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

Alisha S. Lockley is a poet, multimedia artist, stage director, and short film producer. Her work closely examines the subtle sensualities of the surreal and the spiritual. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Randolph College, and she was a finalist for the 2025 Furious Flower Prize judged by aracelis girmay. Unremarkable View of January from one window up above the maternity ward. Below, browning palms, a sherbet sunset; wind chopped Florida water froths filth. I’ve yet to see snow melt firsthand. I have an imagination that comes with new tremors here and there. Visiting hours in the behavioral unit are from 4 to 6. A fraction of my family sits outside glass doors I’m not allowed to touch. My beloveds wait to hold my hands. Nurses watch to scold what we forget while forgetting none of us are prisoners. First, my mother sees about me in her hot blue dress— reeking of altar fabric and Pompeii oil; My head swims against the third dose of Prozac. One pill for my father, one pill for someone’s else violent son– My mother lists the names of saints who ask about me. I’ve started worshipping alone. I’m a heathen because I believe in myself. My mother, more olive-branch-bearing-dove than bear, would rather send word than dirty herself with me in certain truths. Another patient is moved to shake her hand for how articulate I’ve “turned out.” I’m silent when left in solitude— He’s another one who can’t be bothered to read my mind, let alone the room. And before you ask, yes, he was. ### 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.

Inducted in the Texas Institute of Letters in 2025, Sharon Bridgforth is a widely published author, a United States Artists Fellow, winner of Yale's Windham Campbell Prize in Drama, and a New Dramatists alumna. photo by Kevin O'Harra Jr Sharon Bridgforth collaborates with interdisciplinary artists and audiences to install moving soundscapes of her ritual/jazz texts in celebration of African-American Southern Migration histories/queerly. Sharon's work is archived at The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library, New York, NY and at The Austin History Center-Austin Public Library. Inducted in the Texas Institute of Letters, Sharon is an Associate Company Member at Pillsbury House + Theatre, a Doris Duke Performing Artist, recipient of Yale's Windham Campbell Prize in Drama, the Playwrights’ Center Core Membership, McKnight National Fellowship and the USA Artist Fellowship. She has received support from Creative Capital, MAP Fund and the National Performance Network, is a New Dramatists Alum and MAP Fund Scaffolding for Practicing Artists Coach. Sharon has served as Guest Faculty for the Macondo Writers Workshop, founded by Sandra Cisneros and has served as Artist In-Residence for: Thousand Currents; Brown University’s MFA Playwriting Program; University of Iowa’s MFA Playwrights Program; The Theatre School at DePaul University; and The Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. She has had the privilege of being part of the Center for African and African American Studies and the Black Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin for more than twenty years. The Callaloo Journal, Issue 43.4 features some of the department's history. Sharon's new book, before you go: an Offering was published by Tripwire Harlot Press in 2025. 53rd State Press published bull-jean & dem/dey back in 2022. Widely published, Sharon's work is featured in: Volume 110, No. 4, Winter 2022 of The Yale Review; Teaching Black, The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature; Mouths of Rain an Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought; Feminist Studies Vol 48 Number 1, honoring 40 years of This Bridge Called My Back and But Some of Us Are Brave!; We Are Each Other's Liberation-Black & Asian Feminist Solidarities; and Playwriting with Purpose. More at sharonbridgforth.com. dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/Oracle Deck The question: What is Infinite Love Offering? The spread order: 1. The Present Moment 2. Your Inner Knowing 3. Hidden Influences 4. Advice 5. Possible Roads dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/Oracle Deck Created by Sharon Bridgforth, Artwork by Yasmin Hernandez. All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2016 © Geeched Out Productions / Yasmin Hernandez (Artwork). There are nine Oracles (characters from the dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/Performance Novel). Each speaks on four subjects. The text on the back of the cards is from the dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/Performance Novel. In addition, each Oracle has one blank card, which, if pulled, means “you already know.” In other words, they ain’t responding to your question or the situation at hand because you already know what is in your highest interest/greatest good. Centered in African-American artistic and cultural traditions, Sharon Bridgforth's "dat Black Mermaid Man Lady" offers multiple ways via multiple projects for communities to engage in work and conversations that activate collective wisdom and self-determination. dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/The Show premiered at Pillsbury House + Theatre in Minneapolis and is streaming on the Twin Cities PBS channel. View it and more at: https://sharonbridgforth.com/dbmml dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/Oracle & dem Blessings decks, along with the dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/Performance Novel will be published in 2027 by Sinister Wisdom (https://sinisterwisdom.org) For more, join Sharon's mailing list at: https://sharonbridgforth.com. THE INTERVIEW This interview was conducted between Sharon Bridgforth and Jae Nichelle on March 18, 2026. Firstly, these oracle cards are gorgeous. What led to your decision to create cards using the text and characters from the dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/Performance Novel? Can you speak to your process of picking the excerpts for each card? All of my work starts in what my mentor, Laurie Carlos, would call the bone marrow. For me what that means is that I’m investigating what needs to be healed in me. However, with research, Spirit, creative process, collaboration and rigor, the Work becomes itself and ultimately it isn’t about me . . . it is an Offering for those that receive it. I began the process of writing dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/Performance Novel because I was dealing with grief after three of my six parents transitioned. My daughter and I did a lot of processing and storytelling and a lot of laughing and appreciating them, which really helped me hear them/learn from them/and heal my relationship with them. This lead me towards writing what became the dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/Performance Novel. After Working the Work/after the piece became itself . . . the characters kept talking. So I said, I’ma make you Oracles and you can talk to everybody! There are 9 Oracles (characters from the Performance Novel) in the deck. They each speak on four things, which include a blank card. If you pull a blank card, it means you already know. The text on the cards is from the script. The process of creating the deck happened very swiftly. It moved through me and didn’t require a lot of “thinking.” It was more feeling and following Divine Intuition. I was very fortunate that a visual artist that I adore and deeply respect, Yasmin Hernandez (https://yasminhernandez.art), was available and willing to work with me as the artist for the deck. We worked seamlessly together and with a lot of Joy. Yasmin's visual art, Knowing and connection activated the deck. In terms of pulling cards when I do readings, my question is - what is Infinite Love Offering or what does Infinite Love want us to Know right now? The dat Black Mermaid Man Lady project includes a show, oracle deck, home project, dem blessings, the performance novel, and a performance installation. That’s amazing. What have these different mediums revealed to you about your creative process and artistic desires? I feel really fortunate to have had funders, organizations, institutions, artists and audiences that really showed up for me and made it possible for me to explore the work in all these different ways over a long period of time. This includes long-time collaborators, like my daughter, Sonja Perryman, and the literal genius (MacArthur Fellow) Walter Kitundu. The thing that I learned is - for me the work is never done. My curiosity about how a piece might Live continues, but after a certain amount of time and various kinds of explorations, it becomes clear to me that it's time to surrender the Work to what it wants to be out in the world and move on. I do feel that I continue to learn from the Work, and I get to experience it over and over - even after my surrender of it, because there are so many people that are connected to it in different ways. So I get to remain in Circle/in conversation with it. The dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/Performance Novel, the Oracle Deck and dem Blessings will be published in 2027 by Sinister Wisdom, so I’ll get to be in process again out in the world with the Work/which I’m really excited about. Also, 53rd State Press is publishing a collection of my Work that will include dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/The Show. dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/The Show is streaming on the Twin Cities PBS platform. You speak often about working in the lineage of “theatrical jazz,” explaining in a 2022 interview that “like a jazz artist… you practice with rigor, but what you're really trying to do is to open so that the portal of the thing that you haven't done, the sound that you've never heard can come through.” This type of process involves letting go of perfection and the ideas