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Shams Alkamil is a Black Muslim poet. Alkamil began writing as a mode of self-expression to then being twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut book West 24th Street highlights the anchor a location has on lived experiences. Alkamil speaks of her struggles with queerness, self-love, and the Black immigrant experience. Her second book When Time is Circular was published in June 2024. When not writing, Alkamil spends her time as a local educator in Austin, Texas. Alkamil's work has appeared internationally in Mizna , Ebony Tomatoes Collective ,  The Ana , Ruth Weiss Foundation , Tofu Ink Arts Press , WriterCon , Poet’s Choice , and more. Love you. Wish I could have your cancer.  after Gabrielle Calvocoressi Got your diagnosis Monday afternoon. Heard it during 8th  block. Did not cry on the line. Would love to open your  eyes. Force tears to fall. Will you stop pretending? Strong  isn’t your best color. Washes you out. Love you. Wish I  could have your cancer. Do not care if I’m already  immunocompromised. Fuck thyroid. Don’t even know who  Hashimoto is. Don’t care. Would be honored to keep you  alive. Wish I could feed you during chemo. Maybe ginseng  candy. Or zero-alcohol beer. No ice chips. Too cliché.  Whatever makes you smile. Wish I knew what makes you  smile. Wish you could tell me. Love you. Can’t bring myself  to touch your chemo port. Wish I was smarter. Invent a  new seatbelt. Would finally stop grazing your port. Less  wailing. More time to focus on the road. Wish I knew how.  Miss fighting with you. Shout  Stop texting and driving .  Wish you could say  I am your mother . One more time. Who  knew it was the last time? Miss you. Wish it was Stage 1.  Would hate you less. Why did you ignore it for so long?.  Know you were preoccupied. Wish he argued less. Could  help you notice sooner. I’ll visit the doctor tomorrow.  Declare I am you. You are no one. Open my chest bare. Say  Cut them off ! Stare at Death in the corner. Lose staring  contest. Bargain him ginseng candy. Or forgiveness. Say  Leave her alone . Love you. Wish you could say it back. Not  later. Wearing no oxygen mask. No painful gasps between  words. Wish you could tell me. How less of a woman you  feel. Wish I knew how to respond back. Would keep quiet  instead. Love you. Wish I could have your cancer. ### 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.

Natiesha Evans is an emerging writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work, which includes poetry, essays, and short stories, explores themes such as the complexities of relationships, the bittersweet nature of memories, and her life experiences  as a Black, “geriatric” millennial woman that are filtered through the lens of anxiety and bipolar disorders.  She is a candidate for an MFA in Creative Writing from the Writer's Foundry at St. Joseph's University. When not writing, she listens to her favorite podcasts, enjoys aimless walks in museums around the city, and finds calm in the strange and deep world of true crime stories. When Your Bully Makes Your Bed I. One night, I tapped the lukewarm radiator pole in my bedroom. I’m certain it was at the beginning of fall because the pole was only warm to the touch and not as hot as it could get to fully melt crayons. That kind of heat was reserved for 4 p.m. sunsets and three blanket cold nights. I tapped it with a key, disturbing the flaky fish scale white paint chips, and watched them fall quietly onto my cream-colored carpet, as they always did, but usually unprovoked. I listened intently through the spacing connecting her ceiling to my floor and could hear Tracy’s frightened outward cries and her inward ones, too, the ones her grandmother did not—that came between each whoosh of her belt and the pop of Tracy’s skin against it.  I hear you. It will be over soon. Tap. Tap tap. Tap. I often wondered if she could hear me the way I heard her.     She did.   Once. Tap. II. I promised myself that I would throw my blue porcelain lamp into the wall right outside my bedroom, and I’d wait for your heavy footsteps to pound against the worn, brown carpet that extended to the threshold of my door, where my rage would meet you. I’d welcome your punches, your bitches,  and hair pulls with punches of my own.  I’d fight for my life if it meant humbling you. I’d fight for my life if it meant humbling you. Why did my innocence and my joy offend you? You bathed in a tub of the voices in your head and I’d clean it. The white powdered comet cleaner would turn blue as I washed away your guilt. Your happiness scared me,  and your anger was familiar. You curled your hair in a broken mirror Tracks were laid, but there was no train coming for you. III. My therapist pointed out that in the moments that find me in pure panic— when my heart is pounding heavily against the bars of my ribcage like a kidnapped animal fighting to be released from its captors when my breathing is deep and my lungs are touching my spine  when my eyes  dart  around  looking for help  when I purposely place my body in full view so that if I died someone would see me or they’d hear the thud of my body when I fall next to a flower bed with a small laminated sign typed in a 40-point Arial font that reads: Please Curb Your Dog  placed neatly in the dirt and someone would rush over to me and work frantically to help me; check my pulse, and break my ribs in an effort to free my heart —take deep breaths. And imagine myself on a beach, faced up on one of those foldable white plastic beach chairs, eyes closed (the sun glowing red beneath my eyelids), listening to the waves of the warm water that I just waded in waist-deep push against the rocks off to the side, near where I’d seen seaweed and jellied remains of jellyfish. ### 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.

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is the award-winning author of Big Girl , Blue Talk and Love , and The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora. Mecca Jamilah Sullivan,  Ph.D., is the author of the novel Big Girl , a New York Times Editors’ Choice and winner of the 2023 Next Generation Indie Book Award for First Novel and the Balcones Fiction Prize. Her previous books are the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love , winner of the 2018 Judith Markowitz Award for LGBTQ Writers, and The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association. In her writing, she explores the links between language, imagination, and bodily life in Black queer and feminist experiences. Her stories and essays have appeared in Best New Writing, The Kenyon Review, Callaloo, Feminist Studies, American Fiction, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, TriQuarterly, GLQ: Lesbian and Gay Studies Quarterly, American Literary History, The Scholar and Feminist, American Quarterly, Public Books, Ebony.com , TheRoot.com , BET.com , and others. A BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick and a New York Times Paperback Row selection, Big Girl  was named a best books feature by TIME, Essence , People, Vulture , Ms , Goodreads, Booklist , She Reads, The Root , Library Reads, Glamour UK, Vogue France, and others. Her work has earned support and honors from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, Millay Arts, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Mellon Foundation, the Center for Fiction, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Born and raised in Harlem, NY, she is a Professor of English at Georgetown University and lives in Washington D.C. The Club Author’s Note:  “The Club” is a fast and loose riff on Conditions 5 , The Black Women’s Issu e (1979), revisiting the style of Alice Walker’s critical short story, “Coming Apart,” ( Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography edited by Laura Lederer, William Morrow and Company, 1980). Published between 1977 and 1990, Conditions  was a lesbian feminist literary journal edited and maintained by a collective of foundational writers including Barbara Smith, Cheryl Clarke, Jewelle Gomez, and Rima Shore. For contemporary readers, Conditions 5: The Black Women’s Issu e offers a stunning gathering of black feminist voices. At the time of its publication, it caused significant controversy for its refusal to silence black lesbian voices or subjugate black feminist sexuality and erotic life. This criticism, linked to the “sex wars” of the early 1980s, grapples with a politics of respectability and sexual silencing that persists in some areas of feminist discourse in 2024, particularly in the policing of black women’s sexual self-expression. Where and how do black queer sex, sex workers, trans and nonbinary experience, and other disallowed realms of black gender and sexual being find safety and freedom in black feminist visions of futurity? This is a crucial question of our time. Conditions 5: The Black Women’s Issue lights a path for answering these questions, and reminds us that we’ve been here before. Edited by Barbara Smith and Lorraine Bethel, and containing works by Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, Gloria T. Hull, Beverly Smith, Demita Frazier, Cheryl Clarke, Alexis De Veaux, Donna K. Rushin, Ann Allen Shockley and many others, Conditions 5 is a gathering space for the full, brazen, queer complexity of black feminist being. In “The Club,” I imagine such a figurative space in a not-so-distant physical future, considering how these writers, their characters, and the voices they conjure might inflect our own discussions about pleasure, safety and freedom. Each character in “The Club” is named for a central contributor, theme, or concept in Conditions 5 . I take up a speculative expository fiction approach, revisiting Walker’s short story, “Coming Apart,” in which she uses the creative tools of allegorical fiction to contextualize and amplify the feminist critiques of pornography collected in another important anthology of the era—the 1980 text Take Back the Night . It is in this story (itself a critique of porn), that Walker first introduces the term “womanism.” In “The Club,” I tilt the allegory toward a sex-inclusive and pleasure-emphatic vision of Black Queer Feminism, exploring spaces of subversive sexuality, bodily pleasure, and erotic life as sites of black feminist possibility not unlike the space that lies between the covers of Conditions 5, The Black Women’s Issue . * Our Third World lesbian spaces will come From those of us who are remembering in increasing numbers That imitation versions don’t make it… Black lesbian writers Third World women artists from all over Meeting, joining forces, sharing sista energy Speaking to our own experiences and sensibility Without having to explain anything to each other  Because we are each other’s lives and words -- Lorraine Bethel, “What Chou Mean We, White Girl? Or, the Cullud Lesbian Feminist Declaration of Independence” ( Conditions 5, 86) Five ran her tongue over her lipstick under her mask and pushed through the door, trying not to think of Angelina. It was August, humid, and the outside air clung to her skin even as the AC from the club smacked toward her. She was two hours early, but still she felt a deep relief on arriving. Today, she couldn’t get to work soon enough. Clearly she wasn’t the only one who felt that way—several dancers were there already, laying out their outfits, eating, talking shit, making out. Renita, Will, Beverly, and Clemmon stood before the full-length mirror stretching, admiring their lines and curves as the formally trained dancers did. They swore they were true artists. And they were. Five had observed this with some bitterness when she first got to the club years ago, bracing herself for the kind of tired high-art/low-art battle that had played itself out ad nauseam in her own dance school experience, one of the reasons she’d quit. Sometimes that fight did surface backstage at the club, but to Five’s surprise, when it did, it was quickly cut short in a brilliant turn of phrase, often from Renita, who would swivel her head in the midst of a tabletop pose and say “we’re all artists, y’all. Show me a living black woman who ain’t.” To this, Will and Clemmon murmured clear but indefinite affirmation, saying “You right, you right,” agreeing, but giving themselves space to think on it some more. As she pushed into the club, Five washed her hands, dropped her bags in the spray space, and gave a long, maskless exhale as the Sani-Mist covered her. She waved at the bartender, Alex D, the nonbinary mixologist who had deep skin and a nameless sexy, and who made the best Old Fashioned you ever had, every single time. Once, when Five asked what the secret to their Old Fashioned was, Alex looked at her matter-of-factly. “I put the whole Afrofuture in it,” they said, then walked away with a twerk in their step. Today, Alex D stood propped behind the bar talking with E.J., another dancer, about one of the club’s favorite topics of discussion: black women and self-care. For Five, the phrase “self-care” rang hollow outside the club—it had been beaten to death since the first wave of the pandemic back in 2020, and now it seemed to mean everything from proper re-vaccination cycling, to outlandish e-vacation splurges, to the latest pumpkin spice trend on white-girl Instagram. But at the club, these conversations enlivened her. So much of what happened here was self-care, truly, though Five wouldn’t have phrased it that way. She would simply call it survival, freedom. The dressing, the talking, the rituals of hair and makeup, the cleaning, the protecting. The sex and the food. Even the dancing—the work itself—felt nourishing more often than not. The club was the first place Five had ever really felt that way, including everyplace she’d called home and every crew she’d called family. This, more than anything, was what kept her coming back to the club. And it was the reason she was here, at work, two hours early today. She had not found the words to explain to Angelina that dancing at the club was her survival. It wasn’t that Angelina disapproved of her work—not exactly. Angelina was older, but she was quiet and reserved in a way that made Five want both to protect her and to lure her into playful temptation. Five could sense that Angelina admired the freedom and heat of the club, but that she always felt herself an outsider. Angelina had grown up in a strict family steeped in old money and proper Black Middle Class values, among which quietude, rigidity, and respectability were chief. To her credit, Angelina worked hard to free herself of these restraints—Five knew this was part of what drew them together. She liked watching Angelina surprise herself with her desire. She enjoyed luring her further and further into daring, seeing her pleased and startled by the sound of her own voice. Five was also grateful to Angelina. It was thanks to her that they had a home—a cute two-bedroom with excellent public Wifi in a state with no police and a relatively efficient Community Safety Bureau, one of the first to go firearm-free. They shared the apartment with Angelina’s cats, Rachel and Rosalie, who didn’t quite love Five, but tolerated her well enough. Angelina was a teacher, and she spent her days in their brightly lit office ScreenTiming with her tenth- and eleventh-grade literature students in front of the room’s vast bookshelves. Of all the things Angelina had brought into Five’s life, her library may have been the best. Angelina’s shelves were amply curated and meticulously arranged, with prose and poetry monographs from Arroyo Pizarro to Zami, and all the most important anthologies and journals: Take Back the Night, The Black Woman, This Bridge Called My Back, Words of Fire, Mouths of Rain, Home Girls, Sinister Wisdom , every issue of Conditions . Angelina had even installed a Home Assistant audio plugin, multi-programed from title to author to genre and back.   