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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.

Jacinda Townsend is the author of the forthcoming Trigger Warning (Graywolf, 2025) and Mother Country (Graywolf, 2022), winner of the 2023 Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Her first novel, Saint Monkey (Norton, 2014), winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction, was an Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Jacinda teaches in the MFA program at Brown University. Follow Jacinda on her website . Trigger Warning (an excerpt) Homeowning had been Ruth’s idea, conceived almost the minute she became pregnant: it had taken her only one bout of morning sickness to start resenting the plant-infested bungalow they were renting, to start reminding him how impossible it was to heat the house’s back rooms. To start pronouncing its lone full bath as too small and old-fashioned for the magnitude of what was happening to her body. They were flushing money down the toilet twelve different ways, she argued, lining the landlady’s pockets ahead of their own. It had taken them a couple more years to piece together a down payment, but in that time, Myron took on Ruth’s American dream as his own, perking his ears at interest rate dips, covertly eyeing the real estate circulars he found in the supermarket. He was surprised, then, to feel a bachelor’s lack of regret at watching his house burn. A neighbor, Walt Meyers, pushed his wife to the sidewalk in her wheelchair to watch the fire just as something deep in the living room caterwauled before exploding. Walt stopped her abruptly yet no part of her body lurched forward: Myron found that his anima, too, stayed parked in neutral. His sensibilities, as the roof crashed to the foundation, fell to clinical analysis: he was intrigued at the idea of the power drill in his garage becoming hot enough to melt, and wondered at the thought that flames must, at that very moment, have been shooting out of the splintered screen of his plasma television. Yet even if he himself failed to be moved to regret about the loss of the house–the French doors they’d had installed between living and dining rooms, the crown mouldings that had sold Ruth on the house in the first place–there was Enix. How sorry he was for them now, and how worried for their mind. They’d watched the fire with a look of puzzled wonder on their face, their mouth slightly ajar, the glow of the sodium street light glinting off their braces. But when things went irrevocable, when the roof fell, and then the fire truck dragged into their front yard leaving two deep, muddy ruts behind it, Enix turned into a puddle of a child. Six firemen rushed out with two huge, gray nozzles and hooked the truck to the hydrant, and Myron took Enix’s hand. He felt them swoon a little next to him, as though the square of sidewalk they were standing on had sunk into the recently-rained earth. They didn’t cry, but Myron picked up the weight of them as he hadn’t been able to in many years. He let their head sink into the crook of his neck and felt their legs dangling past his knees, felt them spread into a slow smear of emotion that pooled against his own body and made him lightheaded. Their hair was so smoke-filled that he felt strangled. It was to be expected–Enix had been sleeping downstairs, and the fire had come up from the basement. But he found, too, that close to them, a sweet baby smell that could only have been his imagination, a corrupted memory of having held Baby Annie all those years before. Only through Annie did he feel the loss of the house, the death of the kitchen doorframe where they’d penciled notches to mark her jumps in height, the shattering of the patio door where she’d spent so many summer mornings sitting with her back against the glass, eating cereal out of a mug. Already, Enix was traversing two houses and two sets of rules, having to become emotionally ambidextrous, all because he’d chosen the wrong woman, the one most attracted to impermanence. After a string of girlfriends who’d hinted at destination weddings and sent birthday balloons to his dorm, it had blown Myron’s mind, when he first met Ruth, the way she’d excuse herself from his room right after sex, the way she’d leave him waiting for her in restaurants where they’d arranged to meet. Each time she showed up, fifteen minutes, sometimes half an hour late, flashing across his retina in her red curls and faux-fur coat, the relief shot through his brain like a narcotic. She appealed to the lowest part of his self-esteem, he supposed: she quite conspicuously didn’t need him, but she wanted him. Occasionally. Now she’d left him over a joke and she wasn’t coming back, and it turned out that Ruth’s kind of sexy was all wrong, once you were older, with a mailbox full of AARP solicitations and your body transforming into all the things you’d never wanted for it. He’d seen Ruth as a higher order of person, tethered as she was to nothing, but he’d been wrong. It was the solid brown earth, a man needed under his feet. He sat now in the Holiday Inn, eating the tin of honey-coated almonds that had been gifted to him by the sympathetic desk clerk, mindlessly patting his buzzing phone as if it were a baby, as if he could somehow calm its loud insistence. His old friend Anthony Rutherford had heard about his divorce through their grapevine of college classmates. And had come out of the woodwork to say he'd tried to warn him. She played you , Anthony texted him, out of the blue. You never could get that chick in line Nice to hear from you , Myron texted back, then shut down his phone. But when he turned it on again, fifteen minutes later, it buzzed with a parade of messages. My barber’s sending a guy out , began the final series. He hasn’t reopened since COVID, if you can believe. Get yours buzzed too? Come to my house, brother. Myron winced. After all these years. Anthony was still claiming honorary membership in the Black community. But he was one of Myron’s oldest friends. Freshman year of college, Anthony had sat coxswain as Myron rowed through his drinking problems, Anthony restraining Myron’s shoulders on several occasions as he heaved into the toilet on the men’s floor of their dormitory. And then there was the night at a bar on Limestone, when. After Myron won five pool games in a row, a crew of White frat boys had announced they “were gonna beat the shit out of that nigger.” Anthony had intervened, swinging his pool