In middle school, I attended Green Valley Day Camp run by two hippies in Glenshaw, a small suburb outside of Pittsburgh. That’s when I met Jake. He was a freckled 10-year-old with a crew cut. His parents were divorced. During the summer he stayed with his father in Pittsburgh, and in the fall, he returned to his mom in New Jersey. We were instant friends and over the course of three years, we wrote each other monthly letters between September and May. He had a special sign off that I soon adopted: TLA. “It means true love always,” he wrote the first time he used the abbreviation. Every June, I looked forward to his arrival at camp. And every summer, he developed a new and very public crush. First Courtney, then Julianna, and then Amy. I was content with this arrangement, because I figured it had something to do with the fact that interracial couples weren’t in vogue yet. Our last summer together, he held my hand and walked close to me before JP, a fellow camper, walked into the clubhouse.  “You were gonna kiss her!” JP laughed through strings of saliva and a bucktooth grin. “No, I wasn’t,” Jake said.   His denial pummeled me. This was the part where he was supposed to take both my hands, lean in for a kiss, then march outside to announce our union to the rest of the campers.   But none of that happened. Instead, Jake walked out of the clubhouse and pretended the whole thing was a misunderstanding.  On our last day at Green Valley, he handed me a tape with tears in his eyes. Listen to this when you get home, he said. On the tape, he dictated his final correspondence to me. It ended with a song dedication. “I Won’t Forget You” by Poison. Until that moment, I didn’t even know heavy metal ballads existed. We promised to see each other in five years—a random time frame we declared at 13. I knew it was goodbye, but a part of me held out hope that our love was stronger than distance. “You’re a pursuer,” Hannah said to me one day in session.  “What does that mean?” I’d been dating Rick for several months and I was already spiraling from the amount of time we didn’t spend together. This was after telling him that practicing jiu-jitsu five days a week and driving the church van every Sunday until three in the afternoon was too much. I knew something was wrong when I started keeping an imaginary ledger of the time we spent together and apart. If love was a feeling that I’d previously failed at, then surely it had to be quantifiable. If I subtracted sleep and work responsibilities, there were roughly 70 hours of possible couple time but not a single issue of Cosmopolitan magazine boasted an algebraic formula on its cover for calculating how much time was enough time. All I knew was that in the first 10 months of our relationship, I’d only spent three eight-hour days with him, and our average weekly time spent was six hours. But every time I expressed this frustration to Hannah, I justified my needs with what other couples did, namely the ones who morphed into conjoined twins from Friday night through Sunday afternoon.  Hannah ripped out a piece of paper from her yellow legal pad. She drew two stick figures with a line between them. The pursuer stick person stood to the left of the distancer. She pointed to my stick figure and animated it with sloppy “x” marks moving forward. When the pursuer caught up, the distancer moved further away and so on. “You’re too available, she said, “you need to distance yourself.” This was the kind of relationship strategy I hated. I had to temper my desire to be with Rick. My takeaway that day was that I had to pretend to be so into my life, my interests, and passions that Rick’s curiosity would only intensify. The summer I turned 22, my father offered similar wisdom to me in a noisy Steelton, PA pub. We sat at the bar sipping on whiskies and coke as I shared the details of my latest pursuit—a man I’d met in college who moved to the West Coast to be with his high school sweetheart. I imagined that if we stayed friends long enough that he would realize what he was missing in her.  He stared straight ahead like he was contemplating his next drink order and interrupted me. “When a man sees an independent woman, he wines and dines her until she’s dependent. And then he looks for another independent woman.” He took a sip from his rocks glass and looked at me. “Stop chasin’ these fools.”.  The idea of having to restrain any part of my infatuation was excruciating. Like when people tell women that the moment they stop looking for a partner, that’s when the right person walks into their life. Even when I tried to follow this logic, I felt myself looking over my shoulder at a café, a bookstore, a restaurant, a grocery store, at the club dancing—HOW ABOUT NOW? What about right now? Have I demonstrated to the cosmos that I’m ready?  There was no making sense of who I had to be to woo a man. A man I dated in college wrote me love letters every few days, sent me two dozen roses on my birthday, and had a custom belly chain made for me by a silversmith. And this only after a month of dating. But when he felt overwhelmed by my availability, he would say “I need some space.” When I asked for a time frame, he shrugged. But it was always two weeks. When my punishment was over, I would hear his loud muffler pulling into the driveway of my apartment and he would ask me to come back to his dorm with him. I always obliged. I put more stock in his effusive displays than the unpredictability of his moods. I trusted the flair more than his absence.  “Have I talked to you about boundaries?” Hannah inquired one day.  At this point, I’d spent more than a dozen sessions comparing my relationship with Rick to other couples. One couple I knew spent every Sunday doing NYTimes crossword puzzles and reading Moby Dick, but Rick was driving the van. Another couple had brunch every Saturday morning together, while Rick was at jiu-jitsu practice. Another spent every evening together until the sun rose, while Rick dutifully returned to his apartment so that he could prepare a lesson plan or play video games or just settle into the evening. I had a checklist in my mind for what this relationship was supposed to look like from the outside, and my portfolio didn’t seem to measure up. Hannah took this as a no. She pulled a sheet from her yellow legal pad again and drew two columns. In the first row, she drew two circles far apart from each other. “This is estranged.”  In the second row, she drew two circles overlapping each other. “This is enmeshed. This is what you seem to be describing.” In the third row, she drew two circles just barely overlapping their midpoint. “This is what you want. This is what a healthy relationship looks like.” I groaned. This was a more calculated effort than I’d ever put forth in my life.   I had no boundaries. In my 20s and 30s, I made a career of this. I thought men wanted to be needed. When I showed men who I was, it ended in criticism. And instead of taking this as a cue, I shape-shifted into the woman they wanted to be.  The guy I dated after my college graduation was vocal about what he disliked about me. That summer I saved up to purchase a bottle of Evelyn perfume by Crabtree & Evelyn. Its signature note was rose oil.  “You smell like somebody’s grandmother.” That was the point. I chose that scent because it reminded me of the concentrated air freshener that my grandmother picked up at Loblaws once a month.  He didn’t care that it was nostalgic or that my grandparent’s bathroom smelled like roses, and not poop, so I stopped wearing it. He also detested my style. Every weekend, I donned a pair of brown stompers with a black platform rubber heel that my brother purchased for me in the Village when I was 16. The shoe's surface looked like stained wood, and I adored them. One day he told me I looked butch in them and the next day they disappeared. When I inquired about them, he told me that he threw them away. Weeks later, I found them hidden in his trunk and confronted him.  I thought you threw them out.  “I should have,” he said.  He let me reclaim them only if I vowed never to wear them again. I agreed but held out hope that he would fall in with them and me. He preferred heels. He also preferred not to call me his girlfriend.  The men I dated wanted me to be the opposite of me, and I tried desperately to hold their attention despite myself. I was also arrogant and foolish enough to believe that bending to their every whim would coax them into submission.  Rick proposed to me in DC, over dinner at Kruba Thai and Sushi by the navy yard. Everyone except for me knew the day was coming. He’d called my brother and mom days before, and he showed the ring to a few of my closest friends. The restaurant was empty except for us, and another party seated on the opposite side of the dining area. He pulled out a box and in it were earrings.  “Happy anniversary,” he said.  I’d been growing impatient with Rick. We’d been dating for two years and my 40s were closing in. But he wanted everything to be just right. He wanted to know me. He wanted to pay off his student loan debt and find the perfect ring. I told him that none of that mattered, that my clock was ticking, but he still took his time.  “I saw those at the arts festival.” I looked down to see a pair of blue earrings and thanked him with a tight smile. Then he pushed another box forward. “I thought you might like this too.” I opened the box and the light caught the sparkles of a diamond engagement ring with a princess-cut center stone and two smaller diamonds flanking each side. Its detailing was subtle and unique, like me. When I realized it was a proposal, I was so excited I couldn’t eat. We took our dinner to go, and I ran around the navy yard until I was out of breath—Rick jogging just beside me.  When I shared the news of Rick’s proposal with Hannah she asked me what my expectations were in a marriage.  I looked at her like she’d given me more Calculus homework.  In hindsight, my expectations sounded aspirational and half-baked. I wanted the flowers, the unpredictable displays of affection, and everything to be 50/50.  “Love is boring,” she said. She might as well have walked up to a playground of children and told them that Santa Claus burned their letters.   When I finally built up the courage to ask Rick what his expectations were, they sounded nothing like mine.  “I want someone who has their own interests so that we can come together and share our experiences.” I thought that arrangement sounded lonely. It didn’t match the romantic comedy in my head. It sounded like someone who wanted me to keep writing, knitting, wearing comfortable shoes, and decoupaging. It sounded like someone who wanted me to be me. This was a foreign concept. But now that I’d found this rare and imperfect unicorn, I had to start telling him my own wants and needs, not by comparison or through the lens of a friend enmeshed with her Hallmark-trained boyfriend, but by my own assessment. I didn’t even know where to start.  After I spotted Hannah at our wedding ceremony, I took note of every face in the church that day. My smile got wider and wider until I met eyes with Rick. We selected 1 Corinthians 13: 4-7 to be read by my mom at the wedding. The one that details what love is supposed to look, feel, and sound like. It seemed like an appropriate, if not typical bible verse to be read at our wedding. But I don’t think I really understood what was being spoken to us that day.  In 2021 I finally purchased a car of my own after 20 years of taking the bus in cities like Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh where the city design and traffic nearly tripled my commute. I soon discovered how much I loved driving aimlessly blasting music through my speakers. One day I landed on “Tell Him” by Lauryn Hill, a song I’d avoided for nearly as long as I’d been a professional pedestrian. It reminded me too much of old hurt, but I let it play anyway. Instead of damning past decisions, I smiled recalling that the lyrics were based on the same bible passage Rick and I heard on our wedding day. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does boast, it is not proud.  In “Tell Him,” Hill sang “love is not loud.” All these years, I thought loud had to do with avoiding an abusive monster. It never occurred to me that loud might have to do with the kind of performative love I craved. I never gave thought to the idea of love being quiet, predictable, and steady. But as this lesson sunk in, I realized for the first time that love being quiet didn’t mean I needed to be. I needed to turn up the volume and say exactly what I needed and wanted.  ### 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.

Jordan E. Franklin (she/her) hails from Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from Stony Brook Southampton and is a doctoral candidate at Binghamton University. She is the author of the poetry collection, when the signals come home  (Switchback Books), and the chapbook, boys in the electric age (Tolsun Books). Her work has appeared in Breadcrumbs, Frontier, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, the Southampton Review and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2017 James Hearst Poetry Prize and the 2020 Gatewood Prize. 1: poet discusses how she inherited the new world “Ah fear, fear, she's the mother of violence Making me tense to watch the way she breed” - Peter Gabriel Question: How were you able to survive for so long? I come from a long line of folks who kept shotguns  behind their fridge. They couldn’t be shadows  because they were too long, too dark. Love was brief,  left holes in our walls. I could’ve reached  the gun if I tried. My fingers were slim enough, long enough but Dad said I was too little then. Worried about the kickback. He taught me how  to use a gun before I bled. I was born among knives:  me, a C-section spilled onto a hospital bed. Dad kept  them sharp throughout our apartment, tucked away  in drawers, closets. I wasn’t supposed to make it  but he insisted. To truly live, you need to sleep  loaded. Safety off, I can hurt. I can aim,  squeeze the trigger. I can reach your bleeding heart.  ### 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.