Sometimes, between Angelina’s ScreenTime classes, Five would wander into the office before work to stare at the colorful spines and pick the poet who would accompany her through her day. “Homie, show me Living as a Lesbian ,” she’d say. Within seconds, the room would bluster up in response: “ Living as A Lesbian . Cheryl Clarke. Shelf Four.   Row C. Enjoy, girl.” Five loved how Angelina had her shit together, how she could be counted on to know what the safe bet was and to make it every time. Five also loved playing the role of the young and irascible temptress. She relished thinking of herself as the thick-hipped dancer who encouraged Angelina to come out to her uptight family, who held her hand while she let her body speak in bed. Still, even after Angelina had crept out the closet into the relative safety of their shared life, her daring would only go so far. Her vision of a black lesbian future was a home and marriage, gourmet cat food for Rachel and Rosalie, children, legality, normalcy. “You know white picket fences are not viral insulators,” Five had joked once. “They don’t even make them anymore.” Angelina smiled, flushed. “Whatever,” she said. “Just give me my 2.5 kids, like they used to say, and we’ll be good. Population law be damned.” Five wasn’t opposed to this life, intellectually, although having children would mean she would have to stay home from the club while Angelina taught, at least for a while, which she was not willing to do. Where Angelina craved the safe cocoon of acceptance, for Five, inconspicuousness was death. Five wanted space, self-possession, shamelessness. She wanted the warmth of her own spotlight and phenomenal sex. Angelina insisted their desires were not incompatible, but Five was not so sure. This was the cause of many fights between them. Disagreements , Angelina would call them, but still. These were the disagreements that had pushed her from the apartment to the club two hours early today. Angelina had purchased three vials of sperm without telling her, and had made a down payment on a pair of identical wedding rings. “Not for now,” she had insisted this morning when Five found out by reading the bank statement for their shared account. “Just for safe-keeping. For the future!” But the presumption that this future should be neat and orderly and entirely of Angelina’s devising—the expectation that Five should mute her pleasure for that vision—it made her skin hot.  “Who’s future?” she had shouted, her voice a crash of sound across the kitchen. Angelina only looked at her, her face blank as an empty page. She looked confused, maybe betrayed. Still, Five continued. “Who’s safety are you trying to keep, Ange? Who is your so-called future for?”  But before Angelina could respond, Five felt her own heat overtake her. It made her need to move, to leave. She hadn’t been sure how far, or for how long. She still wasn’t sure now. She breathed out again as she thought of it, trying to shake the words off her skin as she moved deeper into the Club. “You getting my cocktail ready, right?” She said to Alex D on the way to the dressing room. They stood striking, gorgeous, with teal eyeshadow and a bright blue bowtie. “My regular, please,” Five continued. “Old Fashioned. But make it next- level strong. It’s already been one of those days.” “I got you, Five.” Alex D smiled. “But is it the regular or is it next-level? There’s a difference, you know. You gonna have to choose. She does know that right, Tsaba?” Tsaba was a yellow-skinned dancer with a pitch-fork-shaped scar on her hand. She had volunteered for the first vaccine trials in 2021 and had the sight ever since. Tsaba looked at Five’s forehead, then back at Alex, and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, she know.” “Fine,” Five said, sighing through a smile. “Give me next-level then. That’s what I need. I’ll come get it before I dance.” The customers wouldn’t arrive for another hour, but the house DJ, Flowers, had already started playing. Five loved the club’s soundtrack— it was all blackgirl body and blackqueer raunch, a mix of Classical tracks by Salt-N-Pepa, Queen Latifah, and MC Lyte, blended with Golden Age bangers by Foxy Brown, Lil Kim, and Missy, and throwbacks by City Girls, Nitty Scott, Meg Thee Stallion and Cardi B. Just now Flowers played an old school Big Freedia song that made Five’s muscles want to leap and her ass swing into motion. She made her way to the dressing room, where Linda, Shari, and Ewar were talking in a close circle, vibing on the political potentials of black queer art from under a cloud of smoke. This was another pleasure of the club—close talking and touch. Outside, no one had seen hugs beyond family since the Before Times. But everyone who entered the club—dancer, customer, babymutha, whoever—was tested twice using the H. Lacks Instantscan, which the club purchased monthly with funds crowd-founded by the Taylor- McDade Dirty Computer IT collective and the Muholi Arts Trust. This meant the club was safer than any other place in the country. Five watched as the dancers talked, brushing shoulders, caressing skin without worry, a collage of lip gloss and neckties and leather harnesses and sequined bras. She basked in the dancers’ flirtation, their loudness, the way they made their opinions known and refused to behave. This was what she wanted. What Angelina couldn’t seem to see. The club was a wonderland of black bodies, genders, and voices, so that even on days when Five didn’t feel like working, the space filled her with something she needed to get through the rest of her life. When she walked in the door, the mask came off and her body was misted and she felt herself yawn open, ready for what the night had to offer. Unlike her life with Angelina, conversations at the club were different every day. The discussions about art were her favorite. The chance to sit and listen to these queer conversations about black creative force was like water to her. It was exactly what she’d been missing in school, and at home as a child, and in all the other spaces she’d been. Sometimes, between sets, she and the other dancers sat and talked with the regulars, especially Michelle, the college student activist who looked at you like she was studying for a test, and got all the dancers in their feelings about prison abolition. Sometimes Michelle brought her friends Janet, Muri, Jones and Rushin, and they sat backstage with the dancers, eating Alex D’s famous lemon-pepper wings and talking shit about trifling men or plotting revolution. Then there was Pat, the beautiful brown-skin trickster with the gleaming eyes who stood at the doorway. With her fly jackets and mercilessly polished shoes, she made the dancers feel safer and clear of their direction just by standing there, reminding people where they were, helping them figure out where they needed to be. No one knew what Pat’s exact title was—Five thought of her as part security, part creative director. She had a V-Port Immunity Passport Verificationist License, a formality for the club, but Pat wasn’t one for titles. When white people or cishet dudes wandered to the doorway, slurring their speech and fumbling over her pronouns, she looked at them like their faces were punchlines and said “Leave me to me and let’s talk about you. Do you need directions home?” This was how it was at the club. Every night was a study in how to do black queer life. Some called it Black feminism and some said that wasn’t for them—that the phrase was old, something that went out with maskless hugs and live arena concerts years ago. Five was clear that all her feminism would need to be black and queer. And that’s what it was for her: BlackQueerFeminism. But to her, it didn’t matter so much what you called it—she knew it when she saw it: black people unbraiding gender and celebrating the strange in themselves, plotting against their pain and spinning pleasure into art, loving and fucking, wet and ready to re-weave the world. In the spirit of this vision, Five connected with as many dancers as she could, and she made it a point to learn their names and stories. It was a good way to keep from thinking about her issues with Angelina. There were so many dancers who came through the space, fat and thick and short and thin, those with immigration papers and those without, speaking all kinds of languages and serving all the queer genders you could think of. There was Jonetta, who had one arm and a hurricane of silver hair and could climb a pole faster than anyone. There was Chirlane, the quiet newbie from New York whose eyes brimmed with feeling, and Toi and Allegra, both proudly unchilded, who danced like their bodies were no-one’s but their own. There was a black girl named Becky, who moved like a windmill and always wore a rose in her hair. There were the songsters, Patricia, Hillary, Calla, and Mary; if you listened closely, you could hear them singing riffs and runs in shocking harmony with the music while they danced. Then there was Audre, the fat, black, half-blind ambidextrous aerialist. She was a powerhouse whose inversions shifted gravity. She made you think the ground was the air, and when she was flying, you were flying with her. There were rumors Audre owned the place, but she never commented either way. This was another of the club’s mysteries. More than once, it crossed Five’s mind that someone should write a history of the club—a documentary, maybe, or a biopic, like the one Bambara’s Revolution Black Film Collective made about the Combahee River Collective back in 2026. The club had so many origin stories they were hard to gather into a single thread. It had moved around, changed purposes and locations often over time and tellings. Some said it began as a weekly voting-rights fishfry hosted by Atlanta’s most notorious 1960s bulldagger. Others said it started as a women-only speakeasy in Harlem during prohibition. Occasionally, Five overheard the college professor regulars, Barbara, Ann, and Gloria talking about the history, their voices lifting up to bold tones in vibrant debate. They talked about the club with passion, as though it meant as much in their hearts and bodies as it did in their minds. And so they were part of the club, to Five and everyone else, though they would probably never get on stage and dance. Then again, scholars could surprise you—often they were low-key artists too. Five relished dancing for them, bumping extra deep, grinding extra juicy before them while she listened. One thing the scholars did agree on was that the club had no owner. Over the years, it had borrowed various spaces, stayed around for a while, expanded, changed a little. Eventually, it attracted too much of the wrong kind of attention, and you would find even the off-nights overrun with white people and cishets, winding in awkward mimicry of the dancers as though crashing a gay club for a bachelorette, their presence so space-taking it threatened to strip the walls of color. Then it was time to switch up, morph again, recreate and move on, cropping up new, different and unexpected somewhere else. In this way, Five thought, Angelina was not so unlike the dancers. She was predictable in some respects—her need for sameness and safety, her yearning to be right. But she had a way of popping up in a space and a form you wouldn’t anticipate, a penchant for pleasant surprise. She had this in common with Five, too. Perhaps this was what frustrated Five most. If she’d felt that Angelina didn’t understand her, it would have been easier. But Angelina did understand—knew her in the same language in which she knew herself—and she judged her anyway. This was what hurt. Five was lotioning up backstage when she heard Pat announce that Angelina was at the door. She appeared at the entrance looking hot and upset. Her plain pink mask covered her face, and her breath steamed against her spindly glasses. Pat screened her and checked her V-Port. “Sorry Ange,” she said. “I have to.” Angelina nodded and finally Pat ushered her in. Five waited for her to unmask and spray so they could kiss, but Angelina lingered in the doorway, her mouth still covered. She looked around the space as though she’d never been there before. Patricia and Chirlane walked by with feathers in their hair. “You can take your mask off, girl,” Chirlane said, laughing. “We all safe in here.” Five watched as Angelina stepped under the spray mister, her mask still on. Five loved to watch the dancers spray-mist when they entered, their shoulders relaxing in deep exhalation as they washed off the rigid distance outside and opened to the closeness of the Club. But Angelina remained stiff, uneasy.  “I just came to support, see what y’all are up to.” Angelina said. “ScreenTime’s down again so I had to cancel class.” She looked away. It was thirty minutes until opening, and the music began to play. The first shift dancers began stretching, making last-minute repairs to their costumes, practicing spins and splits against the poles. Angelina looked back at Five. “I’m sorry about this morning. I’m just tired. Work and all.” “Yeah,” Five said. This was their rhythm. Half-throated fights that never came to full volume, too-quick apologies that never reached full depth. Five was about to offer her own apology—she wasn’t yet sure for what, when Afrekete walked by. “Scuse me, y’all,” she said, managing to look them both in the eye at once. Afrekete was unanimously considered the Club’s most beautiful dancer. Part sky creature, part Sahara cat, with slow-blooming eyes and an easy smile, she looked at you in a way that pierced you, made you think she’d known you all your life. But then, just as quickly, she dropped your gaze, as though she’d never actually noticed you at all. Rumor had it she’d broken Audre’s heart back in the day, but no one could confirm this. Now she sashayed past Five and Angelina, all wide hip and swinging thigh, her costume an elaborate puff of fruit cutouts and peach-colored tulle. She smiled, the melony smell of her body oil settling between them. She was stunning, surprising. Five felt both herself and Angelina lose their breath. “I’m sorry,” Angelina said again, this time with a tight laugh. She gestured to the corner, where Mocque, the club’s accountant and trans-advocacy consultant was practicing her pussy-pop handstands against the back wall in a leather bustier. “You can’t tell me this is where you want to spend your life. This is the work you want to do?” Five watched as Afrekete walked to the mirror beside Janet, bent into a forward fold, and shimmied herself up, her costume flapping over her bare behind. She did this a few more times, gave a pigeon-toed twerk. Then she ran over to the table where Pat and Audre were sitting and swiped a lemon-pepper wing, laughing. “Look. I admire it. I really do,” Angelina’s voice went plaintive, siren-like. “I love your body. I love all our bodies. I love how we move. And I want us to love our bodies too. But I just wonder… why the stage and the lights? Why does it all have to be so big, so public? So