you have about how your work should come out. Did relinquishing control in this way come naturally to you, or has it been a journey? It has been quite a Journey. A Journey that has Opened different roads of growth and healing in ways that I would never have experienced if not for the Work. I think that because I was not formally trained as a performance maker, and because I was shaped by groundbreaking artists whose focus was on using art as a vehicle for social justice . . . I was free and encouraged in following curiosity, passion and intuition. AND early on I had the privilege of being Blessed to work with seasoned performers, like Sonja Parks, Florinda Bryant, and Zell Miller III. I had support early on from Lori Wilson and organizations including (the original) Frontera@Hyde Park Theatre, Women & Their Work, allgo and the National Performance Network. I was supported by academics like Omi Osun Joni L. Jones and E. Patrick Johnson. I was mentored by seminal artists like Laurie Carlos, Robbie McCauley, raúlrsalinas, Marsha Anne Gomez, and Ana Sisnett. In my early days in Austin (I moved there from L.A. in 1989), I worked as a disease intervention specialist, a community organizer, and a HIV outreach worker. By 1998, I chose to become a self-employed artist because I felt that I couldn't continue to grow as an artist and have "day jobs." Weaving what I learned as an activist was already a part of how I Visioned my Work and process. As I grew, I reached a point where more surrender was required of me in order for me to move deeper and more expansively into my creative practice and artistic voice and imagination. That's a whole nutha/long Circle of stories though. Your newest book, before you go: an Offering came out in 2025. What do you wish more people knew about this project? Everything I have ever written. All the roads I've gone down and the Portals I've walked through lead me to this book. To the Work of me metaphysically looking my Mother in her eyes and saying, I Love you and I know that you Love me. It has Opened the doors for me to extend forgiveness to myself for the ways that I feel I failed as a Mother. And this tending has manifested grace that I now see and feel in every aspect of my Life. Ultimately - this the book is an Offering for the reader. My prayer is that it supports Opening/Shifting/healing for those that Journey with it as they walk with and tend to whatever shards of Love that is broken inside of them that they choose to focus on. What spots in LA do you recommend writers visit if they’re seeking inspiration or community? Well, I know this is not really a response to that question...but here is what that question makes Rise in me . . . For me it has always been about people vs places. Growing up here and having returned home after having lived away for 28 years, this is still true. Los Angeles is huge. It is FILLED with incredible people, organizations, events, gatherings, happening and neighborhoods that Offer global experiences - powerfully/beautifully/and connectedly. For instance, one of my all time favorite/don't miss L.A. happenings is FandangObon, which I got to know about and become a part of because I had the Blessing of being in Circle with it's founder, Nobuko Miyamoto, at the Art2Action and Pangea World Theater's National Institute for Directing and Ensemble Creation, in Minneapolis, MN. (which Laurie Carlos introduced me to back in the day). FandangObon is, to me, a perfect example of the real L.A. One that gathers/welcomes/and activates cultures-traditions-people from many places in magnificent powerful art filled Circles. No genre can hold you. Your plays are poetic and musical and leap off the page into interactive, communal performances/rituals. Who are your inspirations for writing that defies boundaries? To name just a few: My mentors, that I listed above. The elders in my blood family. Plus (not in order): Langston Hughes Sekou Sundiata Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Urban Bush Women Ntozake Shange Michelle T. Clinton Nobuko Miyamoto Tons of great books, music and documentaries have Inspired me. Like: Tootie’s Last Suit, All on a Mardi Gras Day and Zarico "Field to Factory: Voices of the Great Migration: Recalling the African- American Migration to the Northern Cities" by Smithsonian Folkways Video and audio: Schomburg’s Louis Armstrong Jazz Oral History Project Katherine Dunham’s book, Island Possessed Clip of her field work (Sango) Satchmo, My Life in New Orleans, by Louis Armstrong The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus by Murray Schwartz and Peggy Schwartz Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe by Gayle Wald Africans in Colonial LA., by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall Faith In Time: The Life Of Jimmy Scott, by David Ritz To Be or Not to Bop, Memoir by Dizzy Gillespie The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabelle Wilkerson My wife, Dr. Omi Osun Joni L. Jone's seminal book, Theatrical Jazz: Performance, Àṣẹ, and the Power of the Present Moment And MUCH MORE!! What is feeding you these days? My grandbaby. The sense of awe and wonder and discovery that I experience when I with her. The Blessing that I get to Know/and Fully feel - that she is the evidence that Love Is. You were Torch Magazine’s very first featured ‘Flame’ in 2006! In that interview, when asked to define success, you said “how I’m living is a reflection of my success.” If you could, what would you tell your twenty-years-ago self about how you’re living now? I decided to pull a dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/dem Blessing in response to this. See the attached card (#28): How can people support you right now? Join my mailing list: https://sharonbridgforth.com And DON'T TAG "me" on no social media - I ain't there, so if you see "me" it ain't me. I am only on Substack (where mostly I just read what other people write vs a lot of posting). Name another Black woman writer people should know. Alexis Pauline Gumbs ### Torch Literary Arts is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats. Click here to support Torch Literary Arts.

Audrey Patricia Williams (she/her) is a queer Caribbean writer and journalist whose work lives at the intersections of culture, identity, and womanhood. Moving between features, interviews, and cultural commentary, her storytelling holds a magnifying glass to the Black experience, exploring its tensions as much as its beauty. As a Brooklyn native raised by Guyanese immigrants in the American South, Audrey’s perspective is rooted in both curiosity and connection. Her work has appeared in ESSENCE, Inc. Magazine, New York Magazine, Refinery29, and Bustle. Audrey is also a co-director of the award-winning short documentary Black Girl Church. Currently, she is working to create supportive spaces for Black writers and build community as organizer of The Word, a literary salon series based in Atlanta. Pottery Lesson I was a lump of clay once. An unformed thing: soft, pliable. Passed from hand to hand, I began to take shape, though I didn't know it was happening at the time. Truthfully, I didn't know much about any of what was happening to me then. Only that I was, and if I was going to continue to be, I would have to learn what each push and pull required of me. During that throwing time, a kind of childhood, I was wedged between heavy hands and rigid surfaces. I was centered by the steady spin of women made to care for me. In their palms and under curled fingers, I felt the clutch of a people who'd had too much taken away to allow themselves a weak grasp. Weakness, too close to slackness, was a forbidden state for anything in their reach—children included. Girl children especially. It was a thing I learned in small ways and big ways: you do not kick your shoes off and leave them anywhere you please (you slide them neatly, side by side, under the bed); when you bathe, don't just stand under the water (scrub well with soap so you don't become a dirty-skinned red girl); look at me when I talk to you (to do so is to show respect and to not is to get a swift slap each time until you remember). The women found weakness in me in places I'd never think to look, and mostly, I hated them for it. But what I felt more than hate, or maybe just tangled up within it, was awe. I wanted to shape myself. I wanted hands like theirs. Hands that knew what to do. The first thing I asked to be taught was how to wring a washcloth dry. There was nothing a young woman was judged by more than her cleanliness. Being in charge of my own was the first responsibility they gave me once I graduated from the protection of childhood. At six, I could wash my own face, I could brush my own teeth, I could wipe my own ass. They just had the final say as to whether I'd done it right. Every morning, I got myself ready for school, and every morning I presented myself for approval. The greased-face, pink-tongue, clean-tail, were fine. The bathroom, the place I’d done it all, rarely ever was. The most consistent complaint: water, in collected pools and puddles, around the sink. The washcloth I left hanging always held more water than my hands could squeeze out, and the drip-drip-drip of what was left betrayed me. Its wet mess turned me dirty in my caregivers’ eyes. When I could no longer bear the suck-tooth, cut-eye disgust of the women who knew how to control water, I sent myself to the wheel. "That’s what you does call dry?” Twisting soaked terrycloth, I looked at the stern-faced Trinidadian woman I called grandmother standing behind me, over me, through the bathroom mirror. Worry whirred inside me. I tried to center myself against the flattened tone of her sing-song island patois. Her eyes, ringed with the milky blue-gray of their years, were still sharp. Even translated by a reflection, they told me the question didn’t call for an answer, just an action. “Fold it over and do it again.” The weight of being watched by a woman who missed