Octavia Washington is an emerging writer who graduated from Carleton College with a degree in English and is currently a Dramaturgy MFA student at Columbia University. She lives in New York and can be found shopping until dropping, probably. Follow Octavia on Instagram and Twitter . babybreath   CHARACTERS Angel, a black woman in her 20s The Husband, older than her     Setting: The Bed Time: None in the Void   Angel is lying horizontal on the bed in her pink robe and bonnet, one leg exposed. She keeps rubbing at her temples. Her sheets are undone, unmade, fraying; every second away from her temple goes to its exposed strings. Her husband is sitting in a chair across from her, monitoring for any worrying signs — well, more worrisome than her usual. She’s surrounded by dial-up telephones, receivers as far as the eye can see. Another ring — and no answer. The phones get bigger and smaller all around her; they shrink and balloon, and she follows their lead with her movements.   Angel hears a click after each name. No telling if the husband can hear them too.   Angel Kolin. Kerolle. Kerstein. Khafif. Khan. These are the first instruments of the baby machine. I have to take a nap but I can’t stop thinking and I need you to help me carry my thoughts. Okay, can you do that? I need you to carry my names and then we’ll all find some peace in dreams. Okay, can you promise that? Alright. I have - pass me that. (He passes her the crumbled piece of paper on the floor; she unravels it.) These are my physicians but I don’t think they went to school for medicine. I think they’re fake. Don’t look at me like that. Forget the degrees painting the walls and the pillows that devour and the games in the waiting room and the snotty receptionist at the desk and the fancy Ivy Leagues of it all. They majored and degreed in Baby Killer MD. And now I have something to say. I stand and shout (Angel tries to stand up but falls back down) , I sit and shout: I have something to say. I have -- what was I -- I’m sorry, I’m not -- oh, Kolin.   That was the first stop. All aboard the abortion express. Sorry. That’s not funny, I know you don’t like when I make, when I make light of things like — dark things. I just meant that he was my pediatrician and that’s why I saw him first. Kolin’s hair went like (she gestures)  whoosh; he had the quaff, baby, the quaff, okay, it was the 90s. He found me in the waiting room playing with the piano rug, the long one with all the keys, you ever seen those shits? No? Well, I was brushing my foot over  c  and humming something so loud that I didn’t hear him and he had to tap me twice with his ghost hands because he’s known me since I was small enough to have to put my whole body on c  to get it to play.   And when I took off my pretty dress from Puerto Rico and sucked my butt into a paper gown, he waved some blurry black photos of my insides and said, do you know what this means, my Angel? And I said, please don’t tell Daddy, because I already had three hot messages from him in my voicemail that I hadn’t listened to but they went something like, I’ll pay for it, blah, just like your mother, blah, hardheaded, blah. And he said we have to tell Daddy. And I said, nuh-uh. And he said, uh-huh. And we went like that back and forth and I guess the stress got to be so much that something in my stomach suckered in,  (hold breath) spun,  (exhale)  and whirled into a vacuum.  (Spit)   And that’s one down. You can find them at siete-uno-ocho cuatro-tres-cuatro y dos-nueve-nueve-dos. See, I don’t even need the paper. I’m smart. Your baby is smart. I memorize all their names because time freed me. And now I have space for lullaby.   Here are the - I - can I talk? Can I talk? Thank you.   Angel lies flat on the bed, spreading her arms and legs so that she’s in a snow angel position.   Here are the weapons they used to destroy me: Kolin. Kerolle. Kerstein. Khafif. Khan. Khasidy. Kamin. Kamal. Kassof. Kaminski. Kaiser. Joseph. Julien. Jofe. Jack. I remember Joseph best! I remember that bitch. I remember Joseph with the green Jordans. I remember because I went, damn, you got it like that? Not mister uptighty bitey tidey-whitey whitey who won’t make eye contact when he puts his instruments in me got some Jays? I asked about them when he was putting his cold stethoscope on my teta, just because I got his number from this white lady in my building, the one with that badass kid — oh, you know her, Jacqueline! How is she? Oh, yeah, yeah, he didn’t say nothing. He shrugged then parted my knees with the gloves. I was trying to get to know him, you know, because I had never met him, and I like to know people before they look in my hoo-ha and put rubber on my panties because I am a classy lady, alright, I was raised alright. But he didn’t want to be known I guess. I guess in his program they tell him the patient is just a chart and a number and a birthday and a history of smoking and cancer in the family. He didn’t talk to me one bit, except to tell me that he noticed some bleeding when he parted me, and that he was very sorry, but he didn’t hear a heartbeat.   You can find him at siete-uno-ocho seis-tres-tres y uno-uno-cuatro-dos. Afterward, I went around to everyone I could find. I grabbed people’s jackets on the train. I yelled on the bus. I yelled so much the bus driver said can someone shut that miss up? But no, no one can stop me when I start hurricaning.   I said, do you need a doctor? Preferably better than him? This is where you can find them: Kolin. Kerolle. Kerstein. Khafif. Khan. Khasidy. Kamin. Kamal. Kassof. Kaminski. Kaiser. Joseph. Julien. Jofe. Jordan. Jefferson. James. Jerome. Jayasundera. Jean-Pascal. Jean-Brice. Jean-Noel. Jean-Pierre. Jean-whatever. So many men and they all rot of babybreath. (Getting up)  I am thirsty. I want water. Your baby wants water!   Husband runs out of the room. We can hear water being poured off-stage. He comes back, helping Angel sip her water.   I’m sorry for yelling. I just get upset when I think about Joseph. The way he was looking at me, you know? Like I was procedure, not person. But if he knew me, if he really opened his ears and consumed me, I’d have her. I’d have a baby. We’d - I’m sorry. I know you like me to speak for myself. From now on we’ll say Jo-shush. Can you repeat after me, Jo-shush? You good? Good.   Listen, will you listen? (sung mostly to herself) Kolin. Kerolle. Kerstein. Khafif. Khan. Khasidy. Kamin. Kamal. Kassof. Kaminski. Kaiser. Jo-shush. Julien. Jofe. Jordan. Jefferson. James. Jerome. Jayasundera. Jean-Pascal. Jean-Brice. Jean-Noel. Jean-Pierre. Jean-whatever. Issac. Ibsen. Inna. Now this one’s gonna get you mad. Issac. I only know his name because I looked for him in the thing that’s online? Yes, you can -- yes, you can! You can look people up by their inmate number and that’s what I did. After. Not before. I know you don’t like it when I get all feelings first. When -- what was it you said? When I move with my anxiety, not my logic. And this was one of those times where I was holding my anxiety but I was desperate. You’d get desperate too, okay, if every path kept taking you to the grave instead of to heaven.   So what had happened was I traveled down the yellow brick road and down a gray alley where there was a woman sitting with her dog in her lap and she was looking at me and I was looking at her because she kinda looked like Tia Flores, a little if I squinted and tilted, just like her with a little more dirt under her nails. And I asked her if she knew which way Gravesend was and she said, why the hell do you wanna go over there, that’s where people get ganged and banged and I said, I’m a hero, I’m saving my new baby, and there’s a man there who will protect her and me from demons and doubters who are forged in the fire of exacting supremacy. Yeah, I see you shaking your head but that’s what I said, okay, I said that shit, because that’s what I thought and I say what I think, always, because I don’t believe in doublespeech like you men of gun, I believe in the truth, the truth is what brings you closer to God, the truth is what keeps the devil at bay, the truth is free. But anyway, I said that and she pointed down to the left, to the left so I followed the yellow brick road and found a gray apartment door on the corner of Avenue D. I knocked. He answered. He had one gold tooth and I thought, man, this really is a private, private, private practice. He said I should leave on my shoes and I immediately got a bad feeling because what type of home doesn’t have you take off your shoes? A bad one, that’s what. He gestured that I should sit in the makeshift living room turned lab turned armchair turned stir-ups and under the flickering lights he put his scalpel on my thigh and said, so you need to get rid of this one? And I said NO. The opposite. He asked me if I was sure. I said YES. He kept shaking his heads and I mean heads because at this point the chlorine -- he had just cleaned before I got there, right -- was getting up in my nose and into my brain. He said I was too pretty and too young to be ruining my life. I didn’t respond because I was getting bothered. The gold, the light, the gray. Instead, I snapped my knees together and stood. And he was like, you still have to pay! And I said MY CURRENCY IS MY FOOT and kicked him in the balls like Tio Rod told me to do when people started looking at me funny. And he screamed YOU BITCH and I ran and ran and ran and I started flying and dropped the latest baby on the way down the street, past the lady, past the trash, past the construction guys who said why you running ma, past the cops who gave me the good ole red and blue and said SLOW DOWN, but then they took pity on me because I was crying so hard that it turned into burps and I looked like the black one’s little sister. Snot and all.   (Beat)   See, I knew you wouldn’t like that story. But that’s what happened. Deadass, that’s what happened.    Can you call my mom? You don’t have your mother-in-law programmed into your fancy little gadget? It’s siete-uno-ocho tres-ocho-dos y cero-cinco-cero-cero. I know we’re not talking right now but I would really like to listen to her breathe. Can you --? Gimme me. Thank you.   Husband hands over his cell phone. As the phone rings, the receivers around her stop breathing — or stop moving so much, whatever’s easier. Angel makes a call. No answer.   (To the voicemail) Hi, Mommy. It’s your Angel. I have a secret: (quiet) Kolin. Kerolle. Kerstein. Khafif. Khan. Khasidy. Kamin. Kamal. Kassof. Kaminski. Kaiser. Jo-shush. Julien. Jofe. Jordan. Jefferson. James. Jerome. Jayasundera. Jean-pascal. Jean-Brice. Jean-Noel. Jean-Pierre. Jean-whatever. Issac. Ibsen. Inna. Irwin. Iwanicki. Ingber. Ingberman. Igor. IIina-Yelena.   Wait, stop talking. I hear something.   Pause as they look around. Then comes swelling, sweet music. It sounds a little like an aria but of many rhythmic, popping voices. It’s clear to Angel that it’s her babies singing.   My parasites came to visit. They sound so good! You can’t hear them? Stop this bullshit: you hear them!   Angel gets up and spins herself. A lovely, if clumsy, pivot.   They’re getting hungry. They need something to eat. Do you have anything? Give me something! No, not that! Watch me:  (Angel does a fast step routine)  Kolin. Kerolle. Kerstein. Khafif. Khan. Khasidy. Kamin. Kamal. Kassof. Kaminski. Kaiser. Jo-shush. Julien. Jofe. Jordan. Jefferson. James. Jerome. Jayasundera. Jean-pascal. Jean-Brice. Jean-Noel. Jean-Pierre. Jean-whatever. Issac. Ibsen. Inna. Irwin. Iwanicki. Ingber. Ingberman. Igor. IIina-Yelena. Henry. Hollander. Horne. Hope. Are you full yet?   (Abruptly stops dancing) Maybe she changed her number. She moves around a lot, you know, I was just trying the kitchen phone. Do this one: Siete-uno-ocho siete-cuatro-tres y cero-cuatro-seis-cuatro.   No? Nothing?   That’s okay. I have one last story for you. Although you were there for this one. So it’s not a story, I guess, for you, it’s a memory. You like Henry. I like Henry. He’s not a whoosh, or a Jay, or a gold tooth. He’s a cackle. Literally. He’s more laugh than person. What! It’s not an insult! He goes (she does his laugh) . It’s trustworthy. A man who cackles is not a man who lies. And he’s brown and he’s pink inside and he’s purple on the outside. That’s a person you can trust. You can trust a cackle. It’s not his fault his attendant -- okay, you’re getting upset. I thought the song would cheer you up. No, don’t cry. You don’t see me crying. This one was almost full-term. I should cry. I stink. I smell like babybreath.   I was getting a bagel that day when I felt it. This quick suck. Quicksand in my belly. I begged the guy at the bodega to call the Mr, tell him to meet me at Bellevue, okay, tell him I’m going to Bellevue. And I closed my eyes and willed myself down 1st Ave. When I transported to the receptionist desk, I said, I’m hurt. And the attendant was passing by on his lunch, yes, the old white one, and he said, no, he whispered because I wasn’t supposed to hear, he whispered, can it hold for my cholecystectomy? And the nurse nodded and then put her needle nails in my arm and said hurt how? But she wasn’t looking at me, you know, her eyes were around and about. And I said I’m hurt ing  now, right now, it’s hurt ing , because that’s the only way to get them to take you seriously. She said sit down, the doctor will be with you soon, and I said, I need Dr. Henry now! Give him to me, give me to him, whatever, but it needs to happen now, right fucking now or I’m gonna explode, there’s a bomb in my chest. And she said, ma’am, that’s a serious accusation, if that’s true we will need to call the police and I said, call the fucking police call the governor call the SWAT team call the FBI call motherfucking Batman you dumb bitch if you don’t get me Kolin Kerolle Kerstein Khafif Khan Khasidy Kamin Kamal Kassof Kaminski Kaiser Jo-shush Julien Jofe Jordan Jefferson James Jerome Jayasundera Jean-pascal Jean-Brice Jean-Noel Jean-Pierre Jean-whatever Issac Isben Inna Irwin Iwanicki Ingber Ingberman Igor IIina-Yelena Henry Hollander Horne Hope Hassan Hausknecht Halper Handler George Gary or Goldstein I will kill you. And then you arrived, wrenching yourself out of a cab. And when I saw you I knew. My insides broke in the lobby and I just knew. It wasn’t Henry’s fault. It’s not your fault.   That’s why I’m telling you right now that I’m not seeing another doctor. Not even if it’s a woman. Not even if it’s light itself. I’m not leaving my bed. You can call them right now. Go ahead. I don’t care if it’s Fred or Fong or Feurman or Flores or Fuchs or Friedman or Ferzli or Fazio or Feldman or Fairwa or Frenkel or Francois or Epstein or Erber or Empire. And when you call Siete-uno-ocho seis-tres-tres y ocho-uno-ocho-tres, tell them my wife and my kids said, I banish you!   No one believes me. No one ever believes me. No, you don’t. No, YOU DON’T! I don’t like to be told who I am and what I am and what compels me and what magic makes me! I’m not a liar! I had all those babies and they ate each other up in my womb and they ate me up, and now I’m not going outside anymore. I’m going to lay here for the next forty-eight hours, or days, or months, or years. No, I want to get up. No, I want to sit. Fuck you! I don’t know!   Angel stands but she bumps into too many things. She trips over one of the phones and ends up on the ground. She vomits into the waste bin. Not real vomit, of course. She’s puking out all of the names; it’s a strange, glittery occurrence. Her husband stands behind her and holds her head. When she’s done he smoothes her edges and holds her.   Sorry for yelling. I believe in the sun, you know? I salute the sun. I cast a hex on all those naughty men. I reach into the void and pull out a wand and I curse them for financial ruin, for emotional instability, for a toilet that never flushes, for a washer that always stains, for a drain that always clogs, for shoelaces inevitably untied, for sickness do we part, for hell and beyond.   Thank you for understanding. Sorry for yelling. And these are the names of all my babies: Daisy, Dagney, Daphne, Diana, Dorothy, Destiny, Desi, Dali, Dayo. Chantel, Charmaine, Candy, Catherine, Catalina, Carolina, Caprice, Camila, Cristina. Bella, Belcalse, Bethany, Bianca, Blanca, Brianna, Belinda, Brandy, Birdie. And I’m their only angel.   Angel sighs then stops talking. The Husband shakes her but she doesn’t stir. It seems she’s fallen asleep in his arms. ### 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, retreats, and special events. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Sapphire is the award-winning author of Push , which was adapted into the Oscar-winning film Precious. Sapphire has received numerous awards and recognition including the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction; the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s First Novelist Award; and in Great Britain, the Mind Book of the Year Award. Sapphire is the author of Push , American Dreams , The Kid , and Black Wings & Blind Angels . Push: A Novel , won the Book-of-the-Month Club’s Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction; the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s First Novelist Award; and in Great Britain, the Mind Book of the Year Award. Named by the Village Voice and Time Out New York as one of the top ten books of 1996, Push was nominated for a NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work of Fiction. Push was adapted into the Oscar-winning film, Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire .  Sapphire’s work has appeared in The New Yorker , The New York Times Magazine , The New York Times Book Review , The Black Scholar , Spin , and Bomb . In February of 2007 Arizona State University presented PUSHing Boundaries, PUSHing Art: A Symposium on the Works of Sapphire . Sapphire’s work has been translated into over 18 languages and has been adapted for stage in the United States and Europe.  The Harlem Trilogy (excerpt)   Mississippi 1910 Pt 1   The House of Satin Madam Satin’s last paramour, Mr. McKenzie, had fallen blind in love with her. It happens. Not as often as one likes, but it happens. He was the last of a string of lovers, johns, and pimps whom she had extricated herself from. The man before Mr. McKenzie who, she wasn’t sure, but knew it was possible, that he could have been Flossie’s father had come after her with a violence. Heavily pregnant but nowhere near ready to drop by her own calculations, Madam Satin, nee Mary Ann Cassidy, had gone to a shabby clip joint where she used to work, dropping in on friends to pass a bottle and partake of gossip. She had gone into labor grasping a bottle of stout, laughing convulsively upon hearing that Jane Murray had dodged the cops by dressing as a man. Only to be picked up on another corner by coppers who weren’t looking for her, ‘for appearing in public in men’s clothing. Jane was fined $10 for this, which is more than she would have been fined for hooking. Mary Ann’s guffaws had turned into howls and her convulsive laughter into contractions as she went into labor clutching her bottle of stout. Mary Ann’s hand was extended as she was being carried to a side room with a bed. A girl coming down the hall took the bottle out of Mary Ann’s hand, turned it up and drained it. The girl who hadn’t been invited to partake in the jollities in the dusty parlor narrowed her eyes and scrutinized Mary Ann’s red and contorted face dripping with sweat, tried to remember what she knew about this woman, and when the Aha! ping of recognition sounded, she ran down the hall, out of the door, down the street and down another street and didn’t stop until she ran straight into the man they called Emerald Isle, the notorious pimp and gambler (known to his mother as Francis Michael Gallagher). Mary Ann had run off from this man some months before taking his diamond cufflinks with her when she went. And for five dollars the breathless acquaintance informed the infamous Mr. Emerald Isle she would be happy to tell him where he could find Mary Ann Cassidy. Mr. Emerald Isle picked her up by the scruff of her neck demonstrating to her what he saw as her stray cat status in life and informed her that she would tell him where Mary Ann Cassidy was five dollars or not. She merely answered, “Times a wastin’ Mr. Emerald.” He responded by throwing her to the ground and then throwing two dollars on top of her. Mary Ann had recognized the loud footfall and loud voice of Mr. Emerald Isle as he walked into the house and had wrapped her newborn in a pus and piss-stained pillow case, climbed out the first-floor window of the shabby and nameless whorehouse with her daughter, and made her way as best she could down the same street she had come to the Convent of the Holy Mother where her cousin was a novice. Madam Satin had asked the nuns to keep her baby girl until she could sort out her life. She was walking down the street from the convent where she had left her child who, the myth-making creature that she was, she referred to as her only child. What that meant was, she chose to forget having been forced to leave one infant on a trash heap, and years later having sold another child with no regret other than that she should have driven a harder bargain. She decided walking down the street that this last one was her first one and that she would keep it. She was twenty-nine and gifted with looks that had people thinking she was seventeen. Yes, this child would be her last child. Tears of rage and woe streamed down her alabaster face and she stumbled as she walked down the street fantasizing about killing her pimp. She was determined she would get her child back from the nuns and raise the baby herself if she had to run away or live in hiding in the convent to do it. The international financier capitalist Mr. Mackenzie who had been out tippling spied her from the window of his carriage and saw the woe but not the rage, and asked his coachman to slow down to see if he might be of assistance to, what appeared on first glance and second glance too, a young golden-haired girl walking and crying with every step she took. Madam Satin, née Mary Ann Cassidy, an experienced raconteur and street diviner, realized that the man who introduced himself as Mr. Mackenzie was really and truly an angel, and asked God as she knew her, as she had been introduced to her in stank dank basements and alleys by witches, colored Creole women, and Catholic girls who had gone rogue, to Guide her tongue/ Treoir Mo Tongu!  She could see her perfusion of golden curls and tears had further besotted a man already well along the path to alcoholic stupor. She spoke slowly refusing a brandy and water that would ‘comfort her’ and chose her words carefully because there was a possibility he would remember them, and so that she should not forget what she said, aware his coachman might be straining to listen to every word she said. Mary Ann Cassidy’s life had been one of fluid invention since her mother, an impoverished woman from Dublin, had left with her sister to seek their fortunes in London. They had landed in a London jail and been scraped out of it and transported to America years ago. Both women had had the good sense to eschew forever and always all things English and Protestant and to seek blessing and sanctuary in the true church of the virgin mother, l’église catholique romaine. Mr. Mackenzie listened to the fair and lovely girl who said she had been turned out of her stepfather’s house when she spurned his advances and had been walking down the street to find the river’s edge and would have walked into it had he not stopped his carriage and saved her. When she drew away from her eyes the handkerchief he had given her and raised those reddened orbs to his, he was impressed by their pale Alpine blue. He pressed some bills in her hand and dropped her off at the Hotel Carmine and told her who to ask for to get a room. And that he hoped he would see her there in two hours when he had finished his morning endeavors. He hoped she would have the forbearance to wait for him, but he understood if she could not and decided to return home, either way the money was hers to keep as he hated to see someone in distress that could so easily be remedied, and not remedy it. He was an old man and fell in love with her in the way that old men do who intend to spite relatives they know have never loved them for anything but their money. He told her he loved her over morsels of tender beef and later ruby-throated hummingbird cake and Bridgetown rum. After a second glass of rum, he told her that he wanted to marry her. Mary Ann Cassidy was rather cool-headed for a woman who had had to drop a newborn that she had given birth to at seven o’clock that morning at a convent. She repeated that she had rescued herself from her stepfather’s house, why she knew, but for what she wasn’t sure. Mary Ann Cassidy was 29, not 17. She knew she did not want to be hanging around waiting for some old man to die, an old man whose relatives would be hovering over his soon-to-be corpse like buzzards. She was clear when she told him, “Give what you would give me now . My mother suffers already this very day that I am not there to take care of the house and children while she goes out door to door with a bucket and brush to scrub the marble steps of the rich.” A third glass of rum and the two were in bed beneath an embroidered coverlet. Her pain and the postpartum blood she left on the sheets were to the drunk man the crying blonde girl’s unasked for proof of virginity. Even her cousin, who has since learned not to doubt the woman now called Madam Satin Fontaine was shocked when Mary Ann Cassidy who had said she would be returning with provisions for her daughter (they all said that), was back the next day with five hundred dollars for the Convent of the Blessed Virgins and her blonde-haired child. She was going away on business for two months after which she would be back to have her baby baptized and then take her home. She would be back in the wink of an eye/ en un clin d’œil . Please sing to the infant in French. Mary Ann Cassidy left the United States with Mr. McKensie thinking she might find a way off the street, maybe enter an established house where she could make a lot of money. What could she do with a lot of money? Buy a house of her own? Such big thoughts. Her mind which had never been really geared toward imagination made a subtle shift from invention to imagination. A house. I want my own house. What night bird did not want her own house, to be her own woman one day? Although some of the simpler ones just wanted to be married and be taken away from ‘all this’. And what was all this? Mary Ann snorted! More in one day than shop girls got in a week (and those little duckies ended up having to give it away to the boss man or the shop steward to get the goddamned check that they had run their respectable feet off for all week!) And then there were the girls who just wanted oblivion—a pipe or a bottle. But most girls were ambitious, Mary Ann thought. Ah, but few had the view or means to achieve if they did have vision. So, visions, dreams, and desires were given short shrift. But that night with the old man Mary Ann Cassidy’s vision was if not born, resurrected. Her first plan, not enough had transpired for it to be so; but the old fellow wouldn’t have known that, was to track him down and ensnare him a few months hence as the father of her child. But no that would be so clumsy, she thought. But better than she could have planned would be revealed over breakfast. The fool wanted to marry her now . He believed her! When would that happen again? The man who thought the tearful girl’s pain and effluvium following childbirth were the blood of a virgin whose maidenhead had been pierced by his propulsive penetrations was a new beginning for Mary Ann Cassidy. She realized that she had now begun a new chapter of her life and that it would begin with a rewriting of the first chapter. This was no problem as she was creative. He told her he had a business trip and he wanted her to accompany him to the continent. Later she would ask someone where that was. At the time she just nodded. He gave her money, more money than she had ever seen, to purchase a wardrobe. He mentioned a couple of shops she had only stood outside of before. She took a phaeton straight away to the convent and gave half the money to her cousin. Her cousin burst into tears and clutched her neck as she kissed her. They were both rebuked. Her cousin put her green agate cross around her neck. The Mother Superior rebuked again but looked away because the bit of her that was sentimental was touched despite her hard position at the top by this young woman with enough iron in her spine to claw her way up. The convent was not an orphanage per se. The sisters allowed girls of many different circumstances to leave children for three months, after which the children were then sent off to orphanages. The girls are told at the time they leave their children that the nuns kept no records and that they would send the children off and into good hands, but that they did not keep track of whether those good hands were from Baton Rouge, Detroit, or Saskatchewan. The nuns would wait ninety days. The girls promised. Perhaps they had intended to, but few came back. Looking at Mary Ann Cassidy’s fine head of golden curls and small eyes like frozen blue water the nuns did not think looking at her the first time she would be back. When she came back eighty-five days later she had learned a language. In the time they had been gone the old man, Mr. Mackenzie, had only fallen deeper in love with the blonde and would not be disabused by comments muttered in low voices, by old acquaintances he would not call friends, who offered warnings about her, he coolly withdrew himself and his paying-for-the-next-round-of-drinks largess. He watched her win at the gambling table one night. It was the beginner’s luck big win that the house orchestrates to draw the new gambler in and begin the cycle of win-lose win-lose that ends with them losing if not everything close to everything. He watched Mary Ann Cassidy swoop upon her chips like a hawk grabbing a chicken’s neck and walk away from the table. Mr. Mackenzie was impressed with this stolid good sense and decided to reward it. Observing her listen over the course of three months to the language spoken around the resort, he heard her pieced-together patois of street French transform into the language that was spoken in the casino and at the track—French. “Tell me about yourself,” he said watching her watch everything as if she was one of those newfangled movie camera machines recording everything. Busy watching the waiter as he set a platter of raw oysters in the shell on the table, she didn’t answer. She watched how Mr. Mackenzie used a little fork, not his fingers and tongue as she was used to doing at the tavern. She had nothing to tell him she thought as she shook out a napkin and observed how he handled his cutlery. “Me?” she said finally, “there is not much to tell. I don’t like talking about myself. It's unladylike.” Despite her intention not to she had forgotten some of what she told him on the street after getting in his carriage. The old guy had been drunk, but not that drunk. Mr. Mackenzie nodded at the waiter to fill Mary Ann Cassidy’s glass. She demurred. An old pimp had told her, Never drink as much or more than your mark ‘less you end up a mark yourself! “Well, my father was a French Creole and my mother the same. My father sent us all to school where we learned proper French, it’s coming back to me hearing it here. But we was kids and clung to our patois at home and spoke English in the street. My mother died and my father took another wife and she straight away wanted me to take care of her kids, she brought two to the union. My father was a night watchman and was killed in a robbery and my stepmother married again. And there I was, a stepchild to one parent and a step-stepchild to the other parent. It wasn’t long before I was having to fight him off. So, that’s where we run into one another. I couldn’t take no more.” The waiter had reappeared, “And the lady what would you like/ Et la dame qu’est-ce que vous aimeriez? ” “ Je voudrais un café noir, s’il vous plait /I would like a black coffee please,” she replied. “You learn fast,” he said. “Yes, I put myself in  it I guess you could say,” Mary Ann Cassidy said. “Well, I guess that’s all there is to say about me. My mother always said a lady’s got to have some mystery, you know.” She attempted a playfulness she did not feel. “And what about you Mr. Mackenzie?” She listened and heard nothing new. He was a rich man and had not been happy at home. Oh, why did they marry in the first place! The café noir kept her awake. His children didn’t appreciate him, all they wanted was his money. Well, give it to them, she thought! His wife had died after a long illness and he was free to marry again and was struck by her beauty and, despite everything, her character. Character? And what was he doing to it, she sneered, bringing her to these glistening gold gambling casinos and ravishing her nightly. The word that came to Mary Ann’s mind was, sum . He needed to settle a ‘sum’ on her head, she thought as he prattled on about what he owned and how big a man he was. Yes, he must take her to the bank and settle a sum on her head. She would never marry him or anybody else. “May I take this, Madam?” the waiter asked. “Yes,” Mr. Mackenzie answered, “we are satisfied.” 