loud? I mean, isn’t there something to be said for privacy? Safety? As feminists, black queer folk, lesbians, whoever, don’t we deserve that too? I mean, if we want it?” “I don’t want it,” Five said. Now it was her turn to be surprised by her own voice. “If safety is the limit of your vision, I don’t want it. What I want is to get my Black queer feminist life. I want something complex and contradictory as us. Something that’s as strange and shameless and as much about our pleasure as we need to be. I don’t want anything else or anything less.” Customers had started to gather, some taking notes, others just being nosey. The music got louder. “Okay,” Angelina said. She raised her voice, looking afraid. “I hear you. I’m not shaming or whatever. I’m not. Sex and desire and ass-shaking. It’s all a part of it. I get it. It’s just…” She hunched her shoulders and gestured around at the dancers, laughing, stretching, arranging their outfits and talking shit. Teasing each other, kissing each other, breathing. “These women are so brilliant. All these folks,” she said. “Wouldn’t we all be better off with y’all at the library? Or making policy? Or even out in the street, protesting? Someplace where real work can actually happen?” Now the dancers began to gather: Gloria, Barbara, Beverly, Cheryl, Becky, Audre, Lorraine, Donna, Ann, Toi, Pat. They stood there, a dazzle of black skin and body, waiting. Five couldn’t pull her eyes off them. “We are the library,” she said, clear as night. “This is the school and the Smithsonian. Show me a black woman surviving that ain’t an artist. Show me a black queer person living in pleasure that don’t deserve a Nobel prize.” The dancers watched Angelina watch them, all their states of costume and undress. Five watched, too, wondering what she would do if Angelina started to cry. They stood there, everything quiet but the song playing from the speakers, a wail of black girl raunch and wanting. “Ok,” Angelina said. “You can take your mask off, baby,” Alex D called from behind the bar. “We all safe in here. Safe as we can be. Come on in. Let yourself breathe.” “Ok,” she said again. But she didn’t move. Five walked toward her slowly, her arm extended to help, but Angelina pulled away. She stepped under the mister again and Pat pushed the button, the air moistening and fog frosting the plexiglass shield as Angelina pulled the cloth from her own face. She moved toward the dancers again, still clothed, but now, somehow, more naked than anyone.  The bassline thumped. Pat called the welcome greeting and the regulars flocked to their favorite seats as the first-shift dancers took the stage, a pageant of long-limbed flags and leans and attitudes from floor to pole. The air smelled like lotion, and bodies, and sex, and good food. Irresistible. Five picked up the drink that was waiting for her at the end of the bar. Next-level. She handed it to Angelina, and they walked into the music.  "The Club" was originally published in Sinister Wisdom : Vol. 123. Jan 2022. THE INTERVIEW This interview was conducted between Mecca Jamilah Sullivan and Jae Nichelle on July 5, 2024. Firstly, wow, thank you for sharing “The Club.” I want to live in this story. I’d love to hear more about your approach to bringing a different form of life to the 1979 Conditions 5, The Black Women’s Issue . How did it feel to name your characters after the magazine’s contributors and themes and bring them into an imagined future? What was your process? Thank you for this. I want to live there too! As an artist/scholar, this was a very cool project for me. I originally wrote the story for the fantastic 2022 Sinister Wisdom  special issue on the iconic feminist magazine Conditions , which published from 1977 to 1990. As a scholar of Black queer and feminist literature, I had spent a lot of time studying Conditions –and especially Conditions 5: The Black Women’s Issue . It was one of many crucial journals and anthologies that gathered the voices of so many of our foundational Black women poets, writers, and theorists, including Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, Cheryl Clarke, Alexis De Veaux, Demita Frazier, Barbara Smith, Akasha Gloria Hull, and many others. In my scholarship, I think a lot about how these anthologies and journal issues work as hybrid, multivocal texts, highlighting work across genres—including poetry, fiction, theoretical/critical essays, and sometimes interviews—and bringing together several different and sometimes contrasting voices to highlight the complexities of Black feminist and queer life. For me, this is the poetics and politics of genre-bending. This idea of how we complicate voice and write across literary genres is at the center of my academic work, and it also motivates me as an artist myself. So when Sinister Wisdom’s editor, Julie Enszer, reached out to me to reflect on The Black Women’s Issue  in any genre—including fiction—I jumped at the chance.  In terms of feeling, there was a lot of pleasure in this story for me. That’s partly the pleasure of genre-bending and working across the creative-theoretical divide, which I’ve always enjoyed. But it’s also partly because the story is about  pleasure in many ways. I wanted to imagine a Black queer future that centers the pleasure of our bodily expression, one in which we’re in close conversation with history, and in which our survival is complex, collective, oppositional, and juicy.  In detailing her dispute with Angelina, Five says that for her, “inconspicuousness was death.” In Black queer feminist practice, do you feel that there is tension between the desires of space + shamelessness and safety + comfort? Absolutely. I think that we’re living in a moment when, for many of us in the US, there’s an expanded sense of choice in how we imagine our lives, at least to some degree. The middle-class American ideal of safety and comfort seems to be in reach for many of us. For some, this might entail marriage, children, property ownership and social recognition. But in the same way that the women these characters are named for showed us that silence is not a protection, I think there are conversations we still need to have about whom the cover of social recognition protects. This is not to throw shade on comfort or safety in any way. I think we need to make strategic use of both of those things. But I think there’s still much more to say about the dangers of respectability politics in Black queer and feminist communities. If the structures of safety we’re aiming for don’t protect the disabled, trans, fat, poor, and working class folks in our communities (for example), they’re not really safe, so they shouldn’t feel comfortable. And, of course, a lot of this unsafety happens through the policing of the body—what one wears, who one desires, how one does gender, in what way one expresses the erotic. When Five talks about shamelessness, for me what she’s envisioning is a space of value outside of respectability, where the self and the body can find safety in and through pleasure, not in spite of it.  I keep thinking about Five’s declaration that “We are the library,” coupled with how you’ve previously said  that Black queer feminism includes recognizing “the body and the interior world as sites of knowledge and power.” In what ways do you remain grounded in your own body? How do you stay validated in your experiences? Ok citation, come through! I love this question. Yes, I absolutely believe that our bodies and our inner lives work together as resources that can sustain us. You know, that line, “we are the library,” is something I’ve been coming back to recently, although I didn’t realize it until you asked this question. I recently had the chance to write about Cheryl Clarke’s brilliant new collection, Archive of Style , and it has me thinking a lot about Black lesbian, queer, and feminist archives. What does it mean to imagine the body as text and archive? What do we keep there, and how do we keep it? For me, this is key to grounding and validation. I refuse to accept the lie that the body and the intellect are separate. I say “refuse” because it often requires an active, ongoing refusal. We’re often encouraged to imagine our bodies as things to “master,” police, and change, and too often this becomes a major responsibility of the mind—to alter and manage the body. Of course, this is a great way to keep us distracted from both the fact of our pleasure and the task of our freedom, because we’re busy trying to change the only thing we may really have—ourselves. So I stay grounded and validated by reminding myself of the pleasure of my body and the importance of my inner world. When I started writing “The Club,” I had a dance practice and a wonderful community that sustained me. I’ve moved since then, but I still dance. I also run, and kickbox, and savor love and delicious food to stay connected to my body. And to stay validated in my inner world, I write. But more than that I read. Reading is the best company.  You were born in Harlem, and the city is an integral part of your novel Big Girl as well as your story collection Blue Talk and Love . Living in Washington D.C. now, do you feel connected to the city and culture? Do you see D.C. creeping into your work? It’s so funny that you ask this. Just this morning I was looking out on my DC neighborhood and wondering when and how the city will show up in my fiction. When I started writing Big Girl  in earnest, I had left Harlem and had moved to Philadelphia. Now I’m working on something that’s set partly in Philly. I’m enjoying DC, and I’m really liking the process of setting up community here, so it’ll be exciting to see how it comes into my work.  Do you have any hobbies, hidden talents, or passions that people would be surprised to learn about? I’m not sure how surprising it might be, but I haven’t talked or written much about my movement practices. I found a wonderful dance community a few years ago that allowed me to tap into parts of my creative self that I hadn’t connected with in a long time. I had taken some dance classes as a child, but those experiences weren’t positive, and so I kind of ran from dance as soon as I had the option. Returning to dance was actually part of my process in writing The Poetics of Difference . I was writing about Black queer and feminist practice in a range of forms, including poetry, fiction, theatre, music, and visual art. I had had at least some hands-on creative experience in each of those forms as an artist, but dance was something I hadn’t done since childhood. So I decided to take some classes, and I fell in love with the community I found. I also like to run. I started running 5ks a few years ago, and I’ve run thirteen or fourteen races since then. I like it because it feels like flying.  In a Center For Fiction interview , you mentioned that while working on Big Girl , you had to trust your voice and your vision. What types of practices keep you motivated even when something isn’t happening in the timeline you hoped it would? Wooh. Honestly, this changes for me depending on what’s going on in my life, my work, and my writing. Over the years, I’ve learned to be flexible, and to listen to what I need to support my writing today, knowing it may be different from what worked in the past, and that it may not work in the future. Big Girl  was my third book, and neither it nor either of the previous two happened on the timeline I had originally envisioned. With my first book, Blue Talk and Love , I was writing stories, which helped soften the impact of departures from my little timeline. I find stories to be more manageable, so that I could finish a draft of a story, send it out, and start another story or work on something else while waiting to see where it landed. I was working on my dissertation, which later became The Poetics of Difference , while finishing Blue Talk and Love  and revising Big Girl . Each was a long process, with several different movements and eras and moods. But there are two things that sustained me throughout: reading and purpose. With everything I write, I find it helpful to connect with why I want to write it. Audre Lorde says “I started writing because I had a need inside of me to create something that was not there.” I try to stay close to that need, knowing that if I need to read something, someone else may need it too. And when tapping into purpose is hard, I read the writers that sustain me. I usually start with Lorde, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, and Jamaica Kincaid. Their voices get me writing every time.  What’s a short story you’ve read that changed your perspective on what a short story can be? Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl.” But really, many of her stories. Partly because when they came out, people wondered whether they should be classified as stories at all. They are so voice-rich, so interior, and they theorize blackness, gender, mother-daughter relationships and the complexities of Black girls’ intellectual lives in ways that I find irresistible.  How can people support you right now? It’s always a joy to connect with readers. I’m on the road a lot these days for events, so if I’m stopping by your city, I hope you’ll come and say “hi.” Name another Black woman writer people should follow. Bettina Judd is the truth. Her latest book, Feelin , takes this conversation on Black women, pleasure, and creativity to incredible places, and the way she represents for the Black feminist artist/scholars is beautiful. I can’t wait for folks to read Cheryl’s phenomenal new collection, which I mentioned. And I’m excited about the reprint of the iconic Alexis De Veaux’s 1984 Blue Heat , which is coming out through Sinister Wisdom  with a new introduction by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, whose new biography of Lorde I just got my copy of and cannot wait to read. That’s more than one, but I believe in the spirit of 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.

Sabrina Spence is an event coordinator, poet, and theatre-lover from Memphis, TN. She is also an MFA candidate at the University of Memphis where she works for The Pinch Literary Journal. Her poems have been published in Beyond Words , Waxing & Waning , Papeachu Review , and NonBinary Review . Sabrina has performed spoken word for ALSAC/St. Jude and was named a finalist for Palette Poetry's 2023 Resistance and Resilience Prize. She holds a Bachelor's degree from Washington University in St. Louis. How to Read Your Pot Likker The eyes are hot, burning red with exhaustion and in the scraped bottom of your grandmama’s pot you discover the charred remains of another woman’s body— her toils and tears seasoning the base like cast iron. Take your wooden spoon and stir her dreams in with the ham hock and salt doctors say you shouldn’t eat. Carve her name in each stalk to steam the letters into your windows. Let her ghost live around the panes of your kitchen—listen to the wrap of her apron as it greases the air and flavors the scent of your favorite dish. When the leaves wilt butter-soft like bodies dark and bending to the strength of the wind with cut palms and stinging bellies, anoint your brow with the shining oil. Coat your bones in old prayers as they sizzle in the fat of your brain, and bathe in the boiling water as you emulsify yourself in the marrow of your blood’s reminiscence. In the light of the stove, cook yourself down. ### 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.