cue like a samurai sword as they advanced, then hoisting himself atop a pool table to sing Frank Sinatra, distracting the entire bar with his two booming verses of “New York, New York” for a long enough time that Myron was able to slip out the front door unnoticed. Even now, Myron could remember run-walking down the street outside the bar, counting out two hundred dollars of Phi Kappa Psi’s money, folding the twenties into his pockets as whistles and applause breached the sound barrier of the bar’s front window. All these twenty-five years later, Anthony had massaged his way into some sort of vice-presidency at UPS. As his star had risen, so had his hairline receded, but Myron supposed that was all the more reason for him to need a regular haircut. Myron cleared the messages, then used his right-hand fingers to drum the beat of “Green Onions” onto his knee. His phone’s wallpaper was a photo of Ruth and Enix when Enix was still Annie: from the left quarter, Ruth smiled sleepily at the world, holding Toddler Annie on her hip in front of the giraffe pen at the Louisville Zoo. Ruth’s sweetness, frozen in perpetuity: hers was the smile of a woman who’d made love to her husband that morning after asking why they didn’t try for a second helping of baby. Myron vividly remembered that morning of sex: it had been celebratory at the same time it had been like fucking someone he didn’t know. He was trying to make another human at the same time he was wondering if a prostitute, at least, might whimper into a couch pillow afterwards and tell him about her abusive stepmother. Not knowing Ruth had been maddening; not knowing what he didn’t even know made him sad. When Annie had first announced themselves as Enix, Ruth had grown impatient with his skipping, old mind, that could wrap itself around Annie’s new pronouns only when it was uncluttered. She herself had been bringing a book called Found in Transition  to bed with her, and the night she finished, she flung it at him before turning over to lie on her side. “How would you like it if someone kept calling you Myrick,” she said. “I mean, really.” He watched her shoulder slide into further relaxation, found the red curls flowing into the mattress, felt choked with emotion. “It’s not intentional,” he said. “My indifference curve on her gender is completely flat. I mean, if this gets Annie equal pay one day at work, I’m happy. I fully support Annie. Enix. Both of them.” “That’s just it,” Ruth had said, miserably. “There’s not a ‘both of them.’ Just an Enix.” He’d taken his mind to the gym then, sat in his office muttering “Enix they them” over and over to himself; he’d taken an empty lemonade bottle and turned it into a pronoun jar, putting a dollar bill in every time he misgendered Enix: the first week, Enix had taken the seventeen dollars and bought themselves a pair of rainbow leg warmers. He’d changed their name in his phone, and added pronouns. “ENIX THEY THEM,” he’d say aloud, each time it popped up. The money Enix collected in the pronoun jar dwindled to nothing, and what then became indelible in his memory was what Ruth had said to him after she threw the book. She’d rolled over in bed, her eyes still closed but the tone of her voice intent. “What if I told you I wasn’t who you think I am. Would you do that to me, Myron? Would you continue to get it wrong on purpose? What if I told you everything you knew about me was just a construct?” “Ruth,” he’d said, laughing. He hadn’t then been able to imagine anything as large as not knowing his own wife, not grasping her true mind. “Ruth come on. But you’d never do that.” She’d turned back over, he remembered, but then rose from bed, put on a hoodie, and gone downstairs, where he found her, thirty minutes later, sitting on the couch, finishing off an entire bag of potato chips. “Come on, Ruth,” he’d said gently. He descended to the bottom stair. “Come back to bed.” “Later,” she told him. “I’m thinking. I’m thinking hard.” Reticence hung constantly about Ruth, like bar smoke; hers was a love that could never bring them closer. Now, with Anthony’s chiding reverberating through his frontal lobe, Myron changed his phone’s wallpaper from Annie and Ruth to a different photo, one of Annie alone, pitching him a softball. The phone rang. It was a tone he’d coded in jest, the theme music to Jaws. This meant it was Anthony. “Hey,” he said, regret quieting his voice. “The guy’s coming in a couple of hours. Best my man could do on short notice.” “Oh, I’m close to you, anyway,” Myron found himself saying. “At the Holiday Inn on Hurstborne.” “Boy, what you doing at the–“ “My house burned down. I’m wearing clothes from the Salvation Army.” “Brother, what?” “Yeah. Down to the ground. Everything gone. Poof.” “You know you can stay here if you need.” “Lined up for an apartment already,” Myron lied. “I’m fine.” “Well, listen. You got a lot going on, but it’s not gonna help, walking around with some jungle afro. You gonna make it over?” “Yeah,” Myron said, aware that he was adopting Anthony’s phony New York accent. Neither man had ever lived outside the state of Kentucky but when Anthony turned it on, it spread like an infection. Myron wondered if he was in any shape to throw up all the resistance he’d need to sit in Anthony’s presence. When he arrived, he found Anthony sitting in his living room, an old boxing match roaring from his television. Anthony sat Myron down and shushed him, throwing his hands to the screen in supplication. Fury downed Wilder, the referee raised his arm in victory, and Anthony took his remote and switched off the screen. He sat upright on his sofa and sucked in his paunch, a move he’d crafted to smoothness in middle age. “So listen,” he said. “You’re homeless. I get it. But how’s your love life? You back on the market yet?” “Nope. There’s no one. You?” Anthony held out a hand and closed his eyes in the gesture that historically indicated he had a long story. He disappeared into his kitchen, came back with two tumblers of ice and a bottle of Woodford Reserve. He poured, dramatically. Said, “I was fucking this sister–“ “You were fucking your sister?” “A sister. A Black chick. I was fucking this sister but I could never figure out where she was and she’d never call me back, so I just started sitting around at night, smoking a lot of weed, drinking…” “You still messed up about her?” “Nah. When I finally caught up with her, she was living with her moms. And the mom was a real manhater, you know, that type. Real piece a