nothing made my body stiff with uncertainty. My hands, small enough to fit in hers twice, were already red and raisined. As far as I knew, the towel was dry. I saw the water gush, I heard it squelch. Still, she pushed. And so, I gave, the fibers digging into me with each opposing turn—my left hand away from me, my right hand toward me, wrists pleading—until the damp cloth stung my palms, now raw. Water quietly trickled through my fingers. I untwisted the towel and turned to hold it up before her. She looked at it (I prayed not a drip would fall), then looked at me (I prayed I didn't look too proud), and took it. I studied her hands as she retwisted the cloth. They’ve held me since I was a two-month-old baby, motherless and new. The first things I knew were what they sounded like against a Sunday tambourine—staccato, sure—and what they felt like against my face—hot, hard. Hers were the only hands I’d ever seen lift steaming buss-up-shut right from the ghee-slick tawa pan and clap-clap the roti, revealing its flaky, papery layers. And though I hadn’t seen them do this myself, I believed when she told me they used to take heavy, cotton linens from rich, British houses and wash them—“scrub, scrub, scrub, like so, here”—with lye and hot, soapy water against ridged steel washboards. Her hands were both hope and haunt. And when she unfurled the washcloth, not able to extract any more water from its exhausted fibers, mine had become the same. This was the way it went with all of the women who shaped me. Daughters and mothers and daughters-turned-mothers, many of whom are now long dead or long gone, told me how to be, and I was. Each one my maker, yet none quite my mother, entrusted with the soft earth of an unclaimed girl, appointed with giving her a form worthy of fire. But even after the kiln, clay has memory. It warps, it twists, it bends, the tension of the firing at odds with the tension of its many-handed shaping. What you end up with is an imperfect vessel struggling to remember what was against what must be. I’m beginning to remember. Maybe because I have a daughter now, and she, too, is an unformed thing. I see her—plastic, workable—and wonder whose hands I am using. My sink hasn’t been dry since she could reach it, but on her own, she can get her ass close to clean. She understands a tongue, when properly brushed, should be pink, though I still ask her to stick her tongue out after brushing to show me. “Ahhh,” she goes. “Ahhh,” I reply, our twin tongues lolling about. We go through jars of Palmer’s cocoa butter by the scoopful, her face glistening from forehead to chin in excess. “Baby, I told you you don’t need that much, you’re wasting it,” I warn, feeling my grasp tighten, seeing her contract in response. I stop myself from telling her, “at your age, I had to…” because at her age I know I was only being shaped, not loved. And now, a daughter-turned-mother myself, I want her to know my heart before she knows my hands. So if I must warp and twist and bend after all this time, I will warp and twist and bend myself into a mother who knows how to hold her child in both. ### 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.

Jae Broderick is an award-winning lyricist, librettist, composer, and the author of DeConstructing Criticism and Or You Could Just Not. When she isn’t working, Jae can be found practicing her backhand or on a plane to somewhere amazing because, um, “writers need to experience things.” Documenti is excerpted from her forthcoming novel, A Few Good Years. Documenti Puglia. 2025. Zia said it was because of the grapes. That the flies infecting every corner of the città were drawn south by the fertilizer i contadini used to sweeten the soil. Acres and acres of vines laden with fruit were slowly ripening under the Mediterranean sun, too bitter to eat but perfect for wine. The farmers covered the vines to avoid the many enemies that lay waiting to spoil the crop. Rain, wind, rot and pests. But the flies were patient. Persistent. They seemed ambivalent about the grapes and chose instead to cosplay mosquitoes. Hovering, circling, dodging, disappearing just long enough to be forgotten, then reappearing as a barely perceptible touch on bare skin that vanishes long before flailing hands fanned the air where they had been. They did not bite. They only bothered. There was no peace. At the Ministero della Giustizia, where we waited outside the guard’s window, there were no flies. There, in that blessed stillness, Zia was trying to convince the guards to allow me, an American, to visit my Italian cousin in prigione. The guard began shaking her head almost as soon as Zia started. “Mia nipote vive a New York e non…” Shake shake shake…the guard looked towards her colleague. “Per favore, è solo per un’ora…” Shake shake shake…then rapid Italian no amount of duolingo could help me understand. Zia was working hard to get me into prison. Please let her in this prison. Please let her see her family. Per favore. Something about Zia’s pleading made my stomach turn. The irony was too much. When my plane took off from JFK, I’d felt relief in leaving America and her chaos behind. The country was trapped in a death spiral and we all knew it. Some watched mournfully. Others cheered. It was as though the civil war had never ended. Perhaps it had not. I’d envisioned spending the next month bouncing between the Adriatic and the Mediterranean, making side trips to Spain and Switzerland, basking in the glory of Rome and vino vino vino. But instead of escaping a prison, I found myself outside one. Per favore. The guards wanted documenti. I offered my passport but it wasn’t enough. They needed something to prove that Zia and I were family. Such a document did not exist. Zia was an outside baby. My father’s father had an affair with Zia’s teenage mother and promptly discarded her when she fell pregnant. Zia moved to England with her mother, then to Italy on her own. It wasn’t until 40 years later that Zia learned she had a brother. They enjoyed a mostly joyous decade-long reunion until he died suddenly. Between them there had been remembrance and resemblance, but no documenti. I shrugged to let Zia know that it was ok to give up. Her eyes apologized. I smiled my thanks and went outside. The prigione lies mere steps from the seaside. What cruel irony is this? To smell the sea but never feel it. I sit on a bench, close my eyes, and listen to trickling water. Not of the sea but the fountain before me. It is a monument built to commemorate soldiers lost in World War II. Their names etched in stone and remembered for posterity. I felt a sudden anger rising. Where are our monuments? What is posterity without documenti? Where is our proof of life? Opening my passport, I stared at the face it held. Lineage remembered in my mother's nose, my grandmother’s cheekbones, my father's eyes. My great-grandmother was born in St. Mary, Jamaica, just two generations out of slavery. Birth announcements came by word of mouth in conversations between neighbors going to and from the river. My grandmother was born in Oracabessa under a British flag. She remembers waving to European tourists as they passed through on their way to parts of the island she would never see. Her birth certificate says she was born in January, but her mother told her she was born in July, and since she is far more Leo than Capricorn, they chose a day and celebrate her in the summer. Among her generation, few know their real birthdays. My mother was born in Jack’s River eight years before the island gained its independence. In those days, births were registered in government offices a day’s journey away. If a friend of a friend were traveling to the city, they may be so kind as to register your child’s birth for you. And if in the chaotic swirl of buses, trains, dust, and a hot sun, they forgot the name you’d requested, you said thank you and accepted the name that was given. All but one of my grandmother’s six children migrated. They took what documenti they had and spread across the globe like so many before them. Europe, England, Canada, America, but not Africa. Although they came from distinct cultures, they were dismayed to find the world had merged their histories into a tribe called Hue, and that their experiences would differ in accent but not in meaning. There were rules. Assimilate Know your place Love yourself in theory Derive specialness from your isolation Celebrate their goodness Forgive them their silences Marry them Smile at their jokes Glide over subtext Demur Hate your hair Defer Revel in being the only Demote your language Embrace theirs Never forget you’re not protected Last night, as the bells rang out in the square, I had observed with delight the ancient rituals. Nonna and her sisters huddled together nodding and speaking at once, children playing football under a full moon, and old men surveying the scene in a synchronized passeggiata. Zia moved through all of it like a swan. Hips softly swaying, Hermes scarf slung across her shoulders, high heels barely touching the cobblestoned streets, eyes gazing at nothing in particular, her gait an armor designed to protect from the silence that hung in the air after her unanswered buona seras. No one sees how furiously the swan kicks beneath the surface just to keep going. That glide comes with a cost. We who know, know. I was born in a hospital. I am only five generations out of slavery, and my documenti will not save me. Zia emerged from the Ministero della Giustizia, her eyes haunted by what I had not seen. “How is Cousin?” I asked. “She’s depressed. She wants to come home.” Zia said. I’ve been in Italy for a week and I still don’t know what Cousin did. Zia has a way of talking in circles, then changing the subject to food. Works every time. I link my arms with Zia’s and we walk together. Family. A light breeze blows as we head towards the parking lot followed by a halo of flies. ### 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.