Lydia Mathis has an MFA in fiction from New York University. She earned her BA in English literature with a minor in classical civilizations from Agnes Scott College. She has worked as a teacher for Teach for America in Memphis and as a teaching fellow at Coler-Goldwater Hospital in New York City. She is the recipient of A Public Space’s 2023 Editorial Fellowship and is currently an assistant editor at A Public Space. She has stories published in or forthcoming from  Stanchion ,  Southeast Review ,  Five on the Fifth ,  oranges journal , and  North American Review . A Body Walks into Public Safety Her feet were pounding. The slightest pressure sent thumbtacks of pain spiking through her heels. Admin had increased the rounds each public safety officer had to complete because, though the proud private college hated to admit it, the cash flow was stale as all hell. A small all-girls school in the south wasn’t a magnet for donations. The school didn’t even have the redeeming quality of a sports team. This meant cuts to “non-essentials,” which meant fewer officers, which meant Sandra had swollen feet. A body in pain seemed to be Sandra’s reality now.  Instead of four officers for the night shift, it was now only her and Jeffrey. They had to cover longer distances and go on more walkabouts. The office was already on the edge of campus, attached to the school’s parking garage, which made the trek feel even longer. Jeffrey was out patrolling the north side of the campus, and then he’d make his way clockwise around the grounds. He’d left nearly thirty minutes ago, so he’d be gone another hour at least before Sandra had to be back on her feet.  Sandra already had to deal with two lockouts and a lost—probably stolen—bookbag. The girl with the lost bag had given Sandra a headache on top of her aching feet. As if she didn’t hear enough whining from her bed-bound mother, she had to deal with the tears of a child who didn’t know better than not to leave her shit unsupervised in the library. When Sandra asked the girl why she didn’t just take her book bag with her to the bathroom, the girl ended up sobbing, and Sandra had to spend twenty minutes patting the girl’s back and giving her two cups of water to calm her down. Eventually, Sandra convinced the girl that she would keep an eye out for the missing bag and that the girl’s professor would understand why she couldn’t turn her midterm in by the deadline.  Sandra only had a few more hours before she was off work, and then she could go home. She would check on her mother, who by then would be asleep with re-runs of Family Matters  or Good Times playing on the television. If Sandra skipped taking a shower, she would have about five hours to sleep before she had to wake up early in the morning to take her mother to her radiation appointment. Actually, she’d have about four and a half after checking the apartment to make sure her mom hadn’t convinced Mr. Jameson, who somehow at seventy-nine still had the energy to chase tail, to bring her a pack of cigarettes. Her mom often flashed a tit or two to get Jameson to go down to the cornerstone and get her “boros.”  Whenever Sandra would raise hell about the cigarettes and her own mother basically prostituting herself, her mom would just say, “let me have my fun while I die, girl.” So, Sandra had given up arguing and settled for crying to herself as she threw away cigarettes her mom tried to hide, and she wondered what she would do when it was just her watching eighties TV shows. She thought she was okay with being alone, never settling down, working to be able to take care of herself and her mom, who was always either recovering or going through a new treatment. But what would she do when she really was alone? Sandra lifted her leg, taking off her sock and shoe aggressively, kneading the pad of her foot. She would get her mom through this cancer treatment too even if she had to put a chastity belt (bra?) on her and chain Mr. Jameson up in his apartment.  Her preoccupation with her own foot might be why the first thing she noticed about the body that walked into the office was its feet. The small room was almost bare. Only having a two-legged desk with a rolling chair for the officers and three folding chairs that were propped against the wall opposite the door. The wide-open space gave Sandra a clear view of the bare toes that walked in.  “Where ya shoes at?” was the first thing Sandra said.  She was still focused on her foot, not bothering to look up. The feet she could see from her periphery were fair and covered in the reddish Georgia dirt. It was raining earlier, and the mud clung to those pallid little toes.  “Don’t track that mud in here,” Sandra said without emotion.  She pulled her big toe from the smaller ones it had started to crowd against, trying to alleviate the cramping the bunion created in the middle of her foot. She would have to budget for the bunion corrector her doctor recommended she buy from Amazon.  The toes by the door didn’t care for what Sandra said and walked further into the room, disappearing from view as they neared the desk.  Sandra closed her eyes at their approach. The cleaning of the public safety office had become the duty of the officers after admin limited cleaning services to dorms, class buildings, and the cafeteria. If Sandra didn’t whip out the broom and mop every weekend, the white office would turn into a canvas of browns, reds, and greens, and Sandra hated messes.  “Listen here. I said don’t track that m—” Sandra started to say as she looked up.  Sandra’s foot fell from her hand, slapping against the floor. The cold tile barely registered as her eyes walked up the knees that were cross-hatched with thin, almost delicate open wounds. The fluorescent lights caused an awful gleaming of the blood that slid slowly down dirtied legs. Sandra didn’t know how much of that blood was coming from the knees or underneath the skirt, where she noticed a trail that slithered down the inside of the thigh. Her eyes stopped there. “Whoa,” Sandra said, breaking the silence engulfing the room. She sat, eyes unblinking, looking at those thighs. The line of blood made it look as if the thigh had been sliced in half. For thirteen seconds, she did nothing but look at that halved thigh. Then a hand was gently placed on top of hers, pulling her eyes back to attention. Sandra looked down at the hand. Only the fingertips touched her. The contact was so light it tickled. Sandra almost giggled at the feeling; she was weak to tickling.  “Your nails are filthy,” was the only thing she could think to say.  The hand started to retract, and Sandra realized she was being a fool, a word she loved to call the silly girls around campus. She clutched the hand in hers. The dirt-caked fingers were white and long, and they looked nothing like her mother’s knobby black ones, but for a moment, it was as if she was holding her mother’s hand in her own. Her mom’s hand would tremble when she reached out for Sandra before gripping tight to lift herself out of the tub when Sandra finished bathing her. Just like her mother, the hand trembled before gripping tightly onto hers. One of Sandra’s only indulgences was her monthly trip to the nail salon. She could only get short nails, but she liked to get a sharp stiletto shape. Sandra released the hand she was holding to take the fingers.  “One second,” she said. She walked to her desk, pumped some hand sanitizer on her hands and pulled a piece of paper from the printer, and walked back. She sat down and took the fingers of the right hand, using her nails to scrape the dirt onto the paper she’d placed on her lap. Sandra’s nails, painted a deep hunter green, seemed to complement the clumps of brown dirt crowding against the cuticles and hiding underneath the nails of the hand she held. She felt briefly like the whole of nature was being shared between their fingers. The room was quiet around them. Sandra could hear the sound the dirt made as it fell onto the paper.  Plap, Plap, Plap.  “There you go,” Sandra whispered.  She folded the paper until she was sure none of the dirt would fall out and put it in her pocket, thinking it’d be useful at some point. She looked up and finally noticed the angry red rings around that pale, pale neck. Her stomach rolled and she knew she couldn’t look up any further. She knew she should. She should look the person in the eye and let them know she was there for them, that everything would be okay, that they would call the police, the real ones, give them the paper full of evidence, and go to the hospital. But Sandra felt like she did when she was nine and afraid of the dark and refused to look inside any room that didn’t have the lights on. She’d prefer not to know what she didn’t know, so she kept her eyes focused below the chin.  Before she knew what she was doing, she was bringing her hand to the throat. The flinch back was violent, like the snapping motion of whiplash during a car accident. Sandra was caught off-guard and flew back, nearly falling off the plastic chair.  “Sorry, sorry,” she said softly, trying to calm the trembling body before her. Sandra moved slowly this time, changing the target of her hands. It was like she was in a stop-motion film, the way her hand advanced, hovered in the air for a beat, then advanced again. It was a film of attempted comfort. Her hand, centimeters away, stopped, and for a second, she was lost as to what she should do. Should she rub or pat or a combination of both? How did she usually touch her mother? Her mom said she always loved how Sandra handled her like she was a grown woman but still special, still someone who needed to be cared for. Her mom was no longer the woman who could lift the couch up by herself to vacuum or spring up to pop a cursing daughter in the mouth. Now she was the woman who had to lean on her daughter to walk up the stairs and who had to grip her daughter’s hands to be pulled out of bed. When Sandra’s hands were pressing into her mother’s waist to keep her upright or holding tight to her hands to lift her up, how did she manage not to break her mom while not making her mom feel breakable? How did she do that?  Right now, her hand seemed to have the potential to destroy this body in front of her, like one brush of her fingers would take the skin off that shoulder, and the flesh would slough off and fall wetly to the floor. Sandra looked at her fingers and knew they would sink into the skin, pass epidermis and dermis, moving like a phantom through muscle and nerve and bone until she got to the heart and ripped through so that it beat and beat and beat, filling the room, bursting her eardrum and the vessels in her eyes, collapsing everything on top of her.  Her hand was a weapon, a detonation, a transgression, and she tried to pull it back quickly, but the body in front of her stopped her, catching Sandra’s hand. Sandra clasped the hand, held on, gripped hard, and squeezed, and squeezed, and squeezed. ### 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.

Andrea "Vocab" Sanderson is a Poet Laureate Emeritus of San Antonio, TX, and the author of She Lives in Music (Flower Song Press, 2020) . Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson is a San Antonio native and a Poet Laureate Emeritus of San Antonio, TX. 2020-2023. Her dynamic style is a fusion of poetry, hip-hop, and R&B. She is a teaching artist who enjoys facilitating workshops all over the nation. She has opened up for Nikki Giovanni, Dr. Cornel West, and Phylicia Rashad. Some of her awards include: Dream Voice 2018 awarded by The Dream Week Commission, The Arts and Letters Award, 2020, Impact Award 2023 for contributions to the arts awarded by The Carver. Best Local Poet 2023 and 2021, by the San Antonio Current. In 2021, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship for her legacy project The Echo Project, which featured on KLRN. Vocab's debut book, She Lives In Music was published on Flower Song Press and her albums are available for streaming on all music platforms. In 2022 & 2023, she received Creation Fund grants from National Performance Network for her theatre production with Lubana Al-Quntar entitled, The Seasoned Woman, a production co-commissioned by The Carver and Art2Action. Vocab has collaborated with Centro San Antonio with the public art pieces of poetry: Elevated Melanin, a tribute to that piece is located in Peacock Alley and more recently Permission to Play, a multidisciplinary mural featuring the art of Barbara Felix located on Commerce Street, in downtown San Antonio and The San Antonio International Airport. For more info visit her website: AndreaVocabSanderson.com Sacred Tongues Are our tongues not sacred, so much so, that we have buried them in the dirt with our forefathers wailing?  Who am I to speak on her skin? Red and hewn from Earth amber touched by terracotta… she has found her worth in forming her heritage around the sun.  She speaks to me in a dialect akin to my own, but our worlds are as similarly vast as the waters that separate our ancestors. She like me has birthed no ravens from her womb, but her hair is as dark as onyx excavated at midnight.   The corners of her eyes are tight and her lids are wrapped in coal. She stole ancient history from the scrolls of her upbringing and sang me a song of destiny forgotten.     With lips soft as cotton she speaks the language reminds me that I am so far removed from my Mother Land that the sands of my skin can't recognize trade winds blown from the Ivory Coast. What I yearn for the most is the connection to the roots stemming upward of my family tree.   I yearn for her to see a little bit of herself when she looks at me.   Wish that I was not raised in ambiguity wilting in uncertainty.  Peeking through plantation quarters shrouded in mystery stroking indistinguishable traits handed to me through genes and homogenous origins that I can not see.   I am only knowledgeable of five generations that came before me.    But the palm of my outstretched hand can not summon or command a grasp to comprehend who I really am.  Never will I know or understand the continent that continually circulates in my veins. Won't recognize the correlation of tribal dance rhythms colliding in a pulsing strain of my heart's terrain.    I can not audibly claim alliance to any country within the continent from whence I know my people came. My words seem almost profane in my exchange with this woman who has spoken in the seed that gave birth to her speech.   I do not envy but I admire as I ask her to teach me to say words so sacred I can not pronounce. Syllables so unfamiliar to my tongue and ear that the clarity of what I hear cannot translate to my lips. So I sip enlightenment from her and she curves her mouth in a dispensation of grace that evaporates the silence and paints this moment between us in purity.  I sit and I sip until, I want to dig in the ground and search for a sound so holy. That English becomes foreign to me and I speak and I speak sacredly. THE INTERVIEW This interview was conducted between Andrea "Vocab" Sanderson and Jae Nichelle on Jult 1, 2024. Thank you so much for sharing “Sacred Tongues.” I know that so many of us feel disconnected from our full lineage, so I keep returning to the line “I am only knowledgeable of five generations that came before me.” What’s the earliest history you know of your family? The part of my family that I learned about on my paternal side stems back to Louisiana and them arriving on an oxen cart to Texas. My dad’s family settled around Port Arthur before relocating to Corpus. But I know about my great great grands and that my people were owned by the folks that had the Sanderson’s chicken farms. My grandmother owned a book of Sandersons that documents Sanderson folk globally. I also took a genetic test that indicated that I am primarily African with the highest percentage being Nigerian. My Nigerian homies already knew this on sight, looking at me. LOL You recently ended your tenure as San Antonio’s first Black Poet Laureate, during which you created  The Echo Project , an oral history initiative honoring community leaders. What other accomplishments during your term are you most proud of? I think my public art works Elevated Melanin and Sunny Salutations at Poet’s Pointe, Permission to Play, Suds to Salvation (which hasn’t been unveiled yet) and my TEDx Talk (a dream come true) are my proudest moments besides The Echo Project. I have loved all of the multidisciplinary work that I have done alone and through collaboration. I cannot believe how much I have done. Meeting and working with Tanesha Payne and Lubanna Al-Quntar really challenged me in the best ways to come up with new ways of expression. As a multidisciplinary artist, do you feel as though there are some ideas/ thoughts that are easier for you to express in one discipline vs another? Hip hop is the easiest and also the most difficult, oddly. Easy, because I love rhyming and difficult because I try to use too many words in a meter and I have to figure out how to say them all before the beat drops. So I write quickly, but then I have to edit and recite it to the beat. I loved learning via your 300 Voices interview  that the name “Vocab” came from how you would read the dictionary as a kid and the importance you place on having an extensive vocabulary. Do you happen to have a top favorite and least favorite word? Favorite words: juxtaposition and calligraphy. I dislike slurs and derogatory terms for women.  You developed your newest song “Are We There Yet” as part of a collaboration with Centro San Antonio. Can you speak to how you got involved in the project and your thoughts on the importance of art and poetry in public spaces? I have worked with Centro San Antonio since 2020 when we came together to paint Elevated Melanin, from there we did other public art. Recently we installed, the Permission to Play  mural on Commerce St. and Terminal A of the San Antonio International Airport. The mural was designed by Barbara Felix and contains my poetry and the concept was mine. The musical composition for the song was played created by Eddy “Versatile” Keyz. The music video was produced and filmed by Barbara Felix and features Odious Dance and Xelena Gonzalez. In my thoughts and views, all forms of art are a reflection of our inner spirit and a manifestation of what is on the inside of us. Movement and words are a form  of communication of something that is supernatural.  They are vital.  If you travel out of San Antonio for an extended time, what do you find yourself missing about home? When I travel away, I miss familiar sounds and smells. I miss the smell of our food and the sound of fusion of regional dialects. Very bluntly, I miss Mexican people, and Mexican American people, I miss immigrants being more of a majority than a minority. If I go to a place outside of the Bible belt, I miss the sight of churches.  IF I leave the south, I miss iced tea. IF I leave Texas, I miss big glasses and cups when I go to a restaurant. Southern people give you a huge cup to drink out of. Example… look at a Whataburger cup. A medium is 32 oz. How can people support you right now? People can support by streaming my tracks on any music platform. Subscribe to my Youtube  or Spotify  or just tell a friend to check me out. Follow me on instagram Vocabulous   Name another Black woman writer people should follow. My buddy Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton. ### 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.