work.” Habitually, Anthony presented Myron with the conversational impossibility of giving what he had just taken. Myron looked glumly down into his lap. “Sounds like you’re better off without her,” he said. “I dunno. It’s been six months and I feel like I’ll never find anybody again.” “You will. You’ll find someone as many times as you need to.” Anthony laughed, but it was the laugh of a dead man, a man who’d poured his life into the mold of a corporate ladder and watched it come away yet unformed. Myron watched his Bourbon sweat through his glass, its malaise seeping out into the ether. When the doorbell rang, it was a relief. The barber’s guy turned out to be a young woman whose mouth pursed disdainfully, in a way so beautiful it defied belief. Anthony paraded her into the living room, downed his drink, then poured a third. “Look at this work of art,” he said, still standing next to her. “What’s your name, sweetheart?” He leaned over her to look at the gold-plated script of her necklace, then answered his own question: “Marina.” “Yup,” she said, pursing her lips into an even angrier heart, one dense enough to pulse. “Marina all day.” “Marina,” said Anthony. “That means you got a boat somewhere?” “No. It means I’m Portuguese.” Myron could see the mump of her tongue, placed angrily into her own cheek. Her irritation was exquisite; it floated above the entire city. “Portuguese,” Anthony said. “I wouldn’t a guessed that. You ever been to Rhode Island? Lots of Portuguese up there. But they’re really all from this one little island. Government relocation.” “Never been to Rhode Island I just came to cut your hair,” she said. She glared at Myron. He felt falsely indicted. Marina was no longer floating anywhere: the exchange had settled back into a real world of sexual harassment and dirty old men. Marina cut both their heads and went away, taking with her a fifty-dollar tip on two fifteen-dollar haircuts. Myron thought of Twitter hashtags. #MeToo. He felt his heart contract. “Mah,” Anthony said, as he closed the door behind her. “You can’t find true love unless you’re stationed in the army.” Myron heard, in Anthony’s affectation, the deep misery of his trying to make a way in a world where both women and understanding were routinely denied him. Myron felt knocked over with grief: there’d be no Ruth to tell all this to when he got home, no Ruth to compare notes with, or bounce his own strange realizations against, forever and ever amen. “Hey you know,” Anthony said conspiratorially, in the exact way of Corleone, “you ain’t the only person from the class of ’01 getting a divorce.” “I’m sure I’m not. Statistically speaking, sixty percent of the country and I are getting a divorce.” “Be serious,” Anthony said, pouring more Bourbon, pitching the tumbler to the back of his throat. “You remember Paulina Wray? “Paulina. Hnnnh. Paulina. Paulina…” Paulina Wray walked across his mind suddenly, as if put there by a bolt of lightning. “Paulina! What happened?” “Who knows. Maybe Danny Todd turned out to be a shithead just like the rest of us.” Paulina Wray had been holding her Bible the last time Myron saw her. He’d known her as a freshman on the women’s floor of their dormitory–she’d come to UK all the way from Trigg County, and risen quickly through some mysterious, churchy ranks to lead the campus homeless outreach ministry. Paulina hadn’t been the prettiest girl in their class: she was short, almost neckless, and wore her purse slung across her body like a bandolier. But Paulina, with her religious fervor, was the most unachievable woman they knew, and thus the most consistently noticeable. Danny Todd, goofy, smelly Danny Todd, with his Tetris addiction and his hobby of intentionally gluing the men’s bathroom door shut, had set out like a conquistador. He joined Paulina’s outreach, wrapping 200 individual care packages for the homeless in one rainy Lexington weekend. Danny lodged his way into Paulina’s heart that month and stayed there: they were married sophomore year of college. She was into permanence, Paulina was. Kingdom living. Eternity. She was a woman Myron should have chosen all those years ago. At the very least, with both their marriages imploding and his house burned down, Myron guessed Paulina might have an intact flat screen television. “I’ve got her phone number,” Anthony whispered, looking around his own house as if it were a crowded bar. He removed his phone from his pocket and rotated it in the air. Once, twice. “Just for you, my man, I’ve got her number.” “What are you doing with her number?” “We actually do business,” Anthony said satisfaction edging his voice. “Stites and Harbison is one of our local firms. How about that.” “So why haven’t you  called her?” “Paulina would never go out with a white guy. She ain’t one a those. She doesn’t swirl.” “Well.” Myron reached into his jacket pocket and put his phone on the coffee table between them. He wondered idly whether Paulina and Danny had ever gotten around to having children. He and Ruth had started late with Enix, but Paulina’s children, if she had any, might be college-aged themselves by now. Out of his way. He imagined Paulina home alone, Danny Todd’s abandoned power drill hanging from a hook in her garage. “Sure,” he told Anthony. “Put her number in. I’ll call her. Maybe.” “Hey. No pressure. No skin off my nose, either way.” Anthony scrolled through his phone, then peered down and input digits into Myron’s. “I’m just trying to help a brother out. But remember–if you don’t call Paulina? Someone else will. You ain’t seen her lately, but that piece won’t stay on the market long.” Myron took his phone back and noted the time. “Hey. My man. I gotta get going.” He’d almost called him brother. At the door both men hugged, clapping each other on the backs in unison. A gesture, Myron thought, leftover from the time of apes. Back at the Holiday Inn, in his houseless, hotel-room future. Myron passed the front desk, noted a besuited man whose puckered, unbuttoned shirt collar spoke of a tie that was no longer there. The man was just standing there, at reception, in a pair of earbuds, and he tapped the toe of his shoe against the floor in some sort of rock/pop time, leather metronome. Myron veered away to put six feet between them but still he heard the man whisper. “Home stretch home stretch home stretch,” the man said, as if chanting it into the dusty hotel lobby might propel him all the way there. ### 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.