Ryane Nicole Granados has always called Los Angeles her home, and her writing finds its roots in her love of her community. She is inspired to write stories of survival that magnify the marginalized while also unearthing the splendor of second chances. Named the 2021 California Arts Council Established Writer and Individual Arts Fellow, Ryane currently teaches at Loyola Marymount University, where she also serves as the Associate Director of the Academic Resource Center. Her work has been featured in various publications, including Pangyrus , The Manifest-Station , High Country News , The Atticus Review , and LA Parent Magazine . Her storytelling has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and showcased in KPCC’s live series Unheard LA . As the winner of the 2023 Leapfrog Press Global Fiction Prize, her novella, The Aves , is officially out now. Flammable    I don’t believe in New Year’s Resolutions, but I do like the feeling of being able to start again. A new calendar year counts by increments of one, similar to the box breathing method my therapist claims will help manage my anxiety. Four structured rhythmic counts, four seasons, four chances to get it right. Inhaling for four, holding for four, exhaling for four, and holding for four again.   It’s winter and I’m in the holding stage. Holding all the weight from a heavy year. The problem is, I’m not a weightlifter. My strength has always been in my legs. I’m a runner. I used to be exceptionally fast, but these last few years have caught up with me. I can no longer outrun the anxiety, so winter becomes my new favorite season. The season for rest and reflection. The time to pause and hold tight because at midnight, you get to burn it all down.   It’s New Year's Eve day of 2024, and we’ve been gifted the opportunity to escape the city. My Midwest husband is missing black sky and visible stars while my kids are in that vortex of time between Christmas chaos, school hiatus, and a break from youth sports. Like toy spinning tops, they all resemble stored up energy quickly turning into kinetic energy and frying my central nervous system with their rotational motion. The permanence of a mountain feels like a perfect solution to their unchecked boredom. After an impromptu five-hour drive from our modest home in Los Angeles, we arrive at a luxurious family cabin in picturesque Mammoth. Ringing in the new year atop a snow-covered summit has to be a sign that things are finally looking up.   As we inch our oversized truck into the garage, the doors fly open and my mother, the kids, my husband, and our dog all pile out of the car in a frantic race for bathrooms. The house is so large there is literally a bathroom for everyone. I know this because my preschool-aged daughter begins to run around counting them. Our potty training has paid off, and her New Year’s goal is to make sure she uses each bathroom at least once before we leave. As for me, I just want room to breathe, space to spread out, and the warmth of a fire in a place where no one complains about my need for constant heat. It turns out anxious people can feel colder than their calm counterparts. The body’s constant fluctuation between fight or flight diverts blood flow away from the skin.   “I found my favorite bathroom,” yells my daughter. “It’s mine and so is the room with the bunk beds. No boys allowed!” My daughter is a tyrant. I’m both irritated by and proud of this reality.   The kids all fan out into personal spaces and my teenage son mumbles a request for Wi-Fi. I ignore him. He is indignant. There’s a New Year’s party he wants to attend. Instead, he is stuck with us: His anxious mother, his fatigued father, his spirited grandmother, his animated younger brother, and his tyrant little sister. We are the party. I brought black and gold party favors. There’s a fresh dusting of powder surrounding the entire house. My middle son explains it’s called a snowpack. He’s been researching all things Mammoth the entire drive up. It turns out with each new heap of powder it becomes more and more compact. Was the snowpack an actual depiction of our crappy year? One thing after the next and the next. A pile on of epic proportions.   “I’m hungry,” shouts our snowpack scholar.   “No, I’m hungry,” retorts the tyrant not to be outdone.   Trying to get back in the teenager’s good graces, I tell him he can pick where we eat. I hope there’s delivery, because I have no intention of moving from my window seat.   Slouched in front of the glass-encased fireplace, I’m filled with a consistent but unfamiliar sensation of comfort. It’s a cocoon of heat that envelops me. I let out an embarrassingly loud exhale and slump further into relief.   A smell from my childhood takes shape. A mix of flammable plastic and hair grease. I’m taken back to the days of box braids. After hours of sitting, you knew the torture was complete because the neighborhood braider would pull out a BIC lighter and seal the ends with a wrist flick technique. Box braids. Box breathing. That’s the smell. Smoke melding with synthetic fibers. The nostalgia’s soothing until reality sets in.   First, it’s the hair on my neck, then the sound of crackling pops. Tiny explosions of heat and moisture begin to race from the tips of my braids. My daughter screams as I simultaneously register what’s happening. The flames, while even behind the glass, created enough heat to set my braids on fire. Wax begins to stick to my sweater and skin. The volume increases on the now chorus of shrieks:   “Mommy’s hair is all burned up!” hollers the tyrant.   “What do you mean burned up?” shouts my mom.   “Burned up!”   “What?”   “Burned up! Burned up! Burned up!”   “What?”   The chant of “what’s” feels like salt in the wound of freshly installed braids now burned to a crisp.   I smack the bottom half of my hair until it feels like layers of broken coal.   One of my sons, I can’t even tell which one at this point, utters an obnoxious, “You’re cooked!”   Tears well up in my eyes. I storm into the primary bathroom and slam the door.   I can overhear my mother telling a detailed account of how Michael Jackson also set his hair on fire. A 1980’s Pepsi commercial. A pyrotechnic malfunction with far greater fanfare than my fiery story.   “So how was your holiday?” A coworker will ask.   “It was fine. We went to Mammoth. The kids built a snowman. Oh, and I set my braids on fire!”   Sitting on the bathroom floor, I sob. Box braids. Box breathing. My internal monologue tries to remind me there’s a distinct difference between a panic attack and a heart attack. I am not dying, but I am incensed.   My husband taps on the door and asks, “How bad is it?”   I cry even harder. “I can help you take them down,” he mutters.   The last time my husband unbraided my hair I wasn’t on the precipice of perimenopause. Instead, I was in premature labor, giving birth to our now 11-year-old son. In hysterics, I decided I could no longer tolerate eight-minute-long “titanic contractions” and braids attached to my scalp. While regaling the nurses with anecdotes of how he took paramedic classes in college, he used surgical-grade scissors to clip and unravel my braids.   I look up at the bathroom door and let out a distressed “I just need five minutes.” Then I type an SOS text to my girlfriends that I set my hair on fire. I provide pics. I beg them to tell me it's not that bad. I warn them not to say the phrase “What?”   