Talicha J. is a Black queer poet and teaching artist. A Pushcart Prize nominee and Collaborating Fellow at The Poetry Lab, she’s performed across the U.S. with the Respect Da Mic and Art Amok slam teams. Her debut collection, Falling in Love with Picking Myself Up (2015), led to a national tour and helped grow her presence as a poet. In June 2024, Talicha released her chapbook, Taking Back the Body , which won the Beyond the Veil Press chapbook contest. Alongside her work, she curates writing and editing sprints, leads online generative workshops, and hosts a monthly publication submission space. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming with Plenitude , Fahmidan , Peach Fuzz , Lucky Jefferson , Just Femme and Dandy , Button Poetry , and more. Cataracts A Ribcage after Athena Liu  i wonder if my grandmother would say she lost  [her] self, or at least a part that she wished back, like her [eyes] which were blinded by something in her body that  [turned] against her. if she could forgive the cataracts  [dark] veil wrapping itself around her vision, bringing [storm] causing systems to shut down without her say. a  [cloud] hovering over her peripheral, making  [gray–]  scale the only palette she could access. i  want [her] to have experienced color again– selfish [sight] to find its way into her direct line, be un– [blocked]  or blurred or dimmed or stolen by age blinking and [light]  running out of ways to dull itself, to be un– [blind] her eyes turned dark, storm cloud gray, her sight blocked, lightblind   Note: A ribcage is a poetic form invented by poet, Athena Liu, consisting of 24 lines alternating between 12-syllable lines and a monosyllabic word in brackets. At the end of the text, the bracketed words — or spine — are read from top to bottom. ### 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.

Deborah D.E.E.P Mouton  is an award-winning author of Black Chameleon (Henry Holt, 2023) and Newsworthy (Bloomsday Literary, 2019), as well as a lauded p laywright, director, performer, and critic. Deborah D.E.E.P Mouton is an award-winning author, playwright, director, performer, critic, and the first Black Poet Laureate of Houston, TX. Praised by the NY Times as an artist who “defies categorization”, her genre-bending works span from stage to page. She is the author of Newsworthy (Bloomsday Literary, 2019) which was translated into German ( Berichtenswert , Elif Verlag, 2020), Black Chameleon (Henry Holt, 2023), and an upcoming children's book, Hush Hush Hurricane (Kokila Books, 2025). Honored as part of Houston Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 class, she has been a contributing writer for Glamour , Texas Monthly , Muzzle , and ESPN's Andscape , to name a few. She’s penned stage works including Marian's Song (Houston Grand Opera), Atlanta: 1906 (Atlanta Opera) & On My Mind (Opera Theater St. Louis). Serving as Playwright/Director, she produced The World's Intermission , commissioned by Performing Arts Houston (Jones Hall), which was adapted for film, and Plumshuga: The Rise of Lauren Anderson , a choreopoem (Stages Theater) which made the cover of the NYT Culture section.   Her recent memoir, Black Chameleon , which was awarded Best Nonfiction Book award by the Texas Institute of Letters (2024), examines Black womanhood through afrofuturistic mythology. Stories that Mouton later adapted into a storybook opera (Lula, the Mighty Griot, HGO) and an independent short film (Headache & Heartthrob).  A former Resident Artist with the American Lyric Theater, Rice University, and the Houston Museum of African American Culture, her upcoming projects will debut at The Kennedy Center and American Lyric Theater. She resides in Houston, TX. On the Eve of Winter  My father,  the one in my dreams,  is always a big man.  Shoulders, rocky mountain wide  round bellied and towering.  He is never frail or slipping  His heart never forgets its own metronome  He hasn't learned to vanish  into thin skin and sunken chest  He is larger than life, always.  Moving about this world-a towering bear  who means no harm  but wandered into the campsite of your heart  to find food,  Made a delightful mess of everything.  He is one day away from hibernation  We don't know it.  He gathers moments  to store for the winter  Smiles to hold him over  when the nights cool  And his body hunches  in the dark to rest.  He will take everything with him.  He will leave nothing behind  but a footprint  wide enough it cannot be filled  Deep enough it cannot be missed.  My father is too grand to miss. Afterlife  And then there was the silence.  The deafening firmament  That said you were gone  Without a mumbling word.  The void where all the squeezing hands And mouthing prayers  Whirled into a black hole  And we leaned in,  Begging to go with you  But not wanting to leave.  Us, too human to ascend.  You, too holy to stay. Found  Less than a year after the last dragon's attack, the Lie-catcher finds me: a tiny hatchling licking my wounds in the corner of the gymnasium floor. He is so full of light that he attracts moths. I sit, drugged the way only a doctor could concoct, reimagining the invasion in the window. I’m a recent hire. Left my last job after calling out from the emergency room yielded a questioning of my dedication to my students. My arms tangled in bruises where nurses had used every vein to try to force me to blend out. I wear long sleeves in summer, hiss when approached. He asks me to lunch. So many times. I oblige. We take to the nearby Randall’s where the soup is served hot and the oyster crackers come free. We wander the aisles like it’s Gethsemane. He shows me nothing new, but it all feels like harvest. Then, the dull ache. The one that says my wounds are still open. And he is close enough to see them. I know what is next. All of the ways this will go wrong. I double over on the floor of the freezer section. Curl my tail. Play dead like a fetal flower full of lies. He sits beside me, in this winter, ushering onlookers along. Plucking each lie from the air like a boy who knows how to pull the wings off of a mosquito mid flight. He says it is okay to sit here however long we must. So we shift well against the ground until I run out of ways to make myself invisible or scare him away. Then He says, he sees how big I can be. And he is not afraid. Corvus Come Calling  I loved a crow once. The kind that only comes around when other relationships are on the verge of expiring. He met me when I was young and unsure. Still finding my voice on the mic. Approached me after the open mic. Offered to let me take him home. I had no room to house such an intrusive thing. But he hung around. Stuck close to my friends. Made himself more… domestic. Shea butter on his feathers, cowries in his dreads. Before long, I could hardly recognize his carnivorousness. Flew away without warning like something about loving me was too alive to enjoy.  Returned my way at a competition a few years later. Flew right into the hotel that I was calling home for a few days. Perched on the bench next to me. I tried to ignore him, but by now he was so familiar he didn’t seem threatening. He inched closer. Dare I say, I wanted him to. By now, he was magnetic, like his beak was neodymium and he   was drawing all the blood iron in the room into a crowd. A “veteran poet” they called   him. A line stretched before him to ask sage advice, the ways of words, how to circle   success. He seemed to have all of the answers. I was enraptured by his ability to speak   to the hearts of man. I guess once you have picked them apart enough times, you know   what they need inside. I was just about to leave when he perched on my shoulder. As if   to say, the line didn’t matter; that I was all he wanted to focus on. So I stayed. Lord, how   I stayed.   He rode my shoulder to dinner once the line before him was a barren field. Sat   across from me picking all the bacon bits out of a salad, like we both didn’t know he   wanted more. He made me laugh my guard down. Then, he asked again to spend the   night. This time, at his place. I didn’t know what it all meant. I assumed he wanted   plumage all over the floor. Our blacks to collide. But I was less interested in finding out   how much bird I was. More interested in watching the yellow in his eyes dance across   my body with pristine focus. But we both got what we wanted, sort of. I watched his   eyes turn my body golden in the moonlight, and he got a taste for flesh. No more than a   morsel. But I must be honest to say I wanted to be more filling. When the sun met us, I   gathered my belongings and we kissed goodbye.   I made my way to breakfast with friends. We laughed and talked and I didn’t   mention my night spent on the floor mattress with the crow. But then, another group  j oined ours. Familiar women, but not friends. And they talked about their sloppy   evenings full of libations and reckless behavior. And they binged laughter and purged  j uicy stories; ones most women wouldn’t share in unrelated company. And they talked   and they let their tongues dance across the names of so many men I thought they held   libraries in their throats. And then one said, she met a crow. Same one as me, two   nights before. How he ate until he was full. She vomited all of the details onto my   cinnamon french toast and it stuck in the maple syrup. That I had been a body, laying in   the road to him, and oh how he had feasted. How he had feasted indeed. I   told myself I would never let the crow close to me again. But loneliness has a   way of festering long after its expiration date. Before I knew it, I was motel deep in a Ten   Gallon Town and he was staying in a room just beneath me. I would see him inching out   to the community pool. His full plumage folding over his swim trunks, He pretended not   to notice me. Let out a deep caw cloaked as laughter and then cut his glassy eyes in my   direction. Cawed again, calling me over. I ignored it the first time. Even the second, but   when he showed up at the second night of competition, I wondered how he had found a   restaurant that would let him linger. He stayed close to the front window, picking grubs   from the ears of the younger performers. Sounding sage and harmless. But we both   knew how devastating he could be.   Still, there was something about the shine of his feathers. How he smelled of   shea butter and loc oil. How he would flutter so close, you remembered what it was like   to be part of his mouth. He hovered around me all night, until he caught me outside,   where no one was looking. He invited me back to his room. Promised he wouldn’t scare   easy. I declined. But I knew it was only a matter of time before he would cast that caw   up at my balcony and I would come running. Just like the dead inside always do. THE INTERVIEW This interview was conducted between Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton and Jae Nichelle on 6/4/24. The first poem you shared here is so full of this strong, comforting father. What would you say you’ve learned from your family that you keep with you today? My family has always made me believe that all of my weird and creative tendencies were by design. As a unit, we were always a herd of black sheep. My mother and father both prioritized history and storytelling along with art. I believe that's why my brother and I are both artists.   My father, especially, made it a point to praise me for all the things he felt others would tease me for. My big feet, my round hips, my inability to be quiet… they were his favorite things about me because they were unique. He wanted me to feel like God made me with intention- both of my parents did. And I still carry that with me until this day. Thank you for sharing “Corvus Come Calling.” It has me thinking about a tangential question that I feel applies to so many Black women writers. How do you care for yourself when writing or researching difficult, sometimes traumatic subject matter? I actually wrote this piece in the thrust of writing my book Black Chameleon , but it didn't make it in for a lot of reasons. Writing can be cathartic, but sharing can take a toll. I believe that just because I write something down doesn't mean it has to be shared. Shared work is for the things I feel comfortable discussing in detail and allowing to be a communal moment, but the art of writing has been my sanctuary. I think a lot of writers forget that we didn't become writers for an audience. We did it to escape. We wrote to build ourselves a new world to exist in, the same way we read. Maintaining the sacrament of writing is crucial. Deciding when to share should be part of the healing process you set out to do with a larger community.  As a big fan of Write About Now, I loved discovering your poems online from Texas Grand Slam 2016. Do you have a favorite moment from your time competing in poetry slams that have stuck with you? Would you ever return to the competition space? My first individual slam was the Women of the World Poetry Slam in 2008. I had been on a few teams, including the college invitational team at the University of Michigan.  I remember getting ready for Final Stage and feeling wildly overwhelmed. I was standing in the lobby of the hotel when one of my fellow finalists, Sonia Renee Taylor or Sha'condria "Icon" Sibley I believe, walked up to me and asked what I was going to perform. I was too much of a competitor to tell them. But then, they invited me to a hotel room to practice. The room was full of a handful of finalists for that year, most who happened to be Black women. Most of them I had adored on stage for years. They all shared their poems and started giving each other feedback. I was baffled and intrigued. Then, I shared the poems that I planned to compete with and they helped me shape them and gave me tips. I remember Sonia saying to me that "we work together to give the audience a good show." Somehow it was not about the competition anymore, but about the sisterhood. I never imagined that was possible in a competitive space. It shifted the way I understood community and relationships with my fellow performers. And so many of those women I am still friends with and root for even if we don't share the same zip code. As far as slam, I will never say never. Slam was a proving ground. It taught me how to engage an audience; how to thread an image with precision. What I learned in those seedy bars and cafe patios altered who I am as an artist, and simultaneously, that space feels less like my own now. It is ever-evolving like I am. And while I won't write it off, I'm having so much fun creating work in the arenas that I am in that I am not in a rush to run back. In what ways do you feel your performance background has contributed to your skill as a librettist? BREVITY. Working in opera is so much about minimum words for maximum impact. Being a poet has definitely helped in this arena. I also think I am a natural storyteller. Even my poetry sets as a performer had a through-line and a story arc. Thinking about the journey I am taking the audience on and who I want them to be when they arrive, is at the core of what makes me a great librettist. Writing for the stage is a little bit of puppet mastering. You have to consider what your audience is feeling at all times. The same thing is true for a performer. In a Canvas Rebel interview , you talk about moving to Houston even though you knew no one there and had no job to stabilize you. By sticking it out, you eventually became the 2017 Houston Poet Laureate, started your own business, published books, and so much more! What has been the most surprising arc of your literary journey? Can I say all of it? I don't know that I ever knew that the world would open to me this way. I just wanted to make space for other writers, to tell my little stories, and to not starve doing it. But so much more than that has materialized. I never thought that I would live through one of the largest hurricanes to hit Texas, or that being the Poet Laureate would mean I had to respond to BBC World News in a poem about the damage. I never thought that poem would go viral or that someone would see it and want me to write an opera. I never thought I would write poems for the Houston Rockets or perform on the 50-yard line of the Texans stadium for 37,000+ people or on stage with the Houston Ballet. I never thought I would be remembered as a writer. And while I am not a household name… yet, I see the impact. I am eternally grateful to God for trusting me to hold so many stories. I am humbled every time I lose everything and have to rebuild (Which I wish I could say happened only once). I am surprised that my children talk about me with so much pride because I belong to them. And I think my ability to stay present and keep being surprised keeps me grateful. If someone offered you a million dollars to sing a song on the spot without messing up any of the lyrics, what song would you sing? I have so much wasted mental space that holds nothing but 90s hip-hop and R&B that my husband makes fun of me. I think it would either be Regulators by Warren G and Nate Dogg or Belle's opening sequence from the animated Beauty and the Beast film (Don't judge me I'm eclectic lol). In your conversation about writing Black Women’s Mythology published in the New American Studies Journal , you said about your memoir, Black Chameleon , that “Naming particular stories contributes to their mythical status by helping them linger.” What’s the name of a story or myth that you’ll never forget? If it's one I crafted, I would say The Women Who Are Blind, which is the opening myth in the book. It chronicles how Black women go eyes in the back of their heads. It was my first foray into myth writing and it opened me up to an entire world. However, that myth wouldn't be possible without Virginia Hamilton's  The People Could Fly . My mother bought me that book when I was young. It was the first time I saw Black folks with perceived superpowers and much of my myth grew from hers. She mentioned that some stayed behind after the people flew back to Africa. I remember asking, what happened to them? Who's telling their stories? Much of that was the early seeds for Black Chameleon . What’s something you feel you can only get in Houston? The food. Houston is the culinary capital of the south. I think it may be the only place you can get crawfish eggrolls, handmade churros, and Nigerian curry less than a block from each other. I love a lot of things about Houston, but when I leave, I instantly miss all of my favorite restaurants.  How can people support you right now? I am currently working on an interactive exhibit entitled "Call Me Mother" that shines a light on the Black maternal Health Crisis. I am raising money to fund the art, pay artists fees for my seven collaborators, and connect with local organizations doing advocacy work. I would love it if people could donate or at least spread the word. They can find out more at my website www.Livelifedeep.com/callmemother . I am also premiering a new opera next June at the Chicago Opera Theater entitled "She Who Dared," composed by Jasmine Arielle Barnes. It chronicles the impact of the historic women behind the Montgomery bus boycott. I would love to see folks in the audience. Lastly, just follow me on IG @livelifedeep. I love to stay connected to dope people. Name another Black woman writer people should follow. Vogue Robinson. She was the former Poet Laureate of Clark County, Nevada. She is an amazing painter and poet and more folks should know about her. ### 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.