Yona Harvey is an acclaimed poet and professor. Winner of the 2014 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, her poetry collections include Hemming the Water and You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love. She is also an author of Marvel Comics' World of Wakanda , becoming one of the first two black women to write for Marvel. Yona Harvey is the author of You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love , winner of The Believer  Book Award in Poetry, and Hemming the Water , winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.  Her poems have been published in various journals and anthologies including Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, The Best American Poetry , Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing,  and A Poet’s Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry .  Follow Yona on her website . P.S. Your little dog is miserable Beauty is bigger than The Cold but The Cold is gaining. “The whole story,” she claimed, I didn’t tell it. “He said, she said,” something like that.  “Tele-,” K. used to call across The Yard. “Phones,” O. would answer. Hot dogs are not a vegetable… When wounded, the eyes can hear…  There were no ghosts in the words I left Miss Thang to measure. Only a predictable human hurt. On some: loose black earth, a trail  of highbrow rubbish— I refused— a few bones unburied near it. Sin, Say In this now moment, the persistent gnats persist, the ones who found a hidden home in the kitchen, in the bedroom, in the study, in the living room though oddly not the bath have found a way to survive the winter zipping by in the radiated heat barely making a mark if the thumb presses down and pins them low, flat-splat on the white kitchen table where sometimes you wonder what sin means except sin is not the right word because you don’t believe in sin and all the heavy sin weight the word brings in this now moment and the thousands of moments before now, such tiny beings, these gnats. You don’t want bugs up your nose, or in your mouth or hovering above your dinner plate and therefore you don’t flinch at all when you clasp your hands and trap what feels like the millionth gnat this month—black smear, feather-shadow stain, barely a stain, not even a stain at all, just a silent nuisance that once hovered over a half-squeezed lemon, a half-ripened banana, seriously what do they even want, what do they even need? You’ve let all the potted plants dry out, dried the sink, left no dishes or containers of standing water. You want these gnats turned to spider food for the spiders you’ve spared, the ones sleeping, napping in their undisturbed corners, maybe slow-leg hustling if you accidentally brush their webs. What’s a gnat’s worth? How does something so small become so annoying? How does something so small move so fast? If you were to discover that gnats bred in clothing and furry blankets, in the threads of tea towels and cloth napkins spreading disease could you kill them even quicker, even more thoughtlessly? Three monks wave from the balcony of your discontent, the ochre sway of their robes mimics a modest flag or the slow arrival of ghosts, the ones born at sunset on the other side of their human lives. There are words you feel you have no right to speak, no right to write and so you skim them over in your mind more swiftly than a glance at a WhatsApp message you hardly want to read, you’ve silenced your notifications, which says as much but suddenly at 8:00 AM, there’s a swarm of texts from The Fly Girls or your maternal family “keeping in touch,” swish, quake, buzz motions wanting to show love. But mostly you feel mushy and rotten and maybe messed over like a half-eaten apple tilted near a dishpan free of water. When compared to the priest reincarnated as fairy, the ghost has the upper hand, you suspect. But the fairy has the upper hand over the frog, hidden out there in the low grasses, hoping someone hears its cigarette tinged ribbit, ribbit . You have no right to declare such a thing, but you declare it anyway, the way a three-toothed, Louisiana palm reader might say it with limited grace, hell, no grace at all, without apology, with all the manners opposite of a Rotary Club member or a Mason. The grooves between teeth filled with smirk and the lingering of a decisive and deadly tongue. For Kiki, High School Class of 1985 Ain’t nothing Jesse Johnson’s Revue gon change, even if Jesse jams about changes. The band banging those electronic drums. Those shiny curls. Those knees bent  then snapping back straight as a guitar handle What of the sigh?     What of the sound?  She questions herself    on an eastbound train. She never 80s-pined for light skin Tho she once wanted   her hair to swing Little Lady of the Midwest versus Little Woman on the Prairie. No cap. Correcti on. No worries. She’s grown now   with new books cradled at her chest. She feel s like going on now. She knows she’s be en a mess that she has been made messy. The Subjunctive There are more plastic flamingos in America than real ones. But who cares about the real? “If I were you,” a politician whispers, “I’d lie low a minute.”  In Tampa, a tenth-grade teacher’s lipstick slips from her purse. It’s one of those drawstring numbers, cheap & insecure as a rumor rolling across the gymnasium floor.  “If I were you,” one student says to another, “I’d watch my back.” Cheerleaders & pom-poms shake like some future virus. Anyone heard of a Deep Listening?  The place where we might sit in a measured manner, palms still, hearts calm & camphor clean & undistracted? Flamingos in the wild have lifespans of twenty to thirty years. Plastic bobs in the ocean forever.  If I were you, I’d be worried. A caught politician seems a great catch, an ideal presidential candidate.  THE INTERVIEW This interview was conducted between Yona Harvey and Jae Nichelle on March 31, 2024. In your poem “For Kiki, High School Class of 1985” there’s the line “she questions herself on an eastbound/ train.” Questions—either seemingly rhetorical or that the speaker seeks the answer to—are pervasive in these four poems. Do you enter the worlds of your poems with questions? Do you feel the need to find answers? Oh, for sure. Yeah. As long as I can remember, people—especially adults—baffled me with their behaviors, especially their behaviors contradicting their words. Questioning led me to art and writing to cope and make sense of the world. I don’t think I need to find answers all the time, at least not in a literal sense. The satisfaction is in the seeking. And as far as questioning yourself goes, after a while you just have to trust and decide, take action. Even if that decision might be wrong. When you’re young (graduating, transitioning, whatever) that can be difficult. You don’t want to be judged or ostracized. You doubt yourself.  