With breakneck intensity, a barrage of firework memes appears on my phone, followed by declarations of “Damn!” and “Now you’re really hot!”   I throw my hair up in a bun and go sledding with my kids. Back home, a week later, the Santa Monica Mountains are engulfed in flames. I finally begin to unbraid my hair while watching a steady stream of news stories detailing fires in Palisades and Altadena. The devastation is historic. Over 50,000 acres are destroyed. California is known for its Santa Ana winds, but this time it is hurricane-force spirals stoking flames and spreading destruction.   A soot-like ash coats my fingertips. This adds to my struggle of separating the strands of acrylic extensions from my own natural hair. Box braids. Box breathing. Old baggage and anxiety disentangle as tales of unimaginable loss overtake Los Angeles.   A high school burns down. They are the rivals of my son’s school. Senior year milestones are scorched. A stone-faced newscaster announces that the death toll has increased.    Two things that bring cities together are sports teams and tragedy. With the earth eroding under our feet and embers falling from the sky like snowflakes, donation drives and fire recovery efforts transform remaining schools into shelters and safe havens. Rivalry is replaced with utility. It all puts my combustible plaits into perspective.   The bank says we have forty-five days to pay the remaining balance on the taxes on our home. My mail carrier looks sad when he hands me the certified letter. I’m sure my therapist would say he’s an empath. Visibly excited with a toothy grin when he gets to stuff our box with birthday or holiday greetings. Pensive and despondent as he points with his pen to the multiple lines where I need to sign my receipt of threatening bank notices. I want to comfort him and tell him it will be okay. My therapist would call this hyper empathy leading to my emotional burnout. That’s the thing about the American Dream. It’s an absorption of other people’s pain and hopes and desires. It’s all good in theory: marriage, house, kids, dog. What’s that they say about death and taxes and life’s inevitabilities? Again, it’s all good until you’ve been hanging on like a circus acrobat from one disaster to the next.   Just hanging on a little while longer now. It’s springtime. New opportunities are on the horizon. We managed to save the house. The roof leaks in one of the back rooms, but it’s okay because it never rains in Southern California. It hasn’t rained in Los Angeles since last spring. The prolonged drought created the perfect fuel for fire. But the remarkable thing about spring is that wildflowers still manage to grow. Even in burned soil, they sprout and lead to vibrant displays of orange, yellow, and red blooms. For more California adornment, rumors report that Green Day will be performing at Coachella. I can once again accept my fate as an “American Idiot” and a “Basket Case.”   The tyrant is in tears because a little girl in her class wears her hair in French braids. The tyrant wants a French braid, too, but I don’t know how. I look it up on YouTube. I’m still confused. The video instructs: start with three sections at the crown like a regular braid, but then add in smaller pieces from the side to make a French braid. It sounds simple enough. It’s the moving all the hairs over to one hand during the cross-over portion that I'm failing at. The tyrant begins to cry again. I’m taken back to the bathroom floor of Mammoth. A Black girl and her braids. Tears of joy and sometimes tears of sorrow.   I’m determined to get this right, for her, for me. Using my pinky as a base, I begin to develop an overhand rhythm that allows me to weave in the extra strands. Like the rope turner in a game of double dutch, I keep telling myself, just don’t lose grip. In the end, the braid is mediocre at best. Secure in some areas and loose in others, but to my surprise, the tyrant is all smiles. Another winter break comes around again. The kids are in the season of bookends. The tyrant has started TK, the snowpack scholar turned soccer player is in 6th grade, and the teenager is applying to college. There are so many beginnings and so many endings. Now I feel like the toy that’s spinning.   On Christmas Eve, I hand my husband one final box. There are specific packing instructions. Fragile. Keep upright. Avoid stacking. It's a toy kitchenette for the tyrant. She wanted it because the stove makes the sound of real fire. The packing instructions feel more like affirmations for life. We are fragile, but we fight to remain upright. The stockpile of 2025 tested all of our endurance.   On New Year's Eve, California receives torrential rain. Up and down the coastal state, the once dry land is covered in water. This year, we don’t have to wait until spring for rainfall. It’s as if the land remembers that just a year before our cities were consumed by a destructive blaze. Despite the weather, the teenager wants to go be with friends. Unlike last year, I concede. I then spend the rest of the evening listening to the pounding drops. Wrapped in a heated blanket, I wait for his key to turn the lock. I periodically peek at the ripples in the ceiling of our backroom. I know the watermarks are warning signs. I know this means we will likely need a new roof. I also know that even as moisture causes the texture to separate from the sheetrock, we’ve already proven we can survive a lot. Still no New Year's resolutions for me, but I’ll accept the slightest resemblance to a little tyrant’s French braid: steady at times and wobbly at others, but not letting go until I finally get to the very end. ### 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.

Joy tabernacle KMT-Battle  iz a Two-head Blackwoman, Opulence, mother, lover & crowned Hoodoo Queen. As a writer, she has received residencies and fellowships from Heinz, MacDowell, Callaloo, Vona & Periplus. They are published in many places, including Callalloo and Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color , Pluck! The journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture , Jazz and Culture , Hayden’s Ferry Review , Pittsburgh Poetry Review, and more. She is the winner of the Discovery Prize from Black Poetry Review. Her work is informed by maroon futurisms, liberation, spiritual fugitivity, & very very Black space-time. She iz the cofounder of North Star Hoodoos, an affiliated marronage of Spirit Workers claiming ownership of the freed self. She iz a traveling ritualist & broommaker with Rootwoman Broomcraft & Apothecary. funerary rites we pulled the bowels outta hell, rinsed the blood off in the murky monongahela let them lay, soaking sun, in the abandoned lot of wild grasses, til they bleached ghost white, twisted and worked them into silk dyed them indigo with our bruises brown with the iron of our city + slivers of our own war-groomed spines wove them with our teeth + nails into ring shout regalia danced with our toes deep in the coal split tarred cracks of the East Hills shopping center, one rum and coke from denise & earl’s, spit libations, one quarter shuffle for every dead girl who didn’t make it out with us. one quarter shuffle for every part of us who ain’t make it out neither. ### 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.