Chidima Anekwe is an emerging writer hailing from the old coastal town of Stratford, CT.  She is a recent graduate from Yale University with a B.A. in English Language & Literature and a concentration in Creative Writing. For her work, she has received support from the SAEF Grant and the DuPuy Prize, and has been nominated for a MacNelly Award for Literary Arts. She writes to explore new postcolonial poetics and Black feminist existentialisms within contemporary American girlhood, usually with a satirical bent. She has read for The Yale Review and edited for DOWN , a BIPOC-centered webzine, among others. She is currently based in CT and gaining experience in NY. Biafra Song I’m in Connecticut and weeping for a place I hadn’t known the name of until too few years ago. My parents kept Biafra like a secret love child. They cared for her but worried she’d disturb the peace in the family. She did. Now their legitimate daughter has become too angry to return home. Eziokwu, the Wikipedia articles made my eyes see red. I won’t go back to Igboland until it’s Biafra again. I want it to be Biafra again. I am a child again, closing my eyes tight during a family party I didn’t wish to attend, hoping that when I open them once more I’ll find I’ve been carried home in my feigned slumber. I am lazy. I am impotent. They are protesting again, in Kaduna and Zamfara. The news is reporting three have died. Human rights groups report a dozen have been killed. A post on my Twitter feed: 50 murdered in cold blood. I believe the Tweet and I see red again. Britain created this and they’re pleased with what they’ve done. They harvest the oil money and make us kill each other. Of course Independence was a lie. They couldn’t even let us have Biafra. But the Igbo genocide did not take my grandparents and I won’t take this fact for granted. And so I promised myself to sing the song of Biafra, out of principle. Or maybe out of spite. I can no longer tell the difference between the two. I ordered a Biafran flag off Amazon and hung it in my room. Then I hated myself for it. Jeff’s company repulses me and I don’t believe in flags now and I didn’t believe in flags when I ordered it either. Or nationalism. Or maybe nationalism is alright when it is that of a postcolonial nation. I wasn’t sure then and I’m not sure now either. I don’t think I like tribalism. I wonder if it must be the solution. I wonder if I will only ever wonder. I used to want to be an academic of some sort, so people would have to call me doctor and I wouldn’t have to go to medical school for it because I hate the sight of blood. And my parents would say ezigbo nwa and parade me around the family party and everyone would laugh and agree how educated Igbos are. I read the Chimamanda book about Biafra and there were academics that would all sit around a nicely furnished living room and eat and drink and talk politics and theorize revolution. I found myself resenting these characters. They needed to leave the house. Now I don’t want to be an academic anymore. But I haven’t left the house. I hate the sight of blood. They don’t have Igbo on Duolingo and they didn’t offer it at my college like they did Yoruba and so I’m trying to have my mother teach me twenty-odd years too late. My mother tongue. I always liked that phrase. My mother. Whose language I did not learn as a child because I wanted to be more like the people who drew the borders they knew would condemn my people to death. Make us run away to their safe havens just to be spit in the face. But I will spit out the lies spoonfed to me by that Berlin-bred project and make myself sick till it’s all out. It doesn’t take much effort. Now all I ever feel is sick. I hate the sight of blood. ### 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.

Chyann Hector is a Black Jamaican-American writer and educator based in the DMV. She has been writing ever since she could remember and wrote her first novel in a spiral notebook in the 5th grade. In her work, Chyann prioritizes the voices of Black women who are immigrants and descendants of immigrants. She also explores multi-generational relationships, mental health, and culture in her writing. You can find her on Instagram and TikTok: @chyiswriting. Black Girlhood  Pt. 1 Chalk  We etch our names into concrete. Drag the solid dust over eroded dips and melded chewing gum. Sketch boxes of portals, worlds numbered. To travel, we must learn balance. We must learn how to build foundation on a single shaky leg. If you listen close enough, you can hear the sssch sssch your rubber soles make against the edges. Blurring chalk lines of ash pink and purple. Feet never stop moving as long as the map in the ground withstands the washing away.  Pt. 2 Pom Poms  Imagine gathered confetti of sharp silver and diamond white. Little stars in our hands as we shape and stomp and chant. Hear the rustling like a gentle earthquake shaking loose the leaves on an oak tree. Nothing stands still here. We noise this field. Glitter dancing in our palms.  Pt. 3. 25-cent chips and sunflower seeds  Bells chime over our heads when we enter this place. The man behind the counter smiles in a way that doesn’t make us want to shed skin. The lot of us, dancing in between the aisles. Swiveling hips trying to match the maracas and trumpets echoing. We make a feast with $3 each. Barbecue rap chips. Salt and vinegar. Flamin hot Cheetos. Ranch sunflower seeds. Foot-long icicles. The bags go pop pop pop. Air escaping into itself. We smile through sugared teeth.  Pt. 4 Double Dutch  Some of us know how to do both. The rest of us stick to one. Arms jerking back and forth. Testing to see if we could truly ride the air. Jump jump jump . The rope kisses ground over and over and this is its own song. We listen carefully to its rhythm. It will tell us if we are too eager and not eager enough. It will snap at our flesh if we interrupt its flow. It does not con real. It does not lie in the sounds it makes. It is like life that way.  Pt. 5 Sulfur 8 and Blue Magic  We sit in between our mothers like they did with theirs before us. The tail snakes its way through our scalp. Etching. We shiver as the vines are pulled from their entanglements and the plastic goes thwack against our craniums. We listen for the rhythm. Brace ourselves for the impact of the biting down. Combing through. We know this is not all that is. Not just the pain. The blue magic comes soon after. Like a calming wave. Washing against a lava shore. All we know is peace. ### 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.

Texas-born LaToya Watkins is the author of the short story collection Holler, Child , which was longlisted for a National Book Award. LaToya Watkins ’s writing has appeared in  A Public Space, The Sun, McSweeney’s, Kenyon Review,  and elsewhere. She has received support for her work from The Camargo Foundation, MacDowell, Yaddo, and Hedgebrook. Her latest book is  Holler, Child: Stories , which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction.  The View I'm embarrassed about how the lady face buried between her friend legs and how they moaning and how it was making me feel before Momma walked in. I was watching it straight-eyed before she came in and took control of the whole thing—made it a punishment. Now I got to watch the rest with her. After that, she gone whup me. I know she is.             "That's called gay. Sodom and Gomorrah," she say without looking at me. "God ain't nowhere in that, boy."             I wish I had somewhere else to look, but she said since I was looking at it before she came in, I better look now. Said wrong got to be righted.              When she first stuck her head through the door, rollers in her hair and tired lines on her face, I was sure she wasn't gone be in here long. I tried to change the channel before she caught me, but I think that’s what got me caught. She went from head-in-the-door to "what was you watching, Naught?"             "I work two jobs," she say. Her eyes still on the T.V. Now a man standing behind the woman. She still got her head buried in between her friend legs and the man moving in and out of her, but I don't even care no more. I ain't even taking notes in my head no more.  "I don't work for this kind of mess. I don't work hard like I do for you to be worried about this kind of mess." She sound sad. Hurt or something.             I don't know what to say. I know she think I'm going down to the devil for watching, which is why I really don't understand why she making me watch the rest. I guess she done gave up on me and heaven. I wonder if this'll make me fall deeper into the fire. I was only gone watch a little bit. I was only gone be in a little bit of trouble when it was time to stand before God. Now I'm in trouble with God and with her. I wonder if she know she might go to hell for watching it with me. I want to ask her, but the lines around her mouth tell me that ain't a very good idea.             A few days ago, she came in the kitchen, and her gold skin turned bright red when she saw me eating Fruity Os from her mixing bowl. I wouldn't have never ate my cereal out of that bowl if we had some more clean ones—if she would've washed them the night before. She didn't fuss at me for it or nothing. I thought she was going to, but she didn't say nothing.             All she did was let her beat-up purse slide off her shoulder and onto the counter. She took off her plaid coat—the one she bought from the second-hand store—and laid it on top of her purse. She reached up over her head and pulled a bigger mixing-bowl from the cabinet and poured the whole box of Fruity Os in it. After she poured enough milk on the cereal to completely cover them, she picked up the bowl put it in front of where I was standing eating from the smaller bowl.             "Since you woke up feeling all long-eyed, boy. Don't care nothing bout how hard I work for every box of cereal I bring in here. You eat the whole damn thing, Naught. Just eat the whole damn thing." And she stood there and made sure I ate every O. When I was done, I thought I was gone throw up I was so full. She told me to go to her room and bring her the only thing she kept when she took Ruke's stuff to my granny's house, the thick leather belt with the snake as the buckle.                         "Naught," she call my name, like she panicking or something, but she still don't look at me. Her eyes still glued to the T.V., and I can't help but wish the girl on screen would shut up with all that hollering.  "Anybody ever touch you like they ain't supposed to, violate you, son?" she ask.             "Huh," I say.  I know what she asking. She done asked it before. She been asking me about being touched ever since she taught me to call my dick Mr. Wang. I learned real quick that a dick is a dick when I started P.W. Dastard Middle School, but Momma still call my dick Mr. Wang. Last week, she woke me up to catch the trash man cause I forgot to put the trash out the night before. My dick was standing straight up and she told me flat out, "Fix your Mr. Wang before you go out that door, boy. Nasty self."             "Have anybody ever touched your Mr. Wang, boy?" she ask.  I stare at the side of her face for a minute. Her jaw is twitching, and a tear is sneaking down her cheek. I feel bad about the movie. I don't want to hurt my momma.             "No, ma'am," I say, letting my eyes drop to the scratchy wool blanket covering me from the waist on down.             "You sure? " she ask, twisting her head to face me for the first time. Her eyes is watery and tired like two wet, rusty pennies, but she still look kind of pretty cause I can remember her smile. I look into them rusty pennies and drop my eyes again. I shake my head but don't say nothing.             "Cause I can understand this problem if that happened. Just talk to Momma. Tell me if somebody done hurt you, Naught. Pastor'll pray with us, and we'll get rid of this old nasty demon." I don't say nothing. Just sit there wishing for all this to be over. Wish I didn't have no dick and no momma. I wouldn't wake up wet after them nasty dreams sometimes and wouldn't be no whuppings. Never. "Well, I don't get it then, Naught," she say. Then she just sit there for a second. "This Ruke fault. I wish I'd have been smarter than to let that low-life get me pregnant with you. Should been smart enough to know he couldn't never be no daddy," she say, turning back to the television. "That on that screen," she say, pointing a lazy finger at the small screen on the rickety dresser. "Ain't nothing you need to worry bout."          I just nod my head and think about the whupping that's coming. "Go out yonder and get you a baby, how you gone feed it?" she ask, without looking at me. I lift my eyes and look toward the screen. The man holding his dick over one of the women's mouth. She holding her tongue out beneath him to catch his juice. I move my eyes to a crack in the wall above the screen.  A roach crawl out from the crack and start crawling down like it's gone go behind the T.V. I wonder if Momma see it or if she looking at the man juicing in the woman mouth. She hate roaches, but we can't seem to rid of them on the count of our neighbors. Momma say them folks nasty and roaches follow nasty. "I been working extra hours to get you a new bike. Get you out this house some time. Thirteen-year-old boy need to be doing something. Idle mind be all the devil need to do something like this," she say. I think about my last bike, the one I got when I was ten, and try to remember if it was enough to make me forget about my dick. Maybe so. I didn't think about girls and wake up hard and wet when I still had it.  