I was trying to remember what that felt like through writing this poem. Also, shout out to my undergraduate Introduction to Poetry class at Saint Mary’s College of California last spring!  Camila Krenn invented the rules for this “Graduation” form. You mentioned in a recent McSweeney’s interview  that the poems in your previous collections, Hemming the Water and You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love have “a restless thinking behind them.” Would you say the same about your upcoming writing projects? How would you describe the thinking behind what you’re working on now? Wow, thanks for that question.  I wouldn’t say the same about my upcoming writing projects. I mean, the thinking is always there. But the restlessness of my previous work had a kind of anxiety attached to it (if I’m remembering that McSweeney’s response correctly). So much uncertainty—about relationships, parenting/mothering, teaching, art making, about my basic human needs, you name it. Hemming  was published in 2013 and Mars  in 2020. In 2013 I started meditation training to deal with what felt like unbearable stress. But I had all these wrong perceptions about meditation—that it was supposed to be peaceful, that I would suddenly feel or be peaceful, that my life and relationships would instantly be improved. And so, I was shocked when I sat down to meditate in those early months and years and felt pure, unmitigated rage. On the regular. I was like WTF is this?! One of my teachers explained that it was the stress melting away. But what was I supposed to do with that? Needless to say, it was a bumpy, uncomfortable journey. And I’m grateful for all that struggle and restlessness because it led me to better decision-making. When the Covid lockdowns came, I accelerated in making tough choices. Toxic relationships, jobs, communications, habits of consumption (food, alcohol, media, social media)  had to end. Best decisions I ever made.  And that ushered in the new work. The thinking behind what I’m working on now is more solid and free.  What has surprised you most about your experience in the Marvel world, having written for Marvel Comics? The Marvel fans surprised me most during my Marvel writing experience. Writing for Marvel puts you in conversation with such diverse readers!  You’re just nerding out all the time.  Folks are so joyful about their favorite characters, favorite runs, or—if they’re older— their memories of collecting before some parent made them trash their comics in the mode of “put away childish things.” But that’s also a misperception—that comics are for kids.  Sigh. Speaking of Marvel, I so love how you mentioned in The Rumpus  in 2017 that writing comics has connected you to a greater audience of Black women. In general, as a writer, when did you first start thinking about audience? Yeah! Well, generally speaking, Black women are very well-read. In the United States, we’re the most overlooked group because some folks can’t imagine us beyond their limiting stereotypes. Of course, it’s important to “be seen,” as is repeated ad nauseam these days. And I’d trouble the waters by saying not being seen also gives us incredible imaginative flexibility. Creativity and ingenuity off the charts. My God. Racism has no imagination. My ideal audience recognizes the hilarity and razor’s edge in that. So as a Black woman, I feel light years beyond the enemy lol. Troubling the water more: I’ve always been seen by the people who love me most. People who don’t show love? Please keep it moving. Don’t see me. Leave me the fuck alone. I definitely credit writing for Marvel as a moment when I began thinking about audience on a more complex (larger?) scale. And before that, Howard University. Because from semester one you’re reading all these incredible black authors—like, in every class—and having these nuanced and revelatory conversations about audience and the disregard for “explaining” yourself to white audiences. That’s power. In an alternate universe where you have one superpower that you can only activate once a month, what would you want that power to be and what would you use it for? This is tough to answer!  My son and I have this ongoing joke about teleporting whenever we haven’t managed our time well or feel a time crunch (we stay procrastinating). So, I’d say teleporting. Getting somewhere far in a hurry. I’d use it to be with my friends and family as soon as they need me. No train, plane, or automobile required. You’re in Massachusetts now, right? Have you come across any hidden gem spots you can recommend?  Yep.  I’m in Northampton. Hidden gems (or probably not-so-hidden gems because I’m still a newbie!): Smith College’s Neilson Library rooftop (beautiful); the walking trail around the Paradise Pond; the scenic drive to MassMoCA and MassMoCA itself; Montague Books and the surrounding area (river, farm stands, book stands, a blue Tardis!!); the W.E.B. DuBois Library and Center at UMass Amherst.  The vegan eats at PULSE—the Southern Comfort Bowl (like, whose grandmama did they steal the collards recipe from?). But let me not instigate. On top of everything else, you’re also leading Cave Canem’s Cultural Preservation Project. What aspect of this project are you most looking forward to? I’m most looking forward to people—everyday people—accessing those incredible recordings! It’s gonna sound cliché, but those conversations capture the heart of Cave Canem, its soul origins—as a feeling, as a need, as a balm—which is different from an institution. How can people support you right now? If there’s a burning question about writing, the writing life, or whatever you’d like me to think through with you, contact me!  I’ll make a point to address it personally or in my newsletter. This also forces me to recommit to that damn newsletter. The procrastination is real. In the meantime, ask a Black woman in your life how you can support her.  And then do it!  It will have a healing, rippling effect on us all.   Name another Black woman writer people should follow.  There are so many!  For starters tho: Gabrielle Rucker and Jalynn Harris. Complicated, devilish, progressive. Community builders. Community givers. Change-makers. They will lead you to more. ### 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.

Adrienne Dawes (she/her/hers) is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter, and teaching artist originally from Austin, TX. Her plays, including AM I WHITE, TEEN DAD, and THIS BITCH: ESTA SANGRE QUIERO, have been developed/ produced by Salvage Vanguard Theater, Theatre Bedlam, New Harmony Project, The Fire This Time Festival, Theatre Lab at FAU, Queen City New Play Initiative, Stages Repertory Theatre, Teatro Milagro, National Black Theatre, and English Theatre Berlin, among others.  Adrienne received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and studied sketch & improv at the Second City Training Center in Chicago. Recent honors include: Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Alice Judson Hayes Fellow at Ragdale Foundation, and artist residencies with Colt Coeur, PlySpace, & Crosstown Arts. Just before the strike, Adrienne staffed on her first TV show, working on a limited series for Hulu/ABC Signature (EP: Ellen Pompeo). She's easy to find online at www.adriennedawes.com and @heckleher on most social mediums. Future is F***** CAST (3) RONNIE: (20s/F or femme person, Black) programmer/hacker MARGARET: (20s/F or femme person, Non-White) VP of Human Resources, nervous energy/ also a training assistant named Xaria (pron. Zarr-ee-ah) CENAC: (early 20s/M, White) an intern bro, completely mediocre yet exudes an outrageously eerie excess of confidence ALSO: prerecorded COMPUTER VOICE performed by either Ronnie or Margaret. SETTING The future. A government tech bro office. Lights rise on a futuristic government co-working space. Ronnie sits at her desk, frowning at what looks like a personal device of some kind. RONNIE (quietly, into device) System entry. System entry. (louder) System ENTRY. With a few keystrokes, she tries another setting. RONNIE (soothing voice) Please: system entry. As Margaret enters with her lunch leftovers, Ronnie tries to hide the device under her desk. MARGARET Hey is this - - RONNIE Oh, I just, sorry - - MARGARET No, I’m sorry, lunch break. Just trying to find an open desk - - RONNIE No, it’s fine, I’m, I’m- - MARGARET Ronnie, right? RONNIE Ronnie. Yeah. And you’re - - MARGARET Margaret. HR. Thanks for letting me sit here! They replaced my entire staff last week and I uh don’t think the new guys like me very much. Margaret awkwardly chuckles. Ronnie continues working on her device. MARGARET What’re you working on? RONNIE New program. MARGARET New program? Doesn’t look like our interface - - RONNIE It’s not, it’s – this isn’t for work - - MARGARET (laughs, awkwardly) Oh no, I didn’t mean like stern voice , “Why aren’t you working Ronnie” - - RONNIE Yeah, cause it’s a personal device, private hotspot - - MARGARET Yeah, your own private personal lunch so you work on whatever you want! Or don’t work! Totally you, your - - RONNIE Margaret – we cool. MARGARET (relieved) Oh, thank God, thank you. I’m . . . kind of on edge all day. Every day. Barely sleep or eat. This is – I just bought an entire meal? Don’t know why I still – my lunch hour – I think I just go to be someplace else to be for an hour. Are you, would you want my lunch? Do you eat lunch? RONNIE I’m okay. Thanks. MARGARET Thanks, I mean, yeah OK . . . so . . . what does it do? Your program? RONNIE (frowns) Uh nothing yet. Still buggy, I can’t figure out why it’s not - - Cenac enters with an entitled swagger. He carries a bottle of Soylent. Ronnie and Margaret sit up, at attention. Ronnie hides the device under her desk. CENAC Oh here you both are. Together. RONNIE Cenac. CENAC Ronald. Just got back from a two-hour lunch with Geographic Operations - - RONNIE (dumbfounded) Two hour lunch - - ? CENAC I’m speaking . And apparently, there’s been some complaints about my “work behavior,” which is hilarious because - - MARGARET Allegations are actually quite serious - - CENAC Margaret , doesn’t concern you - - MARGARET Uh, I’m VP of Human Resources - - ? CENAC And I’m an intern who will probably run this division one day. Margaret’s eyes widen. Cenac leans in, way too close to Ronnie. CENAC So Ronald, what is it about me, exactly , that you find so inappropriate ? RONNIE (calmly) Well first, my name’s not Ronald. It’s Ronnie. It’s on my department profile, digital signature - - CENAC Allegedly - - RONNIE Not alleged, actual fact. My name is Ronnie - - CENAC Well, I guess that’s not a name I “recognize.” RONNIE Yeah, well, all I’m asking is that you remain courteous and civil - - CENAC That’s not an ideology I “represent.” RONNIE I know, Cenac . And I’ve been trying to figure out some way to . . . translate . And closest thing I can think is: the way you treat Chad, Blake, Garrett, Other Garrett - - CENAC They’re executive staff - - RONNIE So am I . I deserve the same consideration, same respect. Does that make sense ? CENAC (frowns) I dunno, I think if you continue to suppress my expression of freedom in the workplace, you’ll be fired. Does that make sense? MARGARET (quietly) You can’t fire her - - CENAC Can’t I, HR? MARGARET She’s head of your department. Technically, she’s your boss. CENAC “Technically,” I’m just a White guy with a Twitter X account. So you’ve both been warned. He exits. The women sigh in relief. Ronnie returns to her device. MARGARET (sighs loudly) God, I’m sorry, that’s not what the agency - - RONNIE Isn’t it? Look around, Margaret. We’re the only ones left. Margaret nods, solemnly. Beat. RONNIE But it’s alright. It’ll be alright. Eventually this will work. (at device) System entry. COMPUTER VOICE (VO) (soothing computer voice) Entry link. RONNIE (excitedly) Alright! Here we go! OK. (to device) Entry link: . . . Solange, A Seat at the Table. COMPUTER VOICE (V.O.) Solange uploaded. MARGARET I don’t understand: it’s an oldies app? RONNIE Not an app. More like a bot. You enter whatever self-care script you want and . . . let me just show you. (to device) Entry link: Rose water. Entry link: Coconut oil for skin and hair. Entry link: Pad See Ew with tofu. Entry link: Rihanna Devotional Prayer Candle. Might as well add, entry link: A$AP Rocky and Rihanna extended wedding playlist - - MARGARET (nods) I was going to say at least ‘Fashion Killer’- ahem ‘Killa?’ Beat. They both stare at the device, waiting. COMPUTER VOICE (VO) . . . Uploaded. RONNIE (relieved sigh) OK! So, let’s say you find yourself in a hostile environment - - MARGARET (nods) All day, every single, all day - - RONNIE (nods) There’s a multi-billion-dollar industry created around the defense of negative stimulus. From outerwear that inflates to create a protective barrier, to wearable technologies that distort the victim’s neural signals, so they have no experience of the attack - - MARGARET Dissoci8. My sister had one for work. She taught critical race theory. Until it got too dangerous. RONNIE (nods) Yes, current technologies can defend or deflect attack, but you have to continually purchase expensive upgrades to remain “functional” meanwhile nothing ever happens to the attacker. The next day they return to the courtroom or the classroom - - MARGARET Or government office - - RONNIE Government office. Yeah. Physical confrontation just continues or - - MARGARET Escalates. RONNIE Exactly. But I’m not building defensive technology, it’s offensive . I don’t want to stun or hurt somebody - - MARGARET We don’t - ?! RONNIE (smiles) I want to rewrite their entire genetic code, so their great grandchildren are born pacifist anarchists with heightened empathetic and collaborative skills - - MARGARET YESSSSSSS!!! Margaret raises a fist, excitedly then quickly recovers. MARGARET I mean yes. Very cool. Yes. And your program, it’d be ready exactly when?!? RONNIE Still testing the entry points. If it works, the victim should remain in a relatively “safe” functioning space, but the attacker would be disarmed completely - - Cenac reenters with what looks like a workplace device. CENAC Uh Ronald? I still don’t have access to the new dashboard. RONNIE Then you need to talk to the Help Desk, Cenac. That’s not my - - Cenac leans in again. CENAC What exactly is your job, then!?! COMPUTER VOICE (VO) Threat detected. Initiate? CENAC What did you say?! Margaret and Ronnie exchange looks. In unison: RONNIE MARGARET I don’t know . . . Uh . . . CENAC You don’t know? You’re department head, I thought you knew everything - - RONNIE I . . . I’m just asking you to follow procedure like everyone else - - ? CENAC When have I ever been everyone else - - He leans in again. Too close. Sound of device activating. MARGARET (softly, to Ronnie) Do it. Initiate. RONNIE Initiate - - ? CENAC What? Ronnie shoots up to her feet. She holds her device held out like a weapon. RONNIE INITIATE! Ronnie’s device suddenly lights up, sound of a soothing R&B music chime. Cenac and Margaret both freeze. Black out. RONNIE (breathing heavily) No! No, no, no! Lights flick back on. Ronnie is seated at her desk, wearing a virtual reality headset. She tries to stand up. Margaret, a training assistant dressed in futuristic business casual, rushes over to help her. MARGARET Ronnie. It’s over. Ssshhh. It’s OK. You’re done. That was amazing - - Margaret pulls off her headset. Ronnie charges forward, pulling out of her reach. RONNIE Where is he?! Where did he go? She falls over, losing control of her legs. Margaret rushes to her side. MARGARET Give yourself a minute. It all feels really real - - RONNIE Margaret? MARGARET Xaria, actually. I’m present in the training module just for narrative support, increased safety, sometimes technical assistance or or - - RONNIE (nods) Xaria, Xaria . . . we cool. MARGARET Cool, cool. Well. You did really well . . . Margaret reviews data on her device. MARGARET Addressed each micro aggressive behavior but maintained a position of authority, which is incredible considering . . . well, everything. But in real life, as you know, they will resort to physical intimidation and violence, so - - Ronnie rolls onto her back, breathing hard. RONNIE I wanted it to be real . . . just to see if my program worked . . . just to see his FACE. MARGARET (grins) Yeah only a programmer would enter VR and try to build an app to disarm generations of violent attackers – clever workaround the non-violence parameters. You’re definitely the woman for this job. Not that it’s a “job” - - Ronnie slowly sits up. RONNIE I want to finish. MARGARET Wait, careful - - RONNIE Put me back in. MARGERET Oh, you don’t have to go through all that again! You passed the basic module - - RONNIE I’m supposed to maintain employment at government agency so that I can hack into their private servers undetected, right? That’s what you’re asking me to do? Months and months of harassment, ridicule; every moment of every day I have to be ready to defend my work, my worth, my physical self? MARGERET Yes. RONNIE Then I have to see this module through to the end. I have to know I can survive. MARGARET Ronnie, are you sure you really want to - - ?! RONNIE I want to be done, done with all of this! Then I’ll remake myself. Build a version that can’t be broken. Ronnie returns to her desk, puts on the VR headset. RONNIE Load it! Margaret loads the next simulation. MARGARET Alright I’ll uh – guess I’ll see you on the other side, Ronnie. RONNIE I’ll see you, Margaret. Xaria. Simulation activates, Ronnie’s body goes limp. Blackout. END OF PLAY. ### 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.