Born in Jackson, Tennessee, JUSTICE is a rising film director, screenwriter, and producer. After attending film school at Belmont University, JUSTICE began her career in film and television by crewing on various local productions. While gaining insight into the inner workings of the industry, she simultaneously tends to the hunger of telling her own stories.  JUSTICE believes the world lacks perspectives in Black stories rooted in societal abnormality, social commentary, and speculative fiction. Now, on a warpath to introduce planet Earth to the worlds of her imagination, JUSTICE is steadily showcasing her unique and evolving vision, one project at a time. Currently, JUSTICE is in the pre-production phase of her latest film project, The Infomercial — a biting satire that dismantles the "urban renewal" industrial complex. Through this project, she explores the predatory nature of corporate redevelopment and the radical resistance of those who refuse to be erased. Whether it’s through her nonprofit work of supporting Black filmmakers or her immersive film and media campaigns that blur the line between fiction and reality, JUSTICE’s work serves as a cinematic bulwark against cultural erasure. JUSTICE continues to live and work in Nashville, TN, where she is actively building a legacy that ensures Black stories remain—like the communities they depict—unapologetic and "Not For Sale." THE INFOMERCIAL FADE IN INT. DYLAN’S LIVING ROOM - DAY DYLAN (25, Black Male) sits in his living room, monotonously flipping through TV channels like a magazine. TELEVISION Oh Johnny, I love you more than you will ever know… He clicks. TELEVISION (CONT’D) (Male) Survey says!! (bing sound, then audience says:) Aw! He clicks. TELEVISION (CONT’D) (sirens and gunshot blare) They’re gaining on us! Floor it! He clicks. TELEVISION (CONT’D) Is your home in desperate need of renovations? Suddenly, a piece of drywall falls from the ceiling at his bare feet. His eyes wander up to the ceiling, then back to the television. He stays. TELEVISION (CONT’D) Or maybe times are just tough, and the cost of housing is just too much for you to handle? An EVICTION NOTICE sits on a small coffee table nearby. We now see the small TELEVISION that’s displaying an infomercial. As camera dollies into the TV, we leave Dylan and enter the world of “The Infomercial”... the aspect ratio slowly shifts from 16:9 to 4:3. PHILL LEE (50s, White Male) takes the lead from here: EXT. NEIGHBORHOOD - DAY Phill smiles boldly front of a small, older house. PHILL LEE Whatever the case may be, we’re here to help you … Hi, I’m Phill Lee, and I’m here to tell you about my company, ProjEX, where we take homes like this... The house behind him is nostalgic : a couple flower planters hang by the porch chairs. The window is barred with an A/C unit, and a small bike lies in the slightly overgrown grass. Black people live here... PHILL LEE (CONT’D) And turn them into this... Suddenly, the house and all its surroundings collapse to the ground... it was a backdrop . Phill now stands in front of NEW, MODERN HOME with big, open windows and at least three stories. You know the type... CUT TO: INT. POLITICIAN’S OFFICE - DAY We’re back in 16:9 aspect ratio. A POLITICIAN is sitting at a desk. Phill stands close behind. PHILL LEE (V.O) ProjEX is a state-funded initiative to clean up the unkept neighborhoods of our blossoming city. The politician STAMPS “APPROVED” on a paper and passes it to Phill with a smile. Phill grins back. BACK TO: EXT. NEIGHBORHOOD - DAY (4:3 Aspect Ratio) Phill walks from in front of the new house and down the street. As he continues, the houses behind him look more like the first house in the backdrop. BLACK KIDS and NEIGHBORS are barbecuing, playing ball & cards -- enjoying life’s simplicity in the background. PHILL LEE Let’s face it... you work hard for your home, you deserve to enjoy living in it. CUT TO: INT. DYLAN’S LIVING ROOM - CONTINUOUS (16:9 Aspect Ratio) Dylan listens intently to Phill. PHILL LEE (V.O) (CONT’D) Plus, the city is growing! You don’t wanna be left behind! Through the window, we see Phill and a CAMERA CREW walk past. BACK TO: EXT. NEIGHBORHOOD - CONTINUOUS (4:3 Aspect Ratio) Phill walks into frame and sits on the porch stairs of MIKE INGLEMAN (40s) house. Another UN-GENTRIFIED house. Mike is confused on who Phill is. PHILL LEE We understand... So, here’s what we’ll do: We’ll come in, evaluate the cost of renovation, and we pay for it, full price! Mike’s head snapped to Phill in shock. PHILL LEE (CONT’D) You heard me! Full Price! We bring so much good to the community that the government funds us to serve you! Mike nods, pretty impressed. PHILL LEE (CONT’D) (smiling to camera) Take it away Karen! INT. MIKE’S KITCHEN - DAY KAREN is the voice of the infomercial. We never see her. Mike stands in the kitchen, arguing on the phone. KAREN (V.O) You could call someone to fix it, but that’s expensive! And your landlord may not be prioritizing your needs. Defeated, Mike hangs up his house phone and hangs his head. EXT. MIKE’S ROOF - DAY Mike stands on a ladder, trying to repair his roof. The ladder is wobbling. KAREN (V.O) And although those social media videos are cute, you can’t really “do-it-yourself”, can you? PHILL enters. He looks at the ladder’s placement with a judgmental squint. He "tsks" and straightens the base to be perfectly level—pulling the legs out just enough for Mike to lose his balance. Mike screams as he FALLS off the ladder. Mike lies injured on the ground, slightly rolling amidst the pain. A beat later, A pair of pristine, chocolate-brown loafers waltz in right next to Mike’s head. Phill squats down and lays a piece of paper and a pen on the ground. It’s a CONTRACT. Slowly and still in the grass, Mike rolls over onto his stomach, grabs the pen, and signs the contract. Phill takes the paper and stands to his feet. KAREN (V.O) (CONT’D) So let us do it. The right way. The ProjEX way. With the pen still wedged between his fingers, Mike extends his hand to Phill like a fallen soldier seeking a rescue. Phill reaches back, a savior’s hand descending toward Mike’s palm. But at the last millisecond, Phill’s hand PIVOTS -- not for Mike’s hand, but for the pen. With a practiced flick, Phill nabs the pen, turns, and walks away in one smooth motion. Mike, already leaning his full weight into the anticipated hoist, finds only empty air. Mike face-plants back into the dirt with a muffled THUD. As he hits the ground, we hear his voice: MIKE INGLEMAN (V.O) I’m not gon lie... I was a little scared at first. EXT. NEIGHBORHOOD - MIKE’S TESTIMONIAL - DAY Mike talks to camera, looking off at what is assuming to be the camera crew. He gives the viewers at home a personal testimonial. He’s definitely that overexcited “Unc”. MIKE INGLEMAN I was like, “What’s the catch? What’s the catch?” But... I ain’t found one yet, so sounds like an offer I can’t refuse to me! As he excitedly smiles at camera, two PROJEX WORKERS on the porch THROW Mike’s belongings into the lawn, using no care at all. They’re dressed in full blue or red jumpsuits decorated with spray-painted white stars or stripes. They also have safety glasses and construction masks on. KAREN (PRE-LAP) You betcha it is! EXT. STREET - DAY RAY CEST (70s), Mike’s landlord, also gives his testimonial. He stands in front of what used to be Mike’s house, but is now a construction site. ProjEX Workers are building on-site. Karen continues: KAREN (V.O) Not a homeowner? Not a problem! Landlords love working with us. RAY CEST I love ProjEX! They just take the problem right off of my hands. He grins. KAREN (PRE-LAP) And neighbors love us too! EXT. STREET - DAY JEN TRAFIER gives her testimonial standing in front of her gentrified house. JEN TRAFIER I actually used ProjEX for my home. I loved it. It’s very easy and I’d recommend it for anyone. KAREN (PRE-LAP) But wait, there’s more! A bright blue (PowerPoint) slide takes over the screen with the company’s phone number and information. The infomercial video continues in the top left corner. KAREN (V.O) (CONT’D) If you call right now, we’ll include a free include in-ground pool installation! The video shows a series of shots constructing the house, and placing new belongings and decorations, like Hobby Lobby canvases and pictures of a white family. KAREN (V.O) (CONT’D) That’s right. Call right now at 1-800-615-6455 to schedule your renovation today! That’s 1-800-615-6455. (16:9 Aspect Ratio) As a ProjEX Worker is walking by outside, the kids’ ball rolls over to his