8. On the voyage home he watched her and fell, old man that he was, deeper in love with his creation of a pure girl set upon and wronged by a wicked stepfather. He knew he was sick and had planned for a long time to spite his children. So, they, after she spent a night at the convent where she obtained a birth certificate for herself as well as her daughter, both stamped with Satin Fontaine and signed by the Monsignor. She waited around for an hour for her daughter to be baptized, retrieved a baptismal certificate for her baby, and as long as they were at it she asked, could she have one for herself. She then headed for the bank. If her papers did not seem unusual and like an abundance of fresh ink it was perhaps because they were issued and common in an age of invention. She retrieved her child and installed it with a nursemaid in a hotel and went to the Bank of Mississippi where she met Mr. Mackenzie and announced her presence and her name—Satin Fontaine and her readiness to begin a new life that Mr. Mackenzie could be honored to be a part of it. The bank manager raised his eyebrows but they dropped and he nodded when Mr. Mackenzie took out his checkbook and wallet. Satin agreed to half the sum being in annuities that would begin paying monthly sums immediately, and the rest in cash. She was quite capable of managing her money she assured the bank officer. Mr. Mackenzie agreed. She repaired to the hotel and gave instructions to the maid. She was ready to move on. Mr. Mackenzie returned to New York divested of fully one-third of his fortune. He waited for Mary Ann Cassidy to join him in New York. It was a scene from theater, the kind-hearted gentleman and the blond vision of loveliness in distress. They would play their parts. He had played this role in his past, though it had never cost him as much before. It was a new role for Satin Fontaine nee Mary Ann Cassidy. She flubbed her lines in ways that would have cost a lesser actress her part but being clever she was not recast. She had seen a house, a large house, a house on President Street, in Le Quartier Canard Blanc . She wanted to buy it. Now that she could afford them, she had dreams. She planned. She knew how to work hard. Two weeks after he had gone back North, she took a deep breath and wrote to Mr. Mackenzie and told him, she had changed her plans and decided not to come to New York and marry him. He could reach her at the convent where she was now a novice and to which she had given all her worldly goods upon taking her vows. Mr. Mackenzie was not a fool, but he felt his days were numbered (they actually turned out to be more in number than he had thought), and old though he may have been he was at the top of his game, he set about his business, his fortunes doubled, and he did not smart at the piece of it lost but what did chagrin him was the loss of his cherished role in this bit of theater. Flossie was seven years old when Mr. Mackenzie returned to Blue Gulf Town, Mississippi. His business had brought him to the Mississippi Sound again and for the last time. He knew where to find Mary Ann Cassidy now Madam Satin. When he entered her house he was escorted to the parlor as was par for the course for gentlemen callers of his caliber. He gazed at the six-foot-tall slender black servant who had escorted him to the parlor. She wore gold hoop earrings, a black bustier, see-thru lace brocade black harem pants, a shiny belt made of foreign coins around her waist, and very smart kid-skin boots. He had never seen a get-up quite like that anywhere else. She looked like the sleek gold-collared black panthers he had seen in cheap oil paintings of exotic Eastern harems on whorehouse walls, except she didn’t look cheap or even attainable. “I would like to see Madam Satin,” he said. “I’m sorry,” she answered, “She is busy. I will be happy to attend to you. Tell me what you wish.” “She will see me. Tell her Mr. Mackenzie is here. She should make haste I have a train to catch,” he said. When she heard who awaited her in the parlor, Madam Satin’s first impulse was to throw a veil over her head and run out the backdoor of her own house. But she thought again and sent Maria back to the parlor via the back staircase, and Maria pulled back the deep-purple velvet curtain of the little schoolroom by day and counting house by night, and invited Mr. Mackenzie in. After a financial transaction had been made Maria led him to Madam Satin’s boudoir. What made her know he had come to rescue her again? She took down her chignon and let her luxuriant golden curls fall unrestrained on her shoulders and donned a white silk camisole over a simple white corset that he would unlace with those fingers that trembled to reveal her still high pink-tipped breasts white as driven snow. She eschewed her imported French perfume and dabbed a vanilla-scented mixture Maria had conjured for protection on her wrists. She took off her diamond earrings. Underneath the scent of confectioner’s vanilla was the smell he had never forgotten—the musky stink between her legs mingled with the pong of sweat from under her arms, and her breath that had somehow always smelled like ripe strawberries. It had not changed. He unlaced her stays with firm sober fingers that began to tremble as her form was revealed. He almost wept as he sucked her breasts. She drew him to her and educated whore that she was, she did what she needed to do to help an old man get an erection. And when he heaved inside of her there was no ‘almost’, he did weep. And Madam Satin could see he was not worthy of her shame. She had not wronged him! What were a few lies or a bit of dissembling if a man came back to you, paid for his pleasure, sucked, and swallowed what was between your legs, and wept on your breast? She had not deceived him. No, Madam Satin had not deceived him. And when Mr. Mackenzie left Blue Gulf and caught the train to New Orleans to finish up his business before he returned to New York he left her with gifts, among which was the diamond wedding ring he had bought seven years ago for her. That was twelve years ago. Mr. Mackenzie has since died. And Madam Satin has continued to rise. ### Poem Found in Scientific American    On November 16. 2022 an article In Scientific American , a reputable magazine as magazines go, calls the question that I now put to you my friends: “Who is dying from COVID now, and why” Is something a poem if you have to tell someone it’s a poem? Wouldn’t they know by the end rhyme or the number of beats in the line— ta DAH  ta DAH  ta DAH  ta DAH ta DAH five times across the page It doesn’t sound like: She is gone! The shock of that—one million times She is gone She is gone She is gone— not like a friendship gone bad like it had or money borrowed and not paid back but like gone, like the ship disappearing over the horizon. She is gone. She wrote me some time ago:   Sorry for sending this card so late I have not been in the Holiday spirit at all. I got fired from my job on November, 15 after 16 plus years on the same job So, basically I have to start over again from scratch In this day and age and [at] my age is not easy. They just fired another person last week after 30 years on the job. Every since they merged with this other company they have been getting rid of people in one way or the other FUCK Trump I have something to say about that also   The article asks who? Who? Her, that’s who! While the total number of COVID deaths has fallen, the burden is shift-shifting-shifts even more toward people older than 64… COVID deaths among people age 65 and older more than doubled between April and July this year rising by 125%...Racism and discrimination play an outsize role. Another friend denise h. bell was a poet. She described herself as “a mature published poet”. Her poems, as I interpreted them, shone a light on marginalization, ageism, poverty She had been published in Rattle of which she was duly proud. Had done time at the Board of Ed. Had been accepted to Cave Canem workshop at over the age of 64 that was, we considered, quite an honor. A stunning poem titled remember my name about an older man who has retired and sees himself in the diminished light of one whom society feels has outlived his usefulness. The poem ends with lines hoping his wife puts “a picture on my obituary” so people remember who he was. denise h. bell denise h. bell denise h. bell denise h. bell denise h. bell denise h. bell denise h. bell denise h. bell denise h. bell denise h. bell denise h. bell denise h. bell Gone! Overall, the article says, U.S. life expectancy has dropped significantly significant signify sign— sign of late-stage capitalism—my words Not the article, who questions the hangman until he comes for them— Who thinks he is coming for them What is my crime you cry out   The article says, “ That is unprecedented, ” She’s talking about the drop in life expectancy. And we had so few expectations— To publish a poem, to be remembered on a lover’s lips, fantasy of a new lover’s kiss—Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s old man finds love with a 14-year-old. It happens to old men in novels—mostly old white men w/14-year-olds of either sex. Though there was "Harold and Maude," but look what happened to her!   At the peak of the recent surge in August 2022, 91.9% of all deaths around the country were among people 65 and older—squeezed out workers, ticket punchers, bouncers, beer hall, beach ball Gramps, Ma’Dear, Auntie, Grammie Spinster sitting at the wheel spinning thread The scissors, the hand that snips the thread dragged off her stool and slapped on a stainless steel gurney intubated in the hospital hallway— to be not strong enough to fight for resources all that tax money to Uncle Sam the sanity lost in Vietnam what you did to your kids when you got back from Korea what you saw in WWII when they emptied the camps the leg you left behind in Iraq the student that attacked you at Public School 321— you didn’t deserve that, but you got it. Now you’re on this gurney waiting for a bed you are not welcome in because of Medi- care’s low reimbursement rates. You look at a little plastic machine attached to your finger saying 70, 60, 50— You don’t feel so much, you thought dying would feel different. And then suddenly it does! Grabbing you by the throat you think about your apartment all your things—things you traded your time and life for—watches—the one red Gucci bag— you were scared to carry on the subway. You call out the tube goes in your throat you think Jesus. The article says younger people are still dying at higher rates, I’m reading but I can hear the man’s voice rise in pitch, “Under normal conditions in the U.S. younger people rarely die.” “Black people are dying at higher rates.” He doesn’t know to say it’s been that way since slavery. But he does say, “That’s not even acknowledging American Indians, Alaska Natives and Pacific Islanders…” Whose land Whose land we stand upon— Who were decimated with guns & type- writers banging out cowboy novels: home home on a plane. It’s November 22, 2022, two days before Thanksgiving I’m reading all this. I’ve seen the affable old white guy say on TV, “The pandemic is over.” He grins, his granddaughter fairytales on the White House lawn—so pearl pristine sun- shine and green grass, the top of the chain—   The article says: “We’re still in the middle of this crisis. The most vulnerable will not just be left behind but will be sentenced to death.”   ta DAH ta DAH ta DAH stopped on a dime Nobody wants to hear that end rhyme ta DAH ta DAH ta DAH stopped for a dime.   THE INTERVIEW This interview was conducted between Jae Nichelle and Sapphire on January 2, 2024. From Push  to The Kid to these excerpts from The Harlem Trilogy , your body of work has shown a remarkable evolution in style and narrative. How do you see your writing style and storytelling approach evolving over the years? Are there specific influences, experiences, or literary movements that have shaped your journey as an author?   As the stories I wanted to tell over the years differed and changed, my style also evolved and changed. What I needed was different for The Kid  than what I needed for Push.  Push is written in an intimate first person in the voice of a girl with limited education. She’s sixteen when the novel starts and eighteen when it ends. There’s an earnestness and purity to this character. That was deliberate, AIDS was highly stigmatized at the time (still is to some degree). In personal ads, folks would say things like, “I’m clean,” when they were discussing their HIV-negative status. She’s a highly “reliable narrator”. Abdul in The Kid  is not. He’s a tormented soul who at times lies to himself. His ability to love himself and the world is called into question. Unlike his mother, he’s highly literate and worldly. Both novels deal with the effects of intergenerational violence, racism, homophobia, art, literacy, and class. Both novels are told in the first person, so we see the world through the character’s eyes. But they’re very different. The question for me as a writer is, what will serve the story, what conceit, technique, device, etc. will bring this story into being? I think that is where “style” should emanate from, what will serve the text. With The Harlem Trilogy,  I am telling an intergenerational story that begins in 1910 and takes the reader up to a few years past the Obama presidency. I had to use different storytelling techniques, but the question remained the same, what will serve the text? When I think of primary influences on me as a young writer I think of Ntozake Shangé. I was studying dance with Raymond Sawyer and Ed Mock in San Francisco. One of the dancers in Raymond’s company was Ntozake Shangé. She was beginning to create the work that would make her famous, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuff . I would watch her artistic collaborations with choreographers like Raymond Sawyer, Paula Moss, Halifu Osumare and poets like Jessica Hagedorn, and various jazz musicians. I was mesmerized. This had a profound effect on my developing artistic sensibilities. I was in California, they went to New York. So, it was obvious New York was the place to be. In New York, I discovered people like Pedro Pietri, Miguel Algarin, Dael Orlandersmith, Bob Holman, the Pussy Poets, Carl Hancock Rux, Janice Erlbaum, Patricia Smith, June Jordan, Sandra Maria Esteves, Sarah Jones, Paul Beatty—the whole movement that was the Nuyorican Poets Café. In 1994 my work was included in Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café . Pedro Pietri, June Jordan, and Ai remain foundational poets for me. Speaking of spoken word, in 2010 I recorded June Jordan’s novel, His Own Where , for Audible audiobook. It was such a thrill to do that for a work and a person I admired.   In “Poem Found in Scientific American,” I had to pause and take in the question “Is something a poem if you have to tell someone it’s a poem?” The piece itself is such an intricate collaboration of news, voices, and eulogy. What role has your poetry played for you in difficult times and political moments?   With a piece like “Poem Found in Scientific American” the methodologies of visual artists like Betye Saar who uses assemblage, Romare Bearden the master collagist, and Rosie Lee Thomkins the quilt maker guide me. And as the title of the poem reflects found poetry is important to the working of this poem. Found Poetry can be defined as: “A borrowed text, a piece of writing that takes an existing text and presents it as a poem. Something that was never intended to be a poem—a newspaper article, a street sign, a letter, a scrap of conversation—is refashioned as a poem, often through lineation…”. That’s from A Poet’s Glossary  by Edward Hirsch. The other word that comes to mind is collage, which etymologically stems from French, gluing, from coller to glue…” Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged . The first time I remember using this type of collage form, i.e., mixing documents and poetry was when my brother had been murdered. I had asked his ex-girlfriend to send me the documents she had concerning his death, the death certificate, etc. Time passed; I forgot about the request. Some months later I got an 8 by 11 manilla envelope in the mail. I opened it not knowing what it was or who it was from. The envelope contained my brother’s birth certificate, his death certificate, and his autopsy report. You know, information, data, the reductive facts. The facts often tell their own story, for example, as I write this, 8,000 children have been killed in Gaza by Israeli bombs and the IDF fighting forces. Those are the facts. Now juxtapose those facts with a clip of a denying obfuscating Israeli government official saying, “We don’t know who  killed those children”, and then maybe show a picture of a Palestinian mother preparing her child for a funeral by enshrouding them in these pristine white sheets we see on the news. By ‘collaging’ all this we tell another story. We do this now ,   so our story exists, at least for us, as a contradiction to the official narrative. Which in the case of Israel and the United States is that Israel is trying to irradicate Hamas. We begin to see through snips of data, a leaked government memo that calls the current moment an “OPPORTUNITY” to move the Palestinians out of Gaza, we juxtapose that with a real estate company offering Israeli Jews seaside property in Gaza. By employing the artistic methodology of the African American quiltmaker, we get a different story. Taking broken and shattered pieces of existence and pasting or stitching them together into a coherent text through the act of collage or assemblage allows my brain to make an explanatory and perhaps healing work of art. Romare Bearden worked in a lot of mediums but it was his work as a collagist that really, like that of the African American women quilt makers, had a profound effect on me. So “collage” or “assemblage” is an opportunity to take our shattered selves and make them whole. The following is an excerpt from the poem AUTOPSY REPORT 86-13504 published in 1994. I used official documents, poetry, and personal correspondence: 3.    Autopsy Report 86–13504 From the anatomic findings and pertinent history I ascribe death to craniocerebral injuries Los Angeles, Ca. October 14, 1986, @ 1230 hours subcutaneous subgaleal subdural cerebral cerebellar extensive skull fractures the body is that of a well-developed black male 74 inches in length tall weighing 179 pounds appearing the stated 38 years of age 37! he was 37! the hair is long measuring 6 inches in length in an afro style. there is also a moustache & slight beard growththe sclerae are white & the irises are brown. nose shows blood the left ear contains blood & fly eggs. the mouth shows fly eggs on the hard palate the teeth appear to be intact thorax symmetrical configuration normal abdomen flat you extremities show no were clubbing, edema or deformity beautiful   4 . …extensive Head and Nervous System damage soul contorted locked up busted penitentiary you said it was fuck or be fucked. said they let you out with a string attached to your ass to pull you back if you breathe wrong.   5.     Dear Sapphire, I sent a letter up to the other address explaining the times and change of life. Since the happenings of the last letter things look better being that I remember where I was a year ago (in jail). Also walking down Sunset to get my last check from the big ‘Z’ I happen to look behind me and see this sister and white boy walking together. She looked as if she didn’t want to be bothered, so I gave her the high sign and she ducked into a phone booth and I into a store. She came out and we started walking down the street arm and arm exchanging words no names yet. She told me she had a friend around the corner with some jam, so we walked by and got Hi. Found out later she is S— S— of Earth, Wind and Fire. Spent last night at her apartment on Sunset. Saph, for the record I have never been so Hi! In my life and awake to remember it: wine, coke, hash and opium. Yes, once again I am in love chasing the happiness (so called) that we all chase. Other than that money is getting funny. Power to Us Lord Lofton   There are themes of trauma, violence, and uncovering complex identities in your work. How do you take care of yourself while writing? Community! For years I attended a meeting of women who had survived sexual abuse. I stopped going for various reasons. But during the pandemic, I joined a Zoom support group. That was incredibly important for me. I also regularly see a therapist. That has worked for me. When I lived in Manhattan there was a church, St Francis Assisi on 31st St, that had student therapists you could see for thirty to thirty-five dollars a session. We need more avenues to access therapy even if you don’t have money or private insurance. Of course, the real solution is MEDICARE FOR ALL, destigmatizing mental health issues, and free mental health services for all. We have to question how we can afford to finance war in Ukraine and Israel while we do without healthcare. How do you rest and recharge?   I try to pay attention to diet and exercise, it’s about progress, not perfection. You never get all this stuff right. Ultimately it comes down to I want to be here for the work and I have to be alive to do it!   As a spoken word artist, what is your current relationship with the performance of your work? Because of the pandemic and my personal health vulnerabilities, I have chosen to limit in-person presentations. So ZOOM is a big word for me right now. When I think of the performance of my work now, I see productions or movies. I would love to see Push , the musical. I would love to see a one-person choreopoem stage or film adaptation of The Kid .   Over time, your work has had a profound impact on readers from around the world, sparking important conversations and challenging societal norms. I love the anecdote you shared in The Poet Speaks Podcast  about a young woman who stopped you on the street to tell you Push  was her favorite book!  Can you share any other memorable experiences or encounters with readers who have been deeply affected by your writing? How do you feel in those moments? One moment that stands out for me is The Kid  and Push  both being translated into French, Chinese, Portuguese, and Italian, so readers could really get a sense of the world I was writing about in a way they could not if only Push  had been translated. Another moment that stands out was in November of 2022 I was invited to the Syracuse YMCA Downtown Writers Center as part of the Syracuse Symposium series: It Takes a Village: Recovering Our Children Through Literature & Literacy. I was honored to be invited. I had presented at this venue, Syracuse YMCA Downtown Writers Center, twelve or thirteen years ago. So, when the presenter was introducing me, he said, “She performed here 12 years ago”, then he said, “Some of those same people who were here twelve years ago are here tonight.” That just went all through me, it gave me a tremendous feeling of community and continuity. The work is so much bigger than bestseller lists and prizes. We’re, at least I am, trying to get the oppressor’s foot off our individual and collective neck as we simultaneously try to make something beautiful out of our existence. Do you have any hidden talents or special interests that people would be surprised to learn? Yes, I’m a visual arts person and have tried my hand at small assemblages and doll-making. What, if anything, is giving you hope these days? The continued blossoming of Black women’s writing and other forms of art. I’m inspired by the new BRILLIANT voices in Black women’s scholarship. I’m inspired by the anything is possible-ness of Serena Williams and Simone Biles! I’m inspired by the resistance that has sprung up all over the world, in the street and online, to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. There has been such a bold courageous response to the illegal mass punishment inflicted on the women and children of Gaza. It has given me great hope. I’m inspired by South African International Relations and Cooperation Minister Dr. Naledi Pandor who announced South Africa would be bringing charges of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice in the Hague.   How can people support you right now? The best way to support me is to read the work. Make sure it’s not taken off the shelves in your local libraries. Support the brilliant scholarship, Sapphire’s Literary Breakthrough: Erotic Literacies, Feminist Pedagogies, and Environmental Justice Perspectives  by Elizabeth McNeil, Neal A. Lester, DoVeanna Fulton, and Lynette D. Myles about my work. And most of all keep writing and publishing your own brilliant and needed work!   Name other Black Women writers people should know. Novelist: Bessie Head, author of When Rain Clouds Gather , Maru , and A Question of Power.  (Born in South Africa to a white mother in a mental hospital at a time when interracial relationships were illegal; Bessie Head would go on to become one of Africa’s most influential writers.) Poet: Ai, author of the National Book Award winner Vice  and The Collected Poems of Ai  edited by Yusef Komunyakaa (Ai is known for her mastery of the dramatic monologue and exploration of outré subject matter.) Memoirist: Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself . (Notice the words “ Written by Herself ”. Until Harriet Jacobs wrote her memoir female African American slave narratives were written (and the content often censored) by white women amanuenses. Harriet Jacobs’ memoir was a game-changer.) Scholar: Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South  which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History, the Dan David Prize, and the Merle Curti Social History Award. (A tour de force They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South  is also a game-changer and required reading for anyone interested in Black women’s lives, studies, and stories.)   ### 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.

Natasha Ria El-Scari is a poet, performer, writer, Cave Canem alum, Ragdale Residency recipient and facilitator/educator for over two decades. Her poetry, academic papers, and personal essays have been published in anthologies, literary and online journals.  Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, Natasha has a BA from Jackson State University and an MA from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. In 2015, Natasha released her first book, Screaming Times  (Spartan Press, 2015). Her second book, The Only Other  (Main Street Rag, 2016) dives into the taboo voice of the other woman. In 2019 Natasha released her first self-published and non-fiction book in collaboration with her son entitled, Mama Sutra: Love and Lovemaking Advice to My Son.  In 2020, Natasha self-released, I Say, T(He)y Say a chapbook about a special decade in her maternal grandmother’s life. In the same month she released Growing Up Sina , her first novel created after challenging herself creatively to grow outside of her first love, poetry. Her forthcoming work, Steelife , explores her feminist upbringing and the evolution of her womanhood. She recently released Te Deum: Lessons a performative collaboration with a chorale ensemble. Natasha’s CDs, DragonButterFirefly (2006), This is Love… (2010), CuddleComplex (2016),  We Found Us (2023) and DVD Live at the Blue Room  (2015) establish her as a spoken word artist.. This mother of two adult children and a bonus son is also the founder and curator of Black Space Black Art , an organization created to promote the exhibition of African American visual arts and businesses. She is also the founder and curator of the Natasha Ria Art Gallery , a small powerhouse that focuses on exhibiting marginalized visual artists. Natasha and her musician husband Kevin plan to open a day/overnight urban retreat space for creatives in the future. Follow Natasha on Instagram and Twitter . The Viewing   Big Mama's Funeral was pink, her suit pink, her casket pink, flowers, pink and her hands were hidden.   The Funeral Director said that it was best to cover Big Mama’s hands. They didn’t look like they belonged on her body.   I wanted to witness, one last time the pea shelling hands- faster than a machine at removing each eye from its socket into the tin bowl. If I shelled, silently, I got to listen   to woman-talk. As the sun went down the bowl weighed heavier between my knees where the gnats gathered with each pea drop.   The Funeral Director thought fit to add another layer of pink taffeta to cover her hands. He thought we would be as pleased as he, until her great granddaughter and self-proclaimed pink lover whispered, Where are her hands, did you bury them first?   Show her gnarled hands not just her pristine faith. Do not shroud her history like she was ugly. Show her dirty weapons. Display the things that saved us. ### 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, retreats, and special events. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

DeShara Suggs-Joe is a queer, Black poet and visual artist. She co-founded Daughter’s Tongue (an all-women writing collective), worked as the Creative Director of Workshops at Winter Tangerine, and is a former member of the Youth Speaks Collective. She received her MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts and fellowships from Callaloo, the Poetry Incubator, and Pink Door. In 2021, she received a nomination for "Best of the Net." She has published poems in Apogee Lit , Voicemail Poems , Poet Lore , The Texas Review , and elsewhere. She has also been featured on Button Poetry’s YouTube platform and has performed at the likes of Spotify, Yahoo, and Pinterest. Her debut chapbook is forthcoming from Button Poetry in April 2024. Visit her website and follow her on Instagram . Ode to the People Who Have Touched the Bottom I was born in a brokedown city some call it home some call it rockbottom bottom of the barrel crabs laughing in unison and me, I ran so fast my feet dissolved or dissipated the ground It’s funny or generous to be home and love it  make it your own wrap yourself in til it stings til your muscles remember til your momma’s calling cause your daddy don’t know where the door is it’s funny right   how home shapes your insides til you’re outside yourself wondering   what it takes to survive a place like this                                             & yet, a bomb never searched for my blood, FREE PALESTINE Never been trapped between rival bullets & forced from home, FREE SUDAN Never had a cell phone be worth more than me living, FREE THE CONGO Never had to fight over the way the river flows, FREE HAITI Never earthquaked & left for dead, FREE PUERTO RICO Never had fire sing her song all over my land, FREE HAWAII FREE     FREE     FREE     FREE ALL OPPRESSED PEOPLE from the foot of the oppressor & let our voices marry into a weapon strong enough to damage         And God?     What is justice but a well wish? An unsung lullaby? A tall tale? An unleaked battle cry? Waiting and wading? A knife in a nuke fight?   And God?        Are there black people in the future? Are there poor people in the future? Are there queer people in the future? Are there trees in the future? Is there fresh water in the future? Are there poets in the future?   And God? Is there a future that I should long for? Is there a future that I should fight for? When will the meek inherit the earth? In this lifetime or the next or the next or? ### 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, retreats, and special events. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

A Chicago native, Lor Clincy orients her work in all things real and raw. She references her upbringing and identity, exploring the layers of her life in contained transparency often wondering what she can process next. She received her BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work, as a teen, was published at Syracuse University through a summer creative writing program, and The Chicago Beat. Last summer, her chapbook, RESOLVE, was published by BottleCap Press. Her recent poetry has been published in Foothill Poetry Journal’s Fall 2023 issue. She will appear in ALLIUM: A Journal of Poetry and Prose in Spring 2024. Currently, Lor is a MFA student in the English and Creative Writing program at Columbia College Chicago. Follow her on her website and Instagram .   For the Condemned      -  after 79th, Kwabena Foli    I considered his mother a victim, ruined by the carrying. I’ve measured his father as Creator, a concept destroyed by freedom. Seldom do we frequent her grief. Somebody’s  daughter conceived a baby on her own, and the world worships her. We hold tight to belief that his father shaped universe once.      He gave rage. Made men in his image, made Mary like me.  How many sons die on crosses for their father and why must their mothers bury their bodies? To have a God is to know how to surrender. On knees, we do not know   you can plead standing, an amen lingering, each before phases of timid silence. I imagine her anguish and his wrath as other.   This is the lament the son carried as he bled, accepting that   his father’s will surpassed his own. This was the only way.     His story is unique in its prevalence, taught   men to obey the first time they are called to die. Taught me   salvation has less to do with free will and all to do with obedience. How   many sons die on crosses, anticipating their fathers to call them home? Bleating, the lamb becomes the shepherd: be   mindful of the fields, the hills, on their own, roll still.    His mother wrapped him, read his body’s bones, and   held them until he settled. How  many fathers leave their sons to succumb to   their wounds? But he was resting, the lamb said. Be  mindful of the fields, the hills roll still. She wept, afraid to admit he had been used.      ### 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, retreats, and special events. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Arisa White is a Cave Canem fellow, Sarah Lawrence College alumna, an MFA graduate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the author of several award-winning poetry collections including Who’s Your Daddy. Arisa White is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Colby College. She is the author of Who’s Your Daddy , co-editor of Home Is Where You Queer Your Heart, and co-author of Biddy Mason Speaks Up, the second book in the Fighting for Justice Series for young readers. Her poetry is widely published, and her collections have been nominated for an NAACP Image Award, Lambda Literary Award, and have won the Per Diem Poetry Prize, Maine Literary Award, Nautilus Book Award, an Independent Publisher Book Award, and Golden Crown Literary Award.  As the creator of the Beautiful Things Project, Arisa curates poetic collaborations that are rooted in Black queer women’s ways of knowing. She is a Cave Canem fellow and serves on the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance Community Advisory Board. Currently in development with composer Jessica Jones, Arisa is working on Post Pardon: The Opera. Visit Arisa's website for more. it takes me a while to step from your cobalt stare to lose the spotlight of your love is a cloddish stampede from nowhere   i am not as cool as a swore this back is not called an avant-garde you are free and you are my favorite and it’s a parasympathetic response   every time you appear in my dreams you want medicine you are a tunnel’s dark trope and the wind passing through is justice   but the deepest stab thrusts the most and I concur I am a visitor more than happy to hold the mirror pinky up, you promised we were flames   burn it to the bottom handsome boi, your nipples a slow-erase then you with moat and mortar and wounds with victims in their mouths   arachnid and simple-breasted like a ball of yarn she came first, whereas she came tumbling and chained to a quartet of the same— tatas ill-tempered and lightning-flavored   the memorial of their touch daybreaking and disloyal, and although my knees would gladly suffer morning’s copper cut, standing up for myself is a soul ambulation In a reasonable amount of time   Text me back within the hour, otherwise, you make a bad bitch feel like grits without taste, a city without its early morning reprise of joggers.   Born from blunt and smoke, you’re a familiar trick I play on myself. On this return, I have more tools than a screwdriver.   This is my seventh transmutation. You inside of me is the waterfall’s surrender, the applause of cedars, all the sway of cattails.   I have a list and a heart beating too fast for you. You were never in my orbit and you called me back. I’m speechless my first time in space.   I am in July and you are in June. I fit you into these fifteen minutes before meeting about federal grants and their specific guidelines.   Drop my croissant, pay the clerk no mind, and tap the green phone. Leave my debit card to sit in the luxury of your voice—   tell me how you feel with a verb and horizon. I need depth to secure my succulents. You, my dear, are so handsome, I’m spring.   I’ve lost the ground I stand on. Spend weeks suspended in a wind tunnel, in a blue noise, that keeps me from autumn. I’ll kiss you in the ante meridian and my latitudes take kissing over settler colonialism any day. I keep finding your Jack Russell in my curl signature, snarled and percussive. Nonetheless, dew-stricken petals wait for me to forget-you-not. It is true— this summer shower is the devil in me. You’ve gone outside without an umbrella or zipper-front London Fog. Your absence presents like a pilgrim in pumps. There’s no question I will forfeit my superlatives. In the cul-de-sac, my tall drink of water, your bust on this Tuesday-Sunday. I look at art and think about you until “I See Red:” on oil, acrylic, paper, newspaper, and fabric on canvas, these mountains give the fireworks perspective: love needs a new vehicle and time to lose on you. I can’t relate at that league, my heart is solely incorporated, me and me in a Cape in Maine.   Guests are privately undressed in this hard-broke space, you are not relative to this unpacking.   Frighten to sore your eyes with my belly, I have no model for the vulnerability of being seen.   Public funk of a dead thing growing again and who knows when I’ll arrive redolent.   I’m wet behind the ears, adultly infant and driving automatic but willing to get there.   I’ve pleased so hard, I’ve lied. It’s all in my dysregulation, the vulgate and goldenrod.   I can educate you on apricity. Heat superficial and distant, we’ll never strike a match.   My god’s forgiveness is transactional and the privileges of my flesh means I ghost easily.   Beware of trolls who message you on the first of a new year— I had no bridge for you to cross. Best way out is through   I’m pulling further from your porch   not turning around, I’m moving toward grief   a long thorn stuck between my knuckles for days   every fight is a reach to the bone   disappointment can’t settle me into prayer   what this deep affection has done   —in the face of your density—   is show the saboteur moonwalking   I have no qualms about erasing God’s sandprints   it’s ancestral to blast these moody pop songs   fashion a belt to keep my cargo from exposing my junk   every pocket filled to the stitch with California poppies   three drops daily with water to flower   sirens go by and I’m reminded I’m not Thoreau   I eat shoulder-to-shoulder with the fear of my rejection   each owl is excited by my presence and terrifies me   where’s the tavern of our first kiss?   you glimmered brighter when not defensive   held my hand and our hands bridged between us   all was broken and eagled into song   we treated anything anybody said as a collective utterance THE INTERVIEW This interview was conducted between Jae Nichelle and Arisa White on January 30, 2024. The poems you’ve shared are full of tenderness and longing. Reading them, I felt like they were working together to pull me into a greater story. Can you talk about the relationship these poems have to each other—why you pulled them together, specifically? The poet and editor Kate Angus once told me that I write heartbreakingly beautiful poems. And so I’m embracing that: how much can a heart break? What emerges from the breaks? What does that emergence sound like? How does it feel? What is actually breaking?  Essentially, it’s about love and loss. Falling in and out of love. Being with the descent and the insight that comes from such vulnerability. Recognizing that love in the present is repairing some lovelessness of the past. Like some spiritual polycule. It’s so peopled, our love.  In “Best way out is through,” I was so entranced by the line “sirens go by and I’m reminded I’m not Thoreau.” Ancestry is invoked earlier in the poem, and it makes me curious to know what writers you see as part of your lineage. Who do you learn from? I wrote that line while I was at Hedgebrook this past July. Sitting by the pond, surrounded by all this green, with an owl at my back, and nothing about where I was felt mechanical. And then, in the distance, sirens. The machines. The man. And the flesh is activated in a psychosocial sort of way, and all of a sudden, I feel separate from my surroundings. I feel an unbelonging. Writers and poets who have schooled me on my belonging are Toni Morrison, Medbh McGuckian, Ai, and Audre Lorde.  Can you share any pivotal moments in your writing journey that significantly influenced your perspective and approach to poetry? I interned with the dance company Urban Bush Women (UBW) during my undergraduate years at Sarah Lawrence College. UBW held a summer institute in Florida one year I was interning, and I was invited to go. The institute comprised emerging dancers, master teachers, and scholars, and it was a beautifully intense time of movement-making. During one session, when the artistic director Jawole Willa Jo Zollar was working with a group of dancers, she called me to the stage to write a poem to accompany the choreography. I watched them rehearse for 10 minutes, and then inspiration struck. I remember everyone, Jawole included, being impressed with the evocative quality of the poem written on the fly. This moment was when I realized I wanted my poetry to collaborate with other art forms, to move beyond the page, and be an embodied experience.  You’re writing an opera! Can you share more about what goes into being a librettist?  A lot of patience goes into it. Excellent collaborators. Institutional and philanthropic support. This is my first time writing a libretto. The biggest hurdle was giving myself the permission to do so–to step into something new using the tools of poetry to guide me as I find my footing in this new genre. It was helpful to research other black poets who have written libretti, which provided me with a lineage and literary community to ground and see myself in. Langston Hughes and June Jordan both wrote operas. So working from that historical literary point of view, instead of feeling like an imposter within opera’s elite airs, I could imagine and know myself as a librettist. Turning to our contemporary and current times, there are many black poets who have crossed over into the opera/librettist world: Tracy K. Smith, Thulani Davis, Douglas Kearney, Vievee Francis, Samiya Bashir, and Nikkey Finney to name a few.  As a writer of many genres and styles, how does your creative process change when working on starkly different projects?  My process doesn’t change that much; the basic ingredients still remain. Research, writing, and revising. If I’m working in a different form, I research that form, acquaint myself with the different writers who work in the form, and I seek editorial advice from those who work actively in the form. Often, I open the creative process to include collaborators, so that requires clear communication, a willingness to let go, and the desire to see the work broaden with, and through, the creative genius of those involved. The Beautiful Things Project is a fascinating initiative. What is one of the most memorable collaborations from this project so far? In the Fall of 2022, I worked with a few students from Colby College as background vocalists and my colleague and musician Jose Martinez to create a dramatic reading of my poetic memoir Who’s Your Daddy  at the Versant Power Astronomy Center & Jordan Planetarium in Orono, Maine. I worked with a small team at the Planetarium to create visuals and animations on different skies. Constellations, astrology, and “the stars”--just generally–are recurring themes in Who’s Your Daddy. So it made perfect sense to do a reading in the planetarium! What are you streaming these days, if anything? I just finished up AMBITIONS  on Hulu. I love a shady and bitchy Robin Givens–she was a bougie-snot even then in Head of the Class ! You can see how ambition is such supremacy at times. “I’m ambitious,” becomes a way to excuse bad human behavior, to form insecure and anxious attachments that keep everyone in a transactional mode, and love stays in short supply.  If a museum about anything could exist, what’s a super specific museum you would like to visit? A museum of teeth. Teeth from different species. Teeth inventions. I’m currently going through a year-long process of a dental restorative procedure and I’m thinking about teeth. Gum health. Fake teeth. How white is too white for teeth? How much attention, time, and resources do I want to give to maintaining iPod white teeth? If our culture wasn’t so vain about our teeth, could I still be a professor with a missing front tooth? I’m already navigating the interlocking oppressions of black, woman, lesbian, . . ., and to not have a proper set of teeth . . . I’m looking forward to my senior years when I have reached the next-next level of gives-no-fucks and I’m bravely toothless and laughing out loud.  What is a perfect food to you? A bowl of soup, any kind. (Lol, especially after my previous response.) How can people support you? Buy my books and then send me D​Ms telling me which poem you enjoyed. To help bring​ Post Pardon​: The Opera,  to ​its premiere, ​donate to the project postpardon.org/support .  Name another Black woman writer people should follow.  Anastacia-Renee ### 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.

Isha Camara is a Gambian-American poet and visual artist from South Minneapolis, Minnesota. She earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Masters at Randolph College in Creative Writing. Her work has been featured in Palette Poetry , Southeast Review , Muzzle Magazine , Rhino Poetry, and Lumiere Review . She has performed for the Madison Public Library, Walker Art Center, and American Composers Forum. Isha seeks to sate her curiosities by layering myths with modern desires, questions and obsessing over these old stories by polishing them inside poetic forms and digital art. Visit Isha's website and follow her on Instagram and X (Twitter) . Kanifing, Gambia Grandfather’s compound, 2009 The first time I saw a chicken killed, I did not care to hold grief in me like I would were it a baby or a dog. That young, I didn’t know grief. I was fascinated. The one who orchestrated the murder was a grandmother, sharp, elbows welded like a blade. She knew not to scatter blood-grief, but instead made a song out of clucking. I liked that. But death didn’t stop. On white floors came the plucking.  Do it – I’m prompted to join, feel grief grin over me. I marvel at the public undressing of the almost dead. The chicken is pink, chatty. It fashes its slit neckbone at me in flirt, performing grief like a last ditch effort to be released. I cluck  i’m sorry . My collarbone rattles too. I remember the man that wrangled me into his barn. I pick the fence metal griefed inside of me. I blink. Now I bring the poultry to boiling water. Till the feathers I couldn’t pluck with my hands fall. I am passed another chicken before my grief can settle. This one is feisty, breaks from my arms. I follow like a man behind it. During its useless scramble, Isha thought: what dance would I perform in grief? ### 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.

Ajanaé Dawkins is an interdisciplinary poet, performance artist, and theologian. She writes about her matrilineage to explore the politics of faith, grief, the intimacy of relationships, and sensuality. She has work published or forthcoming in The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner , the Indiana Review, Frontier Poetry , The BreakBeat Poets Black Girl Magic Anthology, and more. Ajanaé is the winner of the Tinderbox Poetry Journal’s Editors Prize, a finalist for the Cave Canem Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize, and a finalist for the Brett Elizabeth Jenkins poetry prize. She was the Taft Museum’s 2022 Duncanson Artist in Residence and is a fellow of Torch Literary Arts, The Watering Hole, and Pink Door. Ajanaé is currently a co-host of the VS Podcast, Ohio State University’s UAS Community Artist-in-Residence, and the Theology Editor for the EcoTheo Review. You can find her in the middle of the dance floor, skate rink,  local winery, library, karaoke night, or in her kitchen cooking something slow. Visit Ajanaé's website and follow her on Instagram and Twitter . Alene’s Monologue  Excerpt from, Where Black Girls Go, a one-woman show.   I got grown and thought I’d be a woman forever. Then, I became a mother and a grandmother and people forgot at some point I was a girl. Your body stew enough children, leak enough milk, have enough babies pressed to the titty and people think that’s all you ever been. A mother. A dutiful wife and then widow. A surgical blade across the abdomen for the third child and felt like a sharper one at my neck when my husband died. My daughters think I was born this way. My daughters look me in the eye with my own eyes and can’t see I’m a woman. They think they invented late nights and dance floors and the eye you give a man you got plans for. Hell, they think they invented feeling good. I try to tell them ain’t nothing new under the moon but who can borrow memory?   Against my body’s present failures, I hold the past up to the light. My knee acts up and I recall the tingle of recklessness under my younger skin. How on occasion, mid-dance, the music would rise right up in my body and carry me away to some gentleman’s home. Oh, the way we lied to our mommas about where we’d been and why our roots were honey-thick. Lied right through our teeth to our mommas.   I was a late bloomer so I was 19 the first time, me and my best friend snuck out to the club. I told my momma we were going to the picture show and back to her parent's house to study. We went to the club and we danced until our feet rehearsed aging. We were liquored up, and our perms were fresh, and we were smelling ourselves. We didn’t have money and taxis were slow so we hitchhiked to a second club. (Of course, you can’t do this anymore but we stuck our thumbs out until they were stiff with cold.)   And, this fine  man picked us up. Skin, clean and brown as new leather and the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen. Definitely older than us at the time. He had a joint hanging from his lip and offered us some. I had never tried reefer but, why not? I puffed in that passenger seat until I was so far away from my body, I could see my hair curling up in my kitchen like springs. I puffed until I was laughing so hard the teeth fell out all his jokes…until my pulse, his smile, and the music in the stereo were all on the same beat. It was around 4 am when I got home and my momma slapped me clean across my face when I lied about falling asleep studying for finals. She slapped me so hard that I think even she forgot she had been a woman before she was my momma. ### 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.

Tameka Cage Conley is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and librettos. The opera for which she wrote the libretto, A Gathering of Sons , was awarded the Bronze Medal in the Society and Social Issues category of the New York Festivals TV and Film Awards. Tameka Cage Conley , PhD is a graduate of the fiction program of the Iowa Writers' Workshop where she was awarded the Truman Capote Fellowship and the Provost Postgraduate Visiting Writer Fellowship in Fiction. Her work has been published in Ploughshares , The Virginia Quarterly Review , The Iowa Review , Callaloo , The African American Review, and elsewhere. She has received writing fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Cave Canem Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Vermont Studio Center. The opera for which she wrote the libretto, A Gathering of Sons , was awarded the Bronze Medal in the Society and Social Issues category of the New York Festivals TV and Film Awards. She is at work on her first novel, You, Your Father --an epic family saga that considers the untimely deaths of African American men and boys over six decades beginning in the early 1940s in northern Louisiana. She is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the Oxford College of Emory University where her poem, "Among Us," was unveiled and mounted on the walls of Oxford's Horace J. Johnson Hall. You, Your Father: A Novel (an excerpt) Nancy pulled into the driveway and was cut off by Lucille, who vigorously waved her arms as she ran to her daughter from the left side of the house. Nancy trotted to Lucille but was out of breath when she reached her mother. “He got that rifle aimed at the door. That’s why,” Lucille started, then took a breath, “that’s why I came out here to meet you. He said whatever stepped foot in our house, he would blow it back to hell.” “Lord have mercy.” “I been talking to him. But he act like he don’t hear me. I’m scared he can’t hear me, Nancy Lee. He won’t say nothing.” Like a drudge, he’d strode to the closet in the spare room, opened the door, removed the rifle he rarely touched, high-stepped to the living room, dropped to the ground, belly-crawled beneath the table, and used his elbows to pull himself forward, all without disturbing the dining chairs. “He can hear you, Momma. He just ain’t himself.” Nancy left her mother’s side to tiptoe to the window. She peeked inside the house and saw her father sprawled beneath the table like a boy playing combat. As if not enough to snake a blues from her shoulder blades to her gut, as her father crouched--part veteran, part hunter--he looked like Ananias, her dead brother, the same brother who had spoken to her as she flew from her house and said, Go get Daddy out them trenches . Nancy stifled a tearful cough into her hand and gagged. Her mouth thrust open in a violence propelled from her abdomen. She heaved thick, clear liquid. Panic seized her, and she could not breathe. Lucille swatted her daughter on the back three times with a hand so firm it shook Nancy’s spine. Her lower back tingled. Slow, slow was Nancy’s breath as it returned, even slower, the gelid misery that trickled from her throat and wreathed her rib cage where the beating was. Syrupy liquid pooled and slid into her abdomen where it rocked her side to side, side to side. Intelligent water, it was, with its stringent message: Save him . She heaved oozy, clear water that carried the message from her body. She pushed a widened palm against the side of the house, as if it had breath to spare. Lucille sensed Ananias out there in the yard, though he stood beside his sister. Had one of them asked the other, You feel Ananias out here? , they might have embraced, and he would have held them both, not with human arms but arms of The Spirit, and there would have begun a healing long overdue. Neither said a word, so it was that they turned in loss like soil turned over. Lucille pressed both her palms into her lower back and walked away from her daughter. Nancy put her hand to her mouth and talked to Ananias from inside. Brother, I’m scared. Of what? Losing Daddy, like I lost you. I ain’t lost. Daddy is. Nancy tiptoed inside. Lucille walked to the sofa and used the wall as a guide. Nancy slipped off her shoes. Barefoot, she went to him, as if the path was holy. She looked down. Sweat pearled atop her father’s head, and his lips had caked white. At his age, she thought his hands would shake, but they held the rifle steady. She pulled a chair away from the table, so close to her father’s stretched-out position on the floor that she feared he might abruptly turn and without knowing who she was, shoot her. “We don’t talk about Ananias like we should,” she said. At the sound of his son’s name, George shifted, belly flat as slate, though he squirmed in the shoulders. “When I saw Ananias was dying, I came running to tell you and Momma. But Momma told me to go to sleep. She had to get up in the morning and go to work. I crawled into bed with Ananias. The next morning, I thought he was dead until I saw slobber drip down his chin. I wiped his mouth clean and whistled while I did it. Do you remember hearing me whistle that day? “You taught me how to whistle. But I saw the world through Ananias. To tell the truth, I didn’t know it til I saw what they did to those children in Birmingham and thought about my brother. I talked, and Ananias listened. That’s how I learned to listen to God--to what God wanted me to say through the organ. “We don’t talk enough, Daddy, about things that mean something. Why don’t you put that rifle down? I know Momma got a bone in there. I’ll make us soup.” With a mouth dry as sun-washed stone, George was unsure of his tongue’s availability and made no attempt at speech. He shuddered, finally, as he lowered the rifle but did not release it. His eerie faceoff with the door and whatever skulked on the other side had fatigued his insides as if he’d been battered by tornado winds. As he breathed from his mouth, heat bounced to the floor from his slightly disjoined lips and returned to the lower region of his face. So unusual was the heat of his breath that he believed even his sighs, if he’d made them, would be foul, fermented. His bladder was full. His temples pulsed. Emptiness flooded him, from his throat to his ankles. He could not recall the last time he had been so starved. The thought of Nancy’s bone soup filled him like steam. No sooner than he became settled on this imagined joy which could soon be at his grasp did another sight enter his consciousness: white men breaking his door down--a rush in legion, perhaps hooded, perhaps not--but with clear intention to tear his house up, along with any memory of familial glee, and reduce his wife, his daughter, himself to bits and bits of what was once three humans. There went the soup; the savory bone in his mouth, too, crushed to bits, by bullets and fire. How did he know they were not planning to kill every man, woman, and child all over the South who sang, cooked, hollered, loved, laughed, and wept within their Black skins? Blink, and Shreveport could be Birmingham. Blink, and Shreveport was Birmingham--just as he had blinked, been drafted, then sent to war with a shovel and a command to dig. He could not tell Nancy what she began to perceive in the silence that passed through the warm air between them: what if one of those four girls had been her, his last child? And how, in all the years he had known God and called himself God’s servant, could he say to Nancy, Soon as I saw them four little girls, them sweet baby angels, I saw you in them graves, too, down in there with your brother, then me down there, too, and Lucille just standing there crying and shaking her head at me. He made to speak but mumbled instead. “Daddy?” Nancy called when she heard the sounds that strained up from the floor, as brutal sadness tap danced up and down her father’s spine. Family photographs lined the built-in shelf to her left. She knew the photographs as intimately as she knew the faces that peered from them: her parents’ wedding with Lucille in white lace, almost two heads above her father who looked taller than usual in uniform; a sepia one of her as a little girl with her right hand on a white pillow where Ananias lay as an uncommonly still newborn with his head full of glossy black hair; another of her in a biscuit-tinted boat neck gown with Alonzo next to her in black suit and tie. There was not one photograph of the four of them: her mother, her father, Ananias, and herself. At the end of the row of framed photographs was George in his military uniform not too long after the draft. An observer might note the soldier’s stance, the slight lean-back on his right leg as if dodging a blow. Skin, the burnish of a penny. A slight waist to consider. Shoulders of medium breadth. His downturned eyes posed the question, What in the world? As a girl, Nancy studied the photograph and addressed it with such intense curiosity about the man--this soldier her father had been--that he’d walk from paper, through glass and stand before her, short as a shrub. He’d bend down on one knee and whisper things like, I survived just for you . He’d speak about the rotten food, how tired he was, the stench of death, and graves. She’d cry, and he’d hum until she went to sleep, clutching the frame. Her actual father who lived and breathed by her side might be out in the yard cutting grass or messing around under the hood of their truck. Nancy realized that though she loved her father, she’d forgotten the soldier who’d walked to her, not on water but no less miraculous, from the picture frame. ### Grief (for Nancy Lee Washington Young, 1927-1998) I. Twenty-six years gone, I cover my mouth, like you taught me, when I wail. II. Once, a bird flew into the house and beat its wings against the window, strain against glass, to set itself free. My aunt and I were terrified of the small creature: too out of place, too close to death. You did not open your mouth. You walked into the kitchen, returned with a napkin and clutched the deranged thing at its middle, your fingers a pinch. You opened the door and tossed the bird upward as it flew. How did you do that? How? Ain’t nothing to be scared of. III. One morning, when our neighbor’s daughter went after the man who’d struck her mother, you walked down the tar-paved street in Mooretown— once-upon-a-promised-land for Black folk in Shreveport— to find the girl as the sun flexed down on all our Black skin. You walked back with an arm around the girl’s shoulder and whispered into her ear: You don’t want to do that, Sugar, naw. That evening, when you learned the girl had flown to where you’d attempted to rescue her from the unnamed fate of attacking a grown man, you threw up your hand: I’m through with it. Done all I could do. IV. You whupped me good, as you would say, NaNa, and later learned I was innocent. Well, if I didn’t get you for that, I got you for something else. THE INTERVIEW This interview was conducted between Jae Nichelle and Tameka Cage Conley on March 1, 2024. This excerpt from You, Your Father  is truly stunning. Could you say a bit about what inspires you to tell this family saga, what draws you to these characters?   Thank you so much for the kind words about You, Your Father. I was raised in a household where the “other world” of the supernatural was acknowledged, respected, and revered alongside the everyday of buying groceries, making the bed, getting my hair braided or pressed with a hot comb by my aunt or cousin, and going to church. My great-grandmother (who helped to raise me and is an inspiration for Nancy in the novel) would often say, “The dead do not know what the living are doing.” But she’d also speak about how her deceased daughter—my grandmother who died before I was born—would “visit” her.” My mother and aunt have shared a similar story about my grandmother who died when they were teenagers. I suppose I became enthralled by love so powerful that it pushes beyond the grave and returns to the family where there was love. I was curious about how the spirit realm was threaded into the routine of life in a way that often felt seamless and alive. I was curious about how such love would manifest over time in a family, especially a family in Jim Crow Louisiana where all they had, often, were each other and the love generated as part of community. I was also curious about how blood family and family that is not blood but feels like blood—what we might call today, “chosen family”—would enact love amidst trauma. I also was interested in how families and communities responded to mental unwellness, PTSD, mental distress, and mental illness during a time when there was no language, no idea, no concept, no remedy for such pain. How does one heal the broken spirit, soul, and mind in such a world? How, I wondered, frankly, did my people—my ancestors—survive? How? I struck out to discover something close to an answer, I hope, in this novel. I am drawn to the characters for their majesty, plainness, dynamism, might, and belief. They do awe-inspiring, dangerous, playful, and beguiling things. Sometimes, they are bad actors, and I write a scene thinking, “How could  you?” But I am also extremely taken by their pursuit of self and how viscously and completely they love or mistake their fieriness for love. They seem strong to me but also vulnerable in so many seen and unseen ways, which is to say they are human. Certainly, I am building a world that is fictional, but I am seeking the human pulse of these characters. I would love for readers to think of them as someone they know, have known, or would like or love to know. Probably, in ways I could only have known from being asked this question, I want these characters to feel like family—even the most unlovable among them, mainly because someone always loves even the worst humans on the planet. Then again, perhaps I’m wrong about that. Maybe the worst humans become worst because they are unloved.    Both of these pieces are rooted in Shreveport, LA, where you were born. Do you have a favorite memory of your time there? What is it?   I had a play-filled childhood with delightful, wonderfully celebrated Christmases and Easters. My mother was intentional about new outfits for the holidays, and our cousin, who was a hair stylist, would put our hair in thick, dangling curls. There’s a photo of my sister and me forcing the Cabbage Patch dolls we’d gotten for Christmas into our uncle’s arms. The photo is one of my favorites because he’s extremely tall, and here he is as a full, grown man holding two bald, chocolate baby dolls. He looks miserable yet so willing to abide me and my sister’s wishes. I was nine years old—the same age my son is now—and my sister was five. When I was four years old, I wore a yellow dress as the flower girl in my great uncle’s wedding. Some of my fondest memories were spent with my great-grandmother, whom the community graciously and respectfully called Miss Nancy , in the kitchen. I loved to watch her cook. She made excellent biscuits from scratch; I can still taste them. I grew up in Black neighborhoods, so seeing white people in my community was like an alien sighting: the postal worker delivering mail and the school bus driver, these professions that required transit, which literally meant they were in and out. Once, my mother’s white boss came to our house, and I ran outside as if a carnival act had come to town; that’s how rare it was. I remember feeling that I grew up in segregation, which I did. The signage of Jim Crow and the most visibly and socially terrifying aspects of it were gone in the 80s and 90s, but the structure and vileness of it were firmly in place in Shreveport. It seeped into my bones at an early age, and I questioned and criticized it internally, and once I could, in my classrooms. I remember once posing a question in fifth grade: what if the roles were reversed, and it was not Black people who’d been enslaved but instead, the slavers? My white, male teacher shook his head no, which was morally accurate, but I didn’t hear him say that slavery was wrong, villainous, and should never have happened. He would not allow an imagined world where white people were enslaved, but he did not declare vehemently that it was wrong for Black people to be. I wanted him to explore with me—to imagine with me— what a world would look like where four hundred years of subjugation were ethnically reversed because I made early connections that aspects of my young life, which were fruitful and joyful, yet also working class and stressful because of that class distinction, were due to the rippling effects of slavery, and that people who looked like me had been enslaved because they looked like me, which is to say because they were Black people. But he wouldn’t do it.    In addition to your creative work, you also teach literature and creative writing. How do you balance your roles as a writer and educator, and how does each inform the other?   I’m not sure I balance this dynamic well, although I do attempt to balance intentionally, which means I share my writing practice, disappointments, and triumphs with my students. I’m transparent about where I am in my work. If I’m struggling with a scene, I bring that struggle to my students and share what I think is happening and why. By being intentional about exploring craft—times when I feel I’ve gotten it right and experienced the bliss of that as well as times when I’ve fallen short—I feel I am not only teaching but modeling what a writing life looks like. I also share details about my professional development journey and how I’ve been able to build my writing career for the past fourteen years or so, as well as how deeply my writing practice has been part of my life since elementary school, which began as a love and devotion to reading, as it does with most writers. When I assign in-class writing assignments, like an erasure inspired by students’ favorite songs in my Creative Writing seminar last semester, I wrote along with my students and shared what I’d written as they did. I thought it’d be fun, which it was, but I was also so proud of the work the class was doing that I wanted to be part of it. I also hoped to model that I am constantly learning, too, just as they are, and that we are learning together. I centralize my pedagogy much in the same way I do my life, which is being intentional about building community and collaboration as an artistic practice. I frequently say to my students that a decade from now what will matter is not the grade they earned but how they apply what they learn to how they think, critically and socially, and how they use the humanity-centric dynamics of literary art to understand and participate in the world with genuine investment in change-making.   