NitaJade is an Affrilachian Poet and a self-proclaimed weirdo hailing from Asheville, NC. NitaJade earned their B.A. in African and African American Studies from Berea College in 2019. In 2022, they earned their MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of Kentucky. During the 2022-2023 academic year, NitaJade served as the Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Centre College. They joined Emory & Henry's faculty as an Assistant Professor of English and co-director of the annual Appalachian Literary Festival in 2023. NitaJade proudly serves as a Narrative Organizer for the Black Appalachian Coalition and as the Vice President of the Kentucky State Poetry Society. They insist that their late O.G. Queen's sweet potato pie epitomizes love. Ultimately, they aspire to embody the aesthetics of sloths and narwhals (slarwhals, if you please.) They laugh loudly and stubbornly. C R O S S F A D E Ancestor visits your sleep   \   asks if you have something to say   \   pauses long enough to hear your answer   \   makes space for you to sit   \   Ancestor challenges your tongue   \   to split in testimony  \\    in waking life   \   when you voice your visitor   \   all your mama hears is  thisisit!   \   her tone insists   \   tellmewhohurtyou!    \   tellme!tellme!tellme!say!   \   call them out and   \   i’ll call away they breath     \\      you can’t remember vividly   \   enough to gamble lives on      \\      yet, you know your molestation(s)   \   the same way you know   \   your names:  one day out the blue   \   they were called on you      \\      syllables swallowed   \   so often   \   you can’t recall   \   the first time   \   you spoke them   \  ( your names    \   not theirs)      \\      your mama needs   \   rescinded-stamped confession   \   your mama needs   \\    un-gulped wine   \   she needs   \   un-inhaled blunt  \   she needs   \   unmarred midnight moon  \   a trick of the light \ illusions of successful safety    \   smoke in mirrors   \   your mama needs erasure      \\      until your tongue reverses  \  or (un)splits  \  she   will   never   stop    \         reaching        \          for   their   names. C R O S S   F A D E Ancestor visits your sleep   \   asks if you have something to say   \   pauses long enough to hear your answer   \   makes space for you to sit   \   Ancestor  challenges your tongue   \   to split in testimony  \\    in waking life   \   when you voice your visitor   \   all your mama hears is  thisisit!   \   her tone insists   \   tellmewhohurtyou!    \   tellme!tellme!tellme!say!   \   call them out and   \   i’ll call away they breath     \\      you can’t remember vividly   \   enough to gamble lives on      \\      yet, you know your mo lest ation(s)   \   the same way you know   \   your names:  one day out the blue   \   they were called on you      \\      syllables swallowed   \   so often   \   you can’t recall   \   the first time   \   you spoke them   \  ( your names    \   not theirs)      \\      your mama needs   \   a rescinded -stamped confession   \   your mama needs   \\    un-gulped   wine   \   she needs   \   un-inhaled blunt  \   she needs   \   unmarred midnight moon  \   a trick of the light \ illusions of successful safety    \   smoke in mirrors    \   your mama needs erasure       \\      until your tongue reverses   \  or (un)splits   \  she   will   never   stop   \          reach ing        \          for    their   names. C R O S S F A D E Ancestor visits your sleep   \   asks if you have something to say   \   pauses long enough to hear your answer   \   makes space for you to sit   \   Ancestor challenges you r tongue   \    to   split in testimony      \\      in waking life   \   when you voice your visitor   \   all your mama hears is   thisisit!   \   her tone insists   \   tellmewhohurtyou!    \   tellme!tellme!tellme!say!   \   call them out and   \   i’ll call away they breath     \\      you can’t remember vividly    \   enough to gamble lives on      \\      yet, you know your molestation(s)   \   the same way you know   \   your names:  one day out the blue   \   they were called on you    \\    syllables swallowed   \   so often   \   you can’t recall   \   the first time   \   you spoke them   \  ( your names    \   not theirs)      \\      your mama needs   \   a rescinded -stamped confession   \   your mama needs   \\    un-gulped wine   \   she needs   \   un-inhale d blunt  \   she needs   \   unmarred midnight  moon  \   a trick of the light \ illusions of successful safety    \   smoke in mirrors   \   your mama needs erasure       \\      un til your tongue reverses   \  or (un)splits   \  she   will   never   stop   \       reaching      \   for   their   names. ### 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.

Photo credit: Katherine Tejada Fatima-Ayan Malika Hirsi is a mother who writes beside forests and waters. She fantasizes about living in Anne Spencer’s garden and she strives to write poems that instigate action in service to world-building. Her work is forthcoming or appears in MAYDAY , Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora , Honey Literary , sin cesar , Elysium Review , Rise Up Review , and other portals. She is a fellow of In Surreal Life, Anaphora Writing Residency, and Pink Door Writing Retreat. Her first full-length collection, DREAMS FOR EARTH , is forthcoming from Deep Vellum Publishing. Travel with her at fatimaayanmalikahirsi.com or on Instagram @fatimaayanmalika. She wants you to scream FREE PALESTINE with your whole body. Tornado Sirens When You Have A Sleeping Baby a singing refrigerator / a baritone front door / the porch door / metal songs of a cabinet door releasing scents of cinnamon coriander cloves  QAnon in school boards / judges robes / Congress  any and all doors ever made / the creaking wood of the floor / silverware on a plate / the fall of Roe v. Wade / the metal top scraping a glass jar of peanut butter / baby birds nesting outside the chimney / a sneeze / a neighbor mowing or blowing leaves / a neighbor parking / Juno barking / the taste of sepia smoke swallowing sky / the kitchen faucet / the toilet flushing / a mouse exploring the kitchen / some rodent reading in the walls / sudden jitterbug of a fly / a phone you thought was set to quiet / a phone falling off the bed / fingernails scratching your head / the fall of affirmative action / Proud Boys / Women Talking / truths behind horrifying fictions / horrifying truths collections of collective griefs the gasp during that first new episode of Black Mirror where FATIMA  appears across the screen in Netflix Graphique / terms and conditions each time we sign / and haven’t they been doing this since forever / make it look like a choice / contracts in unknown languages / listen to them tell us to recycle as if in that lies our redemption / Google recycle plants near me  then find maps of race and wealth / this / everywhere / ours is the air they poison Cop City / 61 protestors indicted for waging love / SB 63 come to stomp on mutual aid your landlord bowling above in his living room / your shriek at reading news / silence about genocide from tiny town neighbors / this silence is a tornado siren / what is this world I give my daughter / what is this world / what is this world she wakes to each day / sirens everywhere ### 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.