feet. He looks over to the kids, who are already running from his glance. A neighbor also pulls out and opens mail from her mailbox…it’s an eviction letter. She sighs and looks to a fellow neighbor at his mailbox, who shakes their head and holds up the same thing. EXT. MIKE’S DRIVEWAY - DAY (4:3 Aspect Ratio) Mike’s house is done -- big, open windows and three stories high just like the one earl. Mike and Phill address the camera together. MIKE INGLEMAN My home looks great. Thanks, ProjEX! Couldn’t have done it without you! He runs away from the camera to the front door of his new home. Phill keeps addressing us at home: PHILL LEE Stop sitting in your old living room and get you a new one. When Mike makes it to the porch, he turns the doorknob, but the door does not open. He jiggles the knob. Nothing. He jiggles it more. MIKE INGLEMAN (still jiggling in the background) Hey... Hey, y’all locked the door. Mike jiggles the knob again. PHILL LEE It’s a renovation so nice, you’ll practically be breaking down your new door. (to Mike) Am I right? (winks to camera) MIKE INGLEMAN (in the background) Aye, man. Y’all ain’t give me no key either. Suddenly, the door to Mike’s house swings open. He turns to find a white family standing in the door frame. MIKE INGLEMAN (CONT’D) (in the background) Mane, who the hell are y’all?! Phill does his best to talk over the quarrel behind him. Phill smiles at camera once more. PHILL LEE Call us today and start living right. We guarantee you’ll love it or you’ll give our money back! Karen? The tension at the door increases. The family is getting scared as Mike yells more. Phill still smiles to camera. The words Karen says roll up the screen. KAREN (V.O) (talking super fast) ProjEX is a registered trademark. For promotional offers, eligibility requirements, terms and conditions, age restrictions, and offer expiration dates, visit our website at www.projEX.com or see store for details. Restrictions may apply. Offer subject to change without notice. Availability varies by location. Not valid with any other offer. Call now for more information. MIKE INGLEMAN (in the background) Whatchu mean this yo’ house. This MY house. I pay the water, utility bill, insurance bill... all the bills for 106 Willington Drive! Proof?! I don’t need no damn proof for my own house. Listen, y’all got 5 seconds to get out my damn door… 1.. 2... 3... 4... Sirens sing in the background. Mike looks back. MIKE INGLEMAN (CONT’D) (running of the porch) Oh shit! PHILL LEE ProjEX, turning hoods into homes. (16:9 Aspect Ratio) The camera crew is still rolling until... CAMERAMAN Annnd cut! Phill taps the cameraman on his shoulder. PHILL LEE Got it? Alright, let’s go. INT. LIVING ROOM - DAY Dylan - still in the same spot - now sits with a lost and overwhelmed look, trying to process what he just watched. Someone knocks aggressively at the front door. Dylan gets up, not in a hurry. INT. FOYER - CONTINUOUS BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! DYLAN Hollon! Dylan quickly pulls a shirt over his head and he goes to open the door. When he does, it’s... PHILL LEE  Hi, I’m Phill Lee and I’m here to tell you about my company, ProjEX. Now, I see that your home here could use a little reno- Dylan slams the door in his face. PHILL LEE (CONT’D) (through the door) I’ll just stick the pamphlet in the door in case you change your mind. The pamphlet pokes through the door frame. Footsteps fade from the porch. Dylan turns to put his back against the door, revealing his “Hood is Home” Tee Shirt , which reads “F***Gentrification”. He walks out of frame releasing a deep breath. FADE OUT ### Torch Literary Arts  is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Dr. Malika Booker is a UK-based British-Caribbean poet and the award-winning author of Breadfruit and Pepper Seed. Malika Booker  is a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, a British poet of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage, and co-founder of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (A writer’s collective). The Anthology - Two Young, Two Black, Too Different, Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen  was recently published to celebrate Malika Poetry Kitchen’s twentieth anniversary . Her pamphlet Breadfruit , (flippedeye, 2007) received a Poetry Society recommendation, and her poetry collection Pepper Seed (Peepal Tree Press, 2013) was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre 2014 prize for first full collection. She is published with the Poets Sharon Olds and Warsan Shire   in The Penguin Modern Poet Series 3: Your Family: Your Body (2017 ).  Booker and Shara McCallum recently co-edited the issue of Stand Journal, curating an anthology of poems by African American, Black British, & Caribbean Women & Identifying Writers. Booker currently hosts and curates Peepal Tree Press’s Literary podcast, New Caribbean Voices.  A Cave Canem Fellow, and inaugural Poet in Residence at The Royal Shakespeare Company, Malika was awarded the Cholmondeley Award (2019) for outstanding contribution to poetry and elected a Royal Society of Literature Fellow (2022). Her poem The Little Miracles, commissioned by and published in Magma 75(autumn 2019), won The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (2020). Her poem Libation, published in Poetry Review (winter 2022) won The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (2023).  Jonah at the Border Did not Jonah seek to hide on a ship? Hide esp. take cover so as not to be seen or found. 2. Lay low as in secrete, huddle  up, knee to chin, palms cradling the underside of gut, while the poor boat bobbles like dumplings bubbling up in soup. All how he turn is vomit he want vomit in all the bangarang.  How he start reason with he-self like prophet. How he start wonder is when rasta man like he end up crump up down here? ••• Jonah meaning Dove.   meaning sailor or  meaning person on board ship bringing bad luck.  meaning a person jinx… ¹ •••       But when they persecute you in this city flee to the next: for verily I say unto you ²   ••• I read a book once 'Feel the Fear and do it anyway' ³ The author Susan Jeffers made it sound so easy twelve years later I still cannot jump into water (swimming pools or the ocean) for fear of water invading my eyes. •••       But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarnish from the presence…  ••• Man every passage is a risk, see how emptiness erupts  pon we tongue, sandpaper gently scraping we dark skin, that’s how you know is bad, when grated skin comforts more than what we left behind. You aint see the way news reports full up with our perilous crossings, more comforting than land left behind. The way we get painted as crowds of cockroaches  skittering over wooden floorboards. Steups!  And you blind worms can’t see we as paper dissolving in water, vanishing bodies. These days  when we get flung overboard no whale swallows  us whole to resurrect us on the third day.  ••• But the LORD sent out a great wind into the sea,  and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so the ship was like to be broken. Then the mariners were afraid, and cried every man unto his god, and cast forth the wares that were in the ship, to lighten it of them. ⁴ ••• As I write this poem I remember a Guyanese folksong we sung  in school: Itaname about how hard it is to navigate  the treacherous waters especially the jungle rapids. Captain, captain, put me ashore! I don’t want to do anymore. Itaname too much for me! Itaname gun friken me! Itaname, Itaname! Itaname! Itaname! ••• Today the News headline reads:  Horrifying new detail on death of “Jamaican men in wheel wall of the JetBlue plane: Men found in the landing gear. As I read I consider the biblical line: ⁵ but the Dove found no rest for the sole of her feet so it start climb in then crump up inna the wheel wall and so he lay coumblé trembling body beating against the wheel wall humming if I had the wings of a Dove ⁶  till lips too heavy inna the wheel wall till body start lick up itself pon wall like stick pon drum inna the wheel wall lying crump up crump up black skin resting on white metal inna the wheel wall singing this is what it sounds like when doves cry ⁷  till fingers & toes start tingle inna  the wheel wall  scared so till he could not hear the sound of his own heartbeat inna the wheel wall the sole of his feet turn ice fingers turn ice ears turn ice inna the wheel wall who will put forth his hand and ⁸   pluck him from this flight as he flees inna the