I fixed that bike up all on my own. Before she brought the old sorry looking thing home from the thrift store, I had almost gave up on the idea of ever having a bike of my own. I bought things one at a time. The sandpaper to get the pink paint and Princess Power off. The gray paint because I like that color. The seat. The pivotal. Didn't have no manual or nothing. Took me a whole year to get that thing rideable. I built that bike from the ground up, and then somebody from this old raggedy complex stole it off the back porch. Momma whupped me. Said she spent ten dollars on that thing, and I should've had better sense than to leave it outside and give it away. "This how you say thank you. While I'm working, you letting sex demons in my   house," she say, standing up. She looking at the roach now. I can tell by how still her head is, and how mean her voice done got. He done stopped like he listening to her fuss at me.  The arms of her wool housecoat is cut off cause it used to be mine. She had to cut them off to make the housecoat fit her.  When it was mine, I wouldn't never wear it. She wear it every night, though. It's been washed so much it look paper thin. The blue look dull and ashy. She look dull and ashy. To me she pretty and smell like cinnamon, and she good at helping with my math. Even when she don't know nothing about it, she try. She stand in front of the T.V., and I can't see the screen no more. The man moaning loud and hearing it almost as bad as seeing it. I know Momma hear it too. I know it only make her think I’m nastier. Only make her think about me. She look around my room. Her eyes don't even touch me. She turn her body and squeeze through the space between my bed and the wall, making her way toward my closet. I think about the belt hanging up in there. All of sudden I want the movie to last longer, but words is running up the screen. I fix the cover on me. Make sure everything that need to be covered is covered. Make sure I won't feel a thing. "Where you get that shit from, Naught? Who give you something like that to watch?" she ask, bending her upper body toward the floor of my closet. I'm scared cause Momma don't never cuss. She pray hard and loud, specially at church. She got a mean shout, too. Almost look like she dancing on Soul Train or in a music video. She be moving like she free and done forgot everything. She holy. She talk tongues but she don't cuss. I think about pushing her into the closet and jumping off the bed and running away. I grew taller than Momma last year. She always say Ruke tall, but I never really paid attention. He was always sitting down when we visited him at the penitentiary in Lamesa. Even when we stood up to take pictures, I ain't notice. Everybody was taller than me the last time I saw him. Everybody was tall to me back then. I think about what I'm gone do when I make it out the house, after I push her down in the closet. What I'm gone eat. Where I'm gone live. I wonder what she gone do without me here. I think about her smile when she give me stuff. When she gave me the housecoat she wearing, she was proud. Told me about how she ain't never have one when she was a girl. How she want me to have more than her. Be better than her. I stop thinking about pushing her. I stop thinking about running. My heart start beating fast when she stand up with my size ten converse in her hand. She whupped me with shoe when I was ten. I peed in the breezeway of the G building, and Ms. Meddalton caught me. Ms. Meddalton whupped me with a switch cause Momma was still at work when she caught me doing it. Momma got me with a shoe when she came home. Said just cause the breezeway already smell like pee don't mean I got and make it stronger. That whupping hurt worse than a switch or a belt or a extension cord even. She couldn't hit me how she wanted to cause of the grip she had on the shoe, so she hit me in the head, on the back, everywhere.  But she don't even look my way now. She stand up and get in front of the T.V. again. She short and her body wide and flat in the back. Her hair smashed like she been laying on it, and I can see some of her scalp through her thin hair. She moving her head around like she looking for something, and that make me remember the roach. It make me itch, and I want to pull the covers off of me to make sure ain't none in my bed. Sometimes they climb up here and wake me up and sometimes they already in my bed fore I get in it. I don't pull the covers back. I ain't pulling nothing back long as she got that shoe in her hand. I hear a crash and stop thinking about the roaches under my cover.  "Thought I didn't see you, didn't you?" she say, looking around the dresser. She done smashed the roach and dropped the shoe. "There you is," she say. Then she just drag herself out my room on her old house shoes. She don't even look at me. I look at my shoe laying on top of the VCR and think about jumping out my bed and hiding it. I think about closing my door and getting under the cover with the other roaches. I think about not getting no whupping at all. I hear her sliding back to my room. When she come through the doorway, she got a wad of tissue in her hand. She headed toward the VCR, and my eyes is on her. She stop right where she at. She looking at me and I'm looking at her. Her lips start quivering, and her eyes get real watery. I drop my head. "Look at me, Naught," she say. She sound soft and not at all like my momma. I look at her. I'm ashamed cause I'm nasty, and I can't control it. "Stop. Just stop. Okay?" she say, nodding her head. "This kind of stuff is so ugly, baby." I nod my head and feel like I'm gone cry. "I mean… if you got a question that you need to ask me, I'm here, Naught, but baby…" she stop talking, and I look up at her. She touching her lips with the tips of her fingers. Tears coming down her face and when she open up her mouth again, I can hear them in her throat. "Baby, you can't want to do stuff like this. This is the devil's mess." I nod my head, and she start looking blurry to me. Momma tears always bring mine. "I won't do it no more, Momma. I'm sorry. I don't know why I did this."  She nod her head and wipe her eyes. She start making her way back to the T.V. She clean up the dead roach with tissue and eject the tape from the VCR when she finish. She put the balled of tissue down on the dresser and open the flap on the videotape. She start pulling out the film like a mad dog or something. She toss the destroyed tape on the edge of my bed. "Return that to whoever you got it from," she say. Ain't no more tears in her voice.  Momma turn back to the T.V. and pick up the tissue paper. Then she reach over and grab the shoe off the top of the VCR. I grip the edge of the cover and get ready to scream. I always start screaming before she even hit me. On her way over to the side of my bed, where I'm getting my tonsils ready for her, she put the balled-up tissue in the grocery bag I use for trash hanging on the inside of my doorknob. She stand directly in front of me and do something that really shock me. She just drop the shoe—drop it right there on the floor.  "Momma," I say. "What—" "Maybe you got questions that need answering, Naught. Maybe you do. But sex ain't okay, you hear?" she ask. "I'm gone give you this one time to know everything you need to know cause ain't nobody never do it for me. After this, don't you never bring up this nasty mess again," she say and look at me like she waiting for me to say something. "You bet not close your eyes and you bet not turn away," she finally say, messing with the belt of her robe.  "You loose my baby, Satan," she scream as loud as she can, and the pitch of her voice make me jump a little bit. She start chanting it over-and-over again, and I get nervous cause she got the same look on her face that she get when she start shouting at church. She closed her eyes and keep saying, "You loose my baby, Satan. You can't have him." She still saying it when her belt come untied, and she still saying it when she begin to ease the robe off her shoulders. She still saying it when her robe hit the floor and she standing there naked. And she still saying it when she open her eyes and look me in mine.  I'm too scared to close my eyes or look away. She got a serious look in her eyes. I can't keep looking in them, so I drop mine to her breasts. They long and flat against her chest. My eyes trail down because her sand-dollar nipples pointing that way. Below her belly, that’s big and jiggly, like the inside of a bucket of pork chitterlings, is a thick, tangled afro. I think about how much I hate chitterlings and afros and whuppings. She getting blurry to me again and my eyes burn like somebody chopping onions. After a while, she stop chanting and bend down to pick up the old robe. She wrap it around her and tie it back up. "That demon ought to be gone," she say. "Don't let it back in my house, boy." She walk out the door and leave me sitting there. When I hear her shoes sliding down the hallway, I slide down from my bed onto the floor. I kind of ball up on my knees and have a real good cry. Then I get in praying position next to the bed.  And I pray for myself long into the night. "The View" was originally published in Lunch Ticket. THE INTERVIEW This interview was conducted between Latoya Watkins and Jae Nichelle on 9/10/24. “The View” is such an engaging story from beginning to end. I become invested in Naught, who knows he’s going to be in big trouble soon, from the very first paragraph. Did you know immediately where you would start this story? What makes a story’s beginning feel right to you? For me, the start isn’t always the beginning. In my mind, this moment with Naught begins when Ruke leaves him to be raised by this mother. Where the story begins on the page is the situation that allows us to begin the journey of connecting all the parts of Naught’s story. I thought about starting the story with his mother walking into that bedroom and finding him watching the movie; I even thought about starting it with him starting the movie. In fact, I wrote those versions; however, I couldn’t move past those scenes because they weren’t where Naught wanted to start. It felt right to deposit readers in the middle of the mess and let Naught to carry them through. That’s usually the way it works for me; the characters decide where we start and what we tell. In a similar vein, I love how there is so much action in just this short moment in Naught’s room. The video plays in the background, the roach climbs up the wall, and Naught is observing his mother and himself. How do you go about building a scene where there’s so much movement even when the physical location is stagnant? I try to remember that there is always action around us, even in the smallest forms. Sometimes the action around us can annoy or distract and sometimes it can relieve. I think you can tell a lot about a person by what they pay attention to and how they see what captures them. I try to bring this into my work; it’s a way to build character. I also just like movement in stories. If the story is a stagnant one, there should be a lot going on the background. If the story itself is in motion, the volume of background movement can be tuned down. I think it’s a balancing act; the fun is all in attempting to put it together. Your novel Perish (2022) and your short story collection Holler, Child  (2023) have both received great acclaim. Is there anything you wish reviewers or interviewers talked about or noticed more when discussing your work?  I don’t know if this is a “right” answer to this question, but I’m glad reviewers and interviewers talked about my work at all. That’s the part of this that’s still surreal to me. I haven’t even considered the part where I wish for anything more. What’s a book you’ve enjoyed that you didn’t buy for yourself? How did it come to you? The Blueprint  by Rae Giana Rashad. The author reached out to me and asked if she could send it to me. You mentioned in The Millions  that you like to see Texas stories that showcase more experiences than the “cowboys and cattle drives” you used to associate with Texas literature. If you were creating a Texas Lit syllabus, what writers would be on it?  Lakiesha Carr, Tracy Rose Peyton, Attica Locke, Bryan Washington, Tim O’Brien, Kimberly King Parsons, Amanda Churchill, Kim Garza, Naomi Shihab Nye, Elizabeth McCracken, Amanda Johnston, Kendra Allen, Ben Fountain, Cynthia Bond, Jeanette Walls, Elizabeth Gonzalez James, J. California Copper, Roxanna Asgarian, Elizabeth Wetmore, Sandra Cisneros, Suzan Lori-Parks, Nathan Harris, Kelli Jo Ford (There are still quite a few missing, but you get my point). You’ve attended Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and MacDowell residencies. What have you enjoyed most about these experiences? I’ve enjoyed the kindness of strangers, the care and thought put into creating these spaces, and the time to be a writer. I’ve also enjoyed communing with nature because I’ve never thought of myself as that type of person. I didn’t think I cared for trees or birds or animals at all, but I’ve fallen in love with the gift of these things. I wouldn’t have had the time to sit in meadows and watch deer or hike through woods and see gangs of turkeys or great horned owls if these spaces hadn’t welcomed me to it. Are you watching any TV shows these days? If so, what? I am. Reasonable Doubt, Kaos, From, Evil,  and The Chosen . How can people support you right now? Buy (wherever books are sold) or borrow (from your library) and read Perish and Holler, Child . If you love them, recommend them. Read other Black women writers. Name another Black woman writer people should know. Magaret Wilkerson Sexton ### 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.

Erica Frederick is a queer, Haitian American writer from Orlando, Florida currently living in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA in fiction from Syracuse University and writes about being big in all the ways there are to be big—in body, in spirit, in Blackness, in Florida suburbia. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Tin House, The Rona Jaffe Foundation, VIDA, Lambda Literary, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation. She is well at work on her first novel, Fight in the Night. Banana Trees / Sunflower Seeds I’d seen her after Baby Bio at the Barnes & Noble Starbucks, you know, that’s where the baddies be, contemplating cake pops. She was brown-skinned and big-haired, everything pierced, everywhere a tattoo, tall and skinny as the devil’s trident and I got that stomach clutch, like: I gotta pee. And she looked at me and I’m a coward, so I studied someone’s strawberry refresher, but she was still locking eyes with me when I looked up so I turned, stumbled into Young Adult. She was in my peripherals, started circling me in Science Fiction so I just let her catch me and she said, “I know how this sounds, but see, I’ve never seen anyone so beautiful, so kinky-curly, so damn thick, Jesus have mercy.”  I said, “Sierra. Saint-Fleur.”  She said, “Betty, Jean Baptiste. And on top of it all, you’re Haitian too?” I nodded. I said, “Kiss me.”  She said, “Fuck me.”  I sat next to her, nervous, on the city bus, got took to her apartment and she did, I did. On a boxspringless mattress next to stacks of used and yellowed books under all her trinkets and twinkle lights. She laid next to me, naked and heavy-breathed and said, “I might could like you, but you’re gonna have to learn to fuck me better.” And me, anxious always, flop sweat, stomach always doing some goddamn thing, I said, “I should’ve said this, but I’ve never fucked anybody.” She put a hand on my shoulder, forehead on mine, breathed her breath into my nostrils and since then, she’s never stopped touching me soft.  Back home after the bus, I culled peas and plinked them into a cast pot while Mummy curled four fingers of one hand into the handle of a milk-jug-made-watering-can and held the other to her muumuu’d midsection. We were in the makings of a meal for us and for the spirits, so they could gift us everything we’d wished for, like for me final exam answers and for her our slumlord dead and buried. Mummy smiled, gap-toothed, into the ceiling, rolled her hips to konpa. I bit my teeth ’cause I couldn’t tell her that I knew then exactly what  gouyad  and grinding was all about. She poured water into the base of her banana tree, planted straight from the seed into one of the blue plastic barrels she usually used to steal my shit to send to Haiti. She picked yesterday’s offering up off the altar cloth that laid at the base, brushed the dirt off the shoulders of an unopened Barbancourt, then got back to bragging about how beautiful she’d been back in the day.  “Hey hey!” she shouted into the beat. “You know, I’m the reason every man is in search of a Jacmelienne, cherie , they’ve been searching for me since 1983.”  I smirked, plinked peas, said, “But your man left you?”  She lifted her arms and hands way up like she was praising the Lord and not le monde . She said, “He left you, cherie , not me. Because you came out bald and blinding light skinned.” I sucked my teeth, popped her with a pea. She opened her eyes finally, leaned in to cup my face, she said, “But now, you’ve been blessed to look just like your Mummy.” Her thumb was wet and wrinkled. “And your man will be in search of you soon.”  Betty and I started doing shit like going on walks and sitting forever on park benches. She’d graze her fingers over my arm hair or my inner thigh and I would go nuts at the chills she made in me. She started talking like, “Can you believe that once we were strangers?” And I’d twist, tilt, say, “I think I’d like to never stop knowing you.” She said, “I like how you’re looking to eat up life, even though you’re nervous.” I said, “I like how big you do it, belligerent, baby you’re a supernova.” “You’re corny.” “Isn’t that how I got you?”  She said, “Sometimes, I feel afraid, like I’m going to lose you. Like I’ll do it wrong, do too much, I’ll fuck it up, I won’t know how to love you right, and you’ll leave me.” “Sometimes, me too.” I said, “What if I can’t be enough for you, don’t have enough to give? What if my loving is too tiny, too tepid for you to feel?”  “Kiss me.”  “Fuck me.”  I got better, got good, gave her orgasms, learned to stop loving lightly, because she needed pressure. That’s how come it came to be that Madame Claude and Claude himself seen me and her at the Magic Mall. Because we’re Black and romantic, they seen me buying her bamboo earrings, gold plated, said Betty  on the inside of the hoops. They seen her get me a nameplate necklace for me to never take off, wear always, it said Sierra . And by the time Claude and Madame Claude see me pull Betty in by the mid-rise belt loop, kiss her nape, call her baby—I’d seen them too.  I rush to lip-kiss Betty goodbye and swipe a box of the almost-sweet carrot cake that Mummy craves but doesn’t ever buy herself, pray to the patron saint of city buses to make it home quick because I know those two will call her to snitch on me like it’s their day job, like I’m not grown, like … okay I still live with my mom but I’m a degree-seeking  daughter. But when I key open the pastel pink door, I see her sitting at the kitchen table, papers fanned out on top of it: she’s making up numbers for her taxes, home phone pressed to her ear. I slide the cake onto the table and duck into the living room to tap into the other line like it’s the early aughts. I hear Claude and Madame Claude suck their teeth like it’s a ritual required before talking shit, start with, Pitit: We seen your daughter with some slut, she was nose pierced and ankleted, she’s a lesbian .  Mummy, who used to take care and take her time to give me a zig zag part down the middle, braided my hair and put the boul gogo  at the base, my mom, who Haitian-remedied me through juvenile fucking arthritis, who fed me fried eggs and coffee sweet but strong as liquor—she listens to her sister and her sister’s cheating-ass, dusty-ass man say that dick won’t ever be enough for girls like me. I hear Mummy not say shit, not defend me when they say it’d be best to let in a gang to, one after the other, fuck me, force me. That’s the only way I’d ever be satisfied. She only sighs when they say that maybe men wouldn’t be enough. A pack of horses ought to do it for the madivine .  After they click off, I make sure she sees my silhouette in the kitchen doorway.  I say, “So?” She sucks her teeth, she never looks up. “I don’t know what would cause someone to say something so sick.”  “They’re sick,” I say, a bubble in my throat, “but it’s true.”  Her barely-there eyebrows meet in the middle. Jeez, you can almost see her beating heart come up through her bird chest and into the blue veins of her neck. But she is great at knowing nothing so disappointing could ever happen to her. She says, “Remove your lips from that lie.”  “It is true,” I say, “I’ve been gay.” And I have been, sweet since the babysitter, Beatrice. She’d ring the doorbell and I’d act a damn fool, be writhing when I saw her, the origin of the gotta pee feeling. She was busty and nice to me. She wore her hair relaxed and her face dimpled and once I asked: How do I know this is real life? She squinted, looked at me nearly to neckbreak. She said: Don’t ever stop asking questions like that.  Mummy says, “Are you trying to ruin my life?”  “What?” She stares only at the banana tree. She’s forever said I’d better show it some respect—it’d been growing since before I was, more hers than mine. She says, “We can get rid of this. I swear it to you, cherie , this spirit can leave your body.”  She looks at me, everywhere, the nose ring, the nameplate, the anklet. She puts her palms to her cheeks, like she sees now: all the gay signs were there. I shrug, I say, bleary-eyed, “I don’t want this spirit to leave me.”  She says, “Then I won’t have any part in it. In this, in you.” I creakily nod. I turn, a whirlwind into my room. I get on the ground, feel old rice grains and kinky hairballs in my kneecaps, head fog, ears plugged, a siren. I shove clothes, unwashed, into my pink and dirty old Barbie duffel bag. I pass my mom, both of us stone-faced, on my way to the bathroom. I steal the toilet paper because I bought it, steal her dusting powder forged in Haiti because I used to flour myself in it because I used to want to smell her everywhere. I rush back into the kitchen, opening and closing cabinets, orbiting the table. I catch side glimpses of her, slumped, face seems set to drip off her skull. I plop the duffel onto the table and take back the cake, crush the flimsy plastic container into the cartoon carrot drawn in icing, shove it on top of my tennis shoes and zip it away. I stand, waiting to catch her eyes just once, once more. I muss up all her documents, send them fluttering onto the carpet. She only takes a breath, pushes herself from the table, and turns to thumb a sun-spotted leaf of her banana tree. By the time I get to Betty’s I realize I’m breathing again, heavy and hot and a heartbeat. In the doorway, Betty puts one lanky arm over my shoulder, she’s warm. She’s got a blunt between her ringed fingers and holds it to my lips. I shut my eyes. I breathe in. She kisses me before I can blow out the smoke.  I wake up to her big spoon and her arm feels heavy on my waist. I lift it and drop it off me. She wriggles and wakes, lets out her little morning moan, rubs a big toe over my ankles. I shift to lie on my back. She puts her arm around me, again.  “How do you feel?” she asks. I look at her a little, her eyes big and her eyebrows bigger. I look up at the ceiling lamp: a teardrop on a chain, gray with dust.  I close one eye, worm an arm out from under hers to pinch the picture of the lamp out from my sight. “Just like that,” I say.  Betty’s clutching fistfuls of comforter and I’m hands full of thighs, face to face with her labia, where I’ve grown to love to be. “Is everything okay?” she whispers, craning her neck down to catch a peek of the crown of my head.  I muffle, “Mm-hm.” But when I bring my head back down it’s like pushing together the south poles of magnets. I try to inch forward but still spring back. I stare into her clit, I spiral, I … I can’t lick it, I can’t, I can’t, can’t like it. “Hey.” She crawls her fingernails in between my box braids, into my scalp. “Come up here.”  I climb up over her spindly limbs to lay beside her, look into her adorned face.  “Let’s buy a house and have a bunch of kids, name them all Betty and Sierra Jr.,” she says.  “Plant sunflower seeds in the backyard and then get married in it,” I say. “Where should we honeymoon?” “Haiti, the motherland, have a threesome with La Sirenn.”  “Do you think it’ll be the same,” I croak, “you know, without a mother, and everything?” She grabs my hands to interlace in hers, kisses each of my fingers, “You were born of Ayiti, cherie , nothing can steal you from her.” I walk, big headphones on, to pick Betty up from her work study job at the financial aid office, sure to avoid the super senior, this Sisqó dupe, lurking by the arches of the fountain, squawking at women who pass him by. Sure as sin, he’s there, so I turn up the konpa, watch him rub his hands together, holler at me mute-mouthed. I’m a yard away from him when, and when, when when my shoulder pivots, like it’s the core of the earth marionetting me. And just like that, I’m walking back the way I came, the music in my ears dwindles down to dead.  He says, “See, baby, you too pretty not to be noticing me.” I try again to push, fight back against this pull of gravity, but I pivot once again until I’m faced with him. North and south poles, south and north, north and south. His eyes are yellow and mine are hot.  I hear, “Sierra!,” in the distance, turn to see Betty trotting toward me. She starts with a smile, big teeth, big heart, but drops it when she catches sight of me, takes a single sideways look at the Sisqó stunt double.  “You good?” She grabs my hips, I’m hers, she says, “This is my girl.”  He throws his hands up. “My fault,” he says, “you know, I actually got respect for the LGBTs.” He steps back. A bubble bursts, a breath of air.  I open my eyes to Betty frowning at them. “It’s just not coming out right,” she says, furrowed brows and pursed lips. I raise the mirrored pallet to my eyelids, the rainbows I’d requested for the pride parade came out all overcast, smudged. I give up and get the makeup remover while Betty lights a bowl. I’d stopped the stuff, hoping I could cure this—the everything.  I got my license and myself deeper into student loan debt, so I drive us in my brand-new-used Honda Civic down the freeway, to the beach, Betty snoozing against the window, sunshades down. I can almost smell the SPF and the six-foot dolls in drag—no, no. And no, no, no, and no, no. I cut the steering wheel, the steering wheel cuts me, a U-turn into traffic. Betty jerks awake to tire screeches, all of the freeway honking, horns, horns, horns, cursing me, cars cutting and running from mine like a zipper.  Betty grips the glove compartment. “Sierra, what the fuck? What the fuck ?” But she turns to me, my wide eyes and white knuckles. She takes her two fingers, her short acrylics, her rose tattoos, to my wrists. “Please, please, turn around.” “I can’t,” I cry out, “I’m not, I can’t, I’m not in control.”  “Okay,” she says, “okay.” She rubs my shoulder, she cuts the wheel this time, puts us at least over the median and back into the flow of traffic.  “I don’t know where I’m going,” I say in shuddered breaths, phlegm and tears. “It’s all wrong. I think, I think, I’ve been repelled .”  “By what?” she whispers, maybe neither of us wanting to say it too loud.  “Being gay,” I whisper back. As soon as I put words to it, I know where we’re headed.  I show up at the pastel pink door, ask Betty to wait in the car because this is my business to unburden. I tap at the door with the baseball bat I keep in the trunk. And there is Mummy, bright and thin-skinned. I burst in, I ask, “Where is it?” “Thank God, you’ve come back to me.”  I wield the bat like a wand. Point it at my mom, coax her away from me as I step further into the home that once was so much home . “Show it to me! Show me the fucking token you used to make it so that you wouldn’t have a daughter like me anymore.” Mummy clutches her muumuu, says, “Sierra, this isn’t you speaking right now.” “You’re right, this isn’t me. It’s whatever you put on me.” I swing at the pre-owned China cabinet. The glass and the fake-ass China shatter. “How could you?” I ask. She ogles me, always stoic. I gesture the bat to the banana tree. “You can wish what you want me to do. You can pray to whichever of your whack-ass spirits to control my body. Try to pull me from pussy, push me to all the men you want. But you can’t change me.” I let her come close to me. Her pigeon arms. She unsticks the braids from my glistening forehead. “It’s okay, cherie.  That is enough. This will work, will let me love you.” I sniffle.  I heel-turn to the banana tree, the peeling trunk, the fenestrated fronds, and start to smash it to bits.  “No!” she screams, “no.” But the plates are too broken, liquor too spilt, everything between us is too wide, the insides of the tree too white. Then I see it peeking up from the soil. A 3D crystal photo I had etched for her for Mother’s Day: me on one side, morphed into her on the other. It’s bound in cotton yarn. I drop it on the floor. I raise my bat.  — In the car, right in my old parking lot, I sit on top of Betty. I put my hands up her shirt, she puts her hands on my waist.  “I’m gonna start my own altar,” I say, “summon lesbian spirits and shit.”  She smirks, says, “What are you going to put on it?” I think. I say, “Sunflower seeds.” “Fuck me.” “Kiss me.” ### 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.