What regular rituals, if any, keep you grounded?   I spend time with people who are kind, generous, thoughtful, smart, and creative, most particularly my brilliant son who already identifies as an artist at nine years old. I try to populate his life with as much engagement with the artistic world as possible and follow his lead on what interests him as an artist. I read poetry constantly. I read the work of Toni Morrison, Rita Dove, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Lucille Clifton, and Audre Lorde over and over again. I study the work of James Baldwin, which keeps me company. I’ve kept a journal since the mid-nineties. I have several at a time for different purposes, and they are all very beautiful. I’m extremely particular about my journals, pens, and pencils. I have a friend who owns a stationery store in Iowa City where I used to live who still ships journals, pencils, and stationery to me in Georgia. I love the Blackwing pencil, and I even have the companion Blackwing sharpener. I love them so much that I give them away sometimes to friends, old and new, which is a ritual of sharing and community I enjoy. Lately, I’ve fallen in love with aromatherapy pens. I have an essential oil diffuser in my bedroom and bathroom. I love incorporating tea tree, lavender, peppermint, lemon, bergamot, frankincense, and more into my space and life. I also burn incense and light candles. I find that it’s not only the experience of aroma but the actual lighting of the candle, the actual act of setting fire to the end of an incense stick. These offer quick, quiet moments of settling in, of warmth. When I do these small things as an act of grace towards myself, I am reminded that I deserve those small moments of time and how important it is to take them. I’ve drastically changed my life over the past twenty months. I work out six days a week, and I typically don’t allow disruptions to this routine, even when I travel. I have a personal trainer, which helps tremendously with accountability. Adhering to a regular schedule of giving my body what it needs—cardio, weights, yoga—helps me to stay engaged and channels negative energy from my bones and provides peace and calm as I move through the day. There is also something phenomenal about what regular exercise teaches me about my own body. I find it to be curiously linked to my writing life as well. I can go into the gym with a writing question and often during my workout, an answer comes to me. There is a way that exercise, even when grueling and strenuous, enables me to tap into stillness and inner peace so that I can hear what the work needs. I pray, always. Always.  I also cook as a matter of practice to nourish the soul and to enter into a space of being dazzled by possibility. I grew up in North Louisiana but am also deeply influenced by Creole cuisine and New Orleans foodways because I went to college there. I cook with love, the way my great-grandmother did, with a mind towards deliciousness and wonder, and of course, the pleasure of the first bite. Even if it’s a scrambled egg, I do it with care. I love attempting new recipes, and my son is the best person to cook for because he’s honest, loves my cooking, and will be precise about what he likes and why. Music is an everyday part of my life, but for whom is this not true, I wonder? I make playlists when I’m in a mood or to capture a moment. I’ve made playlists for friends, and I love doing it. If I feel bluesy one day or low energy, I will often create a playlist that speaks to the mood I’m in. I find that curating the experience—choosing the songs, their order, and number—provides healing and clarity, so by the time I listen to the playlist from beginning to end, my mood and my energy have shifted. And don’t let me start dancing, too. Then, I am in a state of joy, bliss, peace. The playlist, in this way, is therapeutic and a conduit for self-love. I create my own haven through the music.  I also listen to the great lyric soprano Leontyne Price when I’m writing, especially if I feel stuck in a scene or line. The absolute majesty of her voice—the absolute impossibility of her range, her daring, and the way I hear God in her voice and every wonder of the world because her voice is a wonder of the world—reminds me that all is possible in art.   If your novel was going to be adapted into a movie, who would you want to cast as the leads?   Can I just say this is the kindest question? Thank you for asking. Viola Davis (Lucille); Mahershala Ali (George); Aunjunue Ellis-Taylor (Nancy); Colman Domingo (Nate); Regina King (Vassiola); Trevante Rhodes (Brown); Niecy Nash (Annette); Letitia Wright (Magdalena, youthful); Angela Bassette (Magdalena, mature); Carey Mulligan (Linda Mayfair, youthful); Kate Winslett (Linda Mayfair, mature). Philip Seymour Hoffman would’ve been divine as James T. Guidry, and I mourn him all over again; what a giant he was, what a meticulous artist who cherished each role and made us feel all the language of possibility and defeat and hunger and love. But Matthew McConaughey comes to mind, too, as Guidry. I’d love to see an emerging, child star cast as Brown as a boy.   What have you been most surprised by in your journey as a writer thus far?   I’ve been met with a generous world. In every city I’ve lived, I’ve found an audience, friends, and supporters, not only interested in current work but future ideas and work, too. I’ve been fortunate that doors have opened to me, and that I’ve been met with the most devoted mentors any woman could ask for at every stage of my life from the time I was a freshman in college until now.   If you were on Who Wants to be a Millionaire , what fictional character would you have on standby as your one “phone a friend” call?   Pilate, of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon ,   because she went everywhere and knew so much about our world and the next. She straddled holy, sacred spaces as well as dead, ancient, living ones. Anyone who can time a perfectly soft-boiled egg and also knows the secret of how to keep a soul alive before it knows it is even a soul is definitely the person I want on standby.   What would you say about Georgia, where you live currently, to someone who has never been?   Georgia is a map of mystery. I live outside Atlanta, so I’m in a more rural part of the state, though I can reach the city in 35 minutes without traffic. There are a few places I’ve traveled and lived where I’ve felt my ancestors deeply: New Orleans, the Gullah Region (Beaufort/St. Helena), Ghana, and Harlem, particularly the rhythms, sounds, and life that is so abundant on 125 th  Street, specifically pre-gentrification. I also feel my ancestors deeply in the part of Georgia where I live. Emory University, where I teach as part of Oxford College—one of Emory’s nine colleges—was built by enslaved persons. Whenever I walk into my classrooms, I’m keenly aware that the historical script for the space of academia did not include me or anyone who looks like me. But here I am. Where I live, I see at least one Confederate decal or flag every two weeks. MAGA country abounds in my part of Georgia. Yet, there are representations of Blackness and Black community all around me. Georgia is a microcosm of the social ills of America, as well as the possibilities that come from being abundantly alive in spite of those who wished you were not there or that their attempts at dominance could dictate the world. I live in defiance of that, and my residence in Georgia is a testament to that.   How can people support you?   What a beautiful question. I believe in faith, manifestation, and what happens when we believe in anything good as a collective, as a community. If people read my work and feel an impact, then I am grateful when they share that experience with their circle, their family, their colleagues and coworkers; this is significant. The world can catch fire in a good way, and why shouldn’t language be at the center? Given the aggressive assault on books that teach us to be more human by seeking to ban them, the fight has begun; it has long been waged. Let language, then, guide us into that next place of liberation, wholeness, and power. If my work can be on the tongues of folk, I am grateful for that. I love meeting new people; giving readings and taking part in public conversations are a part of that. Invite me to come sit with you and yours—whether your team, organization, school, or bookstore. I feel fortunate to be in a position to bring people together through language, stories, and giving specificity to emotions, circumstances, and dynamics that people have experienced but do not have the words for. How many times do we hear that? I don’t have the words.  I’m grateful that as a writer, I can find them—and then share them .   Name another Black woman writer people should follow.   Since I write across genres, is it okay to name more than one? Alexia Arthurs and Dana Johnson (fiction), Nikia Chaney (poetry), and Cassandra Lane (creative nonfiction) ### 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.

Brittany Rogers is a poet, educator, and lifelong Detroiter. She has work published or forthcoming in Prairie Schooner , Apogee , Indiana Review, Four Way Review , Underbelly, Mississippi Review , The Metro Times , “The BreakBeat Poets: Black Girl Magic”, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Lambda Literary, and Oprah Daily . Brittany is a fellow of  VONA, The Watering Hole, Poetry Incubator, and Pink Door Writing Retreat, as well as a 2023 Gilda Snowden Awardee. She is Editor-in-Chief of Muzzle Magazine and co-host of VS Podcast. Her debut collection Good Dress is forthcoming from Tin House Press (October 2024). Learn more about Brittany on her website . Before Uses of The Erotic At a recent keynote speech, I was asked about the first book I read that had an impact on me. I told the audience of teachers and librarians a delightful story about my first introduction to the Junie B. Jones series, declaring my love for her sassy mouth and energy. They laughed and nodded their heads in approval, and internally, I sighed.The answer I gave must have been appropriate enough. Of course, this was not my real answer. Though I do remember enjoying the Junie B. Jones series, what I remember more was my love for romance novels. Not just any romance; the historical novels with white women adorned in fancy gowns on the front cover. Tempt Me at Twilight. Romancing the Duke. Carry Me Away.  I learned this love for cheesy, steamy romance from my grandmother. As a child, I spent a significant amount of time at her house, and she had a book collection that rivaled my school library.  What initially started off as me sneaking off with a book or two then returning it when I thought she wasn’t looking became us laying across her bed, feet up, reading individual copies of the same book together. I know, I know. Most people, and especially most older Black women would not approve of an adolescent Black girl indulging in such texts. My mother always described our preferred literature as smut- nothing more than debauchery, sure to put bad ideas in my head. But my grandmother was the sort to feed me steak, ice cream, and Pepsi for breakfast. She made sure I could change a diaper by the time I was six, taught me how to pee on the side of the road, and was the person who took a look under the hood of my first raggedy hooptie- a red, rusted minivan. I saw her in a skirt twice: once at a wedding and once at a funeral. In high school, she gave me a necklace with a small gold pendant, shaped like a pistol, then scoffed loudly, when weeks later, I told her a boy at school said it made me look un-lady like. It is not that my grandmother did not care about what was ‘appropriate’; she was simply more concerned with what she felt I could handle. As far as she was concerned, I was a miniature version of her- so of course, that meant I could handle anything. *** If I was reading romance novels by eight or nine, I’m sure it is no surprise that in ninth grade I was fully entrenched in the work of Omar Tyree, Sister Soulja, and Eric Jerome Dickey. By this time, I was stealing books from Target and hiding them in boxes beneath the collection of Babysitters Club that my mother had purchased over the years. I was aware by then, of the looks that I received from my teachers when I pulled one of my books out of my bag and began to read once my work was finished. It is the same look they had when I wore a skirt above my knees, or walked with a guy friend in the hallway. A Black girl reading books about romance, sex, or love equated to a Black girl who was having sex. A Black girl who was having sex was promiscuous, a disappointment, ruined. A ruined Black girl is a bad influence on all the other Black girls who actually want to become ladies, mothers, wives.  Occasionally, they would try to set me on a new path by pointing to my intelligence.  “But Brittany, you read so well… did you know your last test scores indicate that you’re reading at a college level? You don’t want to read something more rigorous?  The Coldest Winter Ever  won’t be on the AP Exam. A bright young lady like yourself should be reading more ‘appropriate’ texts. The Color Purple , for example.  A Lesson Before Dying . Maybe even I Know Why The Caged Birds Sing .” I stopped informing my teachers that I adored those texts as well when I realized that their fear wasn’t really about my perceived lack of exposure to the classics. I continued to read my books quietly at my desk, pretending not to know what they thought of me. Still, I found it ironic that they were comfortable with me reading about rape and divorce and lynching and poverty , but were horrified about me being subjected to pleasure.  *** This is where I admit that by 9th grade, I certainly knew what sex was. That I knew the mechanics of intercourse before that first romance novel was in my hand. At 9, my mother found a raunchy note, offering love and oral sex to my crush Byron, in the pockets of my uniform pants. At thirteen, I was banned from my father’s house for kissing the boy down the street in his garage, while my little sister failed at playing lookout. In 11th grade, gossip ran a majorette out of school for doing far less than what I had enjoyed doing countless times already. Only some of this is because of that family friend, too old and aggressive to say no to.  I don’t talk about those years often. There is no point outside of therapy, and even then —have you ever tried explaining that everything is not a response to trauma? Not acting out, or a cry for help, or a lack of, or too much off. Sometimes the girl, the woman, decides what she wants and pursues it. Believe it or not, she gets to choose. *** I graduated high school and went to a college so close that I caught a bus home, and went to the mall on the weekends. In those first two years, I was given British literature. American literature. Shakespearean literature. A contemporary poetry class with a professor who didn't quite understand what contemporary meant. I earned an A in each course, but still managed to disappoint my professors, who somehow expected my eyes to light up in class discussions after reading  A   Tale of Two Cities , Othello , and Scarlet Letter . I got married. Got pregnant. Got divorced. Moved back to my city, and spent a year sleeping on my grandmother's couch. Now, when I snuck in her room and laid across her bed, I had my own book selection- mostly borrowed from the library up the way. Now, we talked about our spicy characters and their wild, forbidden loves as if we were gossiping about our noisy neighbors. Can you believe she left him for? You think those two will end up together? How long before they realize?  Once, I lost my library card and was forced to use a friends’ instead. My least favorite librarian worked at the branch I preferred visiting the most. They received a new supply of urban fiction once a week, and was the only library on any of my bus routes with a separate section for erotic novels and romance. When my least favorite librarian realized I was checking out books each week under a false identity, she made me return the stack that nearly touched my shoulders, as she muttered that I seemed too young to have that type of literature anyway. Small as it was, I remember venting to my granny afterwards, crying about how I couldn't keep anything. In that season of much hardship and little joy, nothing felt more true than my belief that I would never again have my own anything , not even the tiny bliss of reading a raunchy story, just because I wanted to.When I came home from class the next day, my grandmother surprised me at the door, her shoes and denim jacket already on. Asked me to run her up to my favorite library. When we got there, she told me to point out the books I wanted, using the same tone as when she would pick me up from school, in the 5th grade,  and make me point out the kids who talked shit about my too dark skin, too small breasts, my too much mouth, and not enough shame. Once her hands were full, she took the stack of the latest Zane and Ashley Antoinette novels to the counter. When that gatekeeping librarian asked my grandmother if those books were hers, she proudly exclaimed that she couldn’t wait to read them, then passed them to me as soon as we got out the door.  *** I was wrong then, but like most 20 year olds, of course I didn’t know it yet. I wasn’t able to keep the things that were no good for me. That first husband. A raggedy apartment. The job that made me work too many hours, then scammed me out of my pay.  What I did have, I had in abundance. My autonomy. The audacity to know what I desired, and the confidence to make my requests loudly and detailed. The peace of having no one to answer to. Moreover, I had a grandmother who spent my whole life teaching me to define myself on my terms, who loved me so much, she would lie to make sure I had a small spark of pleasure.  ### 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.