wheel wall till he head start get bazodee, when the plane start rise higher inna the wheel wall thinking I’ll fly away oh glory I’ll fly away ⁹   right now from inna this wheel wall till he belly start talk in a strange tongue to turbulence bass inna the wheel wall till he start reason call out Jesus call out God call out ‘À mwè’ inna the wheel wall how he could not even take flight when ice start cover him like coffin blanket inna the wheel wall ••• Then the questions begin:  Tell us, we pray thee, for whose cause this evil is upon us; What is thine occupation? And whence comest thou? What is thy country? And of what people art thou? ¹⁰ ••• For in your poetic vision, a boat had no belly, a boat does not swallow up, a boat does not devour, a boat is steered in open skies. Yet the belly of this boat dissolves you precipitates you into a nonworld from which you cry out. The boat is a womb, a womb abyss . ¹¹ ••• Then they said unto him, What shall we do unto thee  that the sea may be calm unto us? For the sea wrought and was tempestuous. And he said unto them, Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; ••• My aunt tells me in those days they taught you to swim like Bad John: she in that fishing boat, she father belly high beyond pregnant  she brothers grinning in khaki short pants, how they palms circled  she wrists and ankles. How they stretch she out like rope, swing  she round and round then dash she in the water. That is how  they use to teach you to swim in them days. Sink or swim girl   they start shout after they just throw she out like garbage. How  she just make one big splash then start sink, how she never  fight when water start blind and deaf she tail, till she father  had to jump in, haul she out, flip she over then thump she  back, till the entire sea spill out she mouth and nose.        Till she scared water bad bad to this unholy day.  ••• The waters compressed me about, even to the soul; the depth closed me  about, the weeds were wrapped about my head   ¹² ••• It was the day to behead the chickens. The chicks I fed  scattering grain in they brown cardboard box home. Cooing  to them. Stroking they yellow. Then just so dry, they turn full blown and cranky, only pecking ankles, when ah collecting  eggs in the coop. It is the day to behead  the chickens. Watch how sun smiling pon concrete like  is an ordinary day. Watch how birds peck the ripe soursop on we little tree. Father sharpening, he cutlass. While I beg  for them. Meh little brothers catch and clench the top  of their wings in one hand. Father stoops into position.  He places the first offering between he feet. Stands on  them wings. I flee. If you see how fast, I tear up  the wooden backstairs. Then slide under meh bed. Silent.  Meh heart a beating speaker. Fingers shaking, lying  under meh bed reading Nancy Drew. All how ah turn I can’t help think - Is what does summon the legs? What or who decides the direction of our blasted feet? Figure out how I reach under meh bed before even meh brain decide to run. Downstairs in the yard, decapitated friends  flap clumsily into they deaths, with no brain to direct them,  how long do they flap before the body knows it no longer  has a brain, before the body is beyond their fear? 1 Adapted from Online Etymology Dictionary https://www.etymonline.com/word/Jonah 2 (Matthew 10: 23 Kings James Bible (KJV) 3 Jeffers, Susan. J. (1987). Feel the Fear and do it anyway.' Fawcett Columbine 4 Jonah 1:3-5 KJV 5 Daily Mail News Article. 7 th January 2025 US Reporter Joe Hutchinson 6 Hymn lyrics taken from Psalm 55:6 sag by Bob Marley and the Wailers. Also a popular funeral song in the Caribbean Community 7 When Doves Cry – Prince and the Revolution (song) 1894. 8 Genesis 8:9 9 I’ll Fly away – Albert e. Brumley (hymn) 1932 often song at Caribbean funerals 10 Jonah 1:8 11 Glissant, Edouard, 1928-2011. Poetics of Relation. Ann Harbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987. P.5 12 Jonah 2:5 THE INTERVIEW This interview was conducted between Malika Booker and Jae Nichelle on March 18, 2026. Malika Booker Interview Questions Wow, thank you for sharing this poem. You so skillfully weave in this re-imagined story of Jonah with present, personal, and historical moments of migration—all tied together by violence in and around water. What led you to begin with Jonah? This is a great question. My current poetry project creolizes the Kings James Bible, by recasting the characters, locations and language of the KJV within the English-speaking Caribbean and its diaspora.  This epic ekphrasis project enables Black bodies to enact embodied critiques of the enduring impact of plantocracy, colonialism and patriarchy on their lives. So, I lyrically reimagine characters like the Virgin Mary telling her mother she is pregnant and it is not Joseph’s child; or Jesus vulnerable in the Garden of Gethsemane wanting to enact a nine night wake the night before he is betrayed. Mrs. Noah and Samson’s mother interrogate how the act of non-naming diminishes their worth. This reimagined story of Jonah is part of this body of work. Jonah enables me to cast a critical lens on migration globally and its impact on the people undertaking these perilous endeavors. The poem’s lyrical hybrid sequential form allows a micro and macro investigation and demonstration of the complexity of migration and its harrowing impact on the body. Here I can allude to the danger of Jonah’s journey, his disdain scorn and superciliousness towards people who were other and his reluctance to travel, as a metaphorical trope.  It also allows me to explore the western myths about Black people’s relationship to water hinting at the middle passage, while simultaneously alluding to the crossings and deaths that occur every day off the European coasts.  Fear is a throughline in this poem. What is your relationship with fear, especially when it comes up in your work?  The Black body must constantly navigate some element of fear, particularly in the diaspora. This fear (embedded in the white psyche) is responsible for the disproportionately high numbers of deaths in police custody and is an underlying current in our engagement with white society. These elements of fear began the moment we were kidnapped from the continent and continued through the middle passage, and on the plantation economy where our labour was extracted through barbaric measures and continues to present day. So, the Jonah poem enables an interrogation of multiple examples of these fears. Personally, I remember my heightened fear living through Covid with the knowledge that in Britain a disproportionate number of Black people were dying, and that yet again my body was a vulnerable thing. It is this I suppose that has led me to my poetic preoccupation with examining the way we navigate our present lives in the shadow of fear. I hope that the Jonah poem alongside other poems enable us to scrutinize our fears, bravery and a sense of adventure in the face of adversity.  In the final stanza, the speaker instinctively runs for cover under the bed and grabs a book for comfort. It reminded me of a moment in your 2023 interview with Lauren K. Alleyne  when you said you would read under your bed as a child, which opened up the worlds that would later enable you to write. Does being a writer feel like a choice you’ve made or an instinct, something inevitable? I am more of a reader than a writer, who enjoys the act of reading for the worlds I discover and the knowledge I gain. Reading had a profound impact on my life at a crucial stage of my development. As an eleven-year-old, I moved from Guyana to Britain in 1981 and was severely lonely and bullied in the school yard. So much so that I asked the librarian if I could reshelve the books during the break and read to escape the bullies and the cold weather. I would borrow twelve books a week from the local library. Imagine my joy to discover ‘Ruby’ by Rosa Guy about a young West Indian teenager who had just migrated with her family to Harlem and was experiencing the same sense of alienation and bullying as me.  Anyway, I was an avid reader, yet most books I read were filled with white characters residing in worlds alien to my upbringing.  I wanted to read about Caribbean women like my mother and aunts. I wanted books and poems to explore and reflect the vibrant, complicated characters from my community. I remember discovering Toni Morrison and Alice Walker and just knowing that I wanted to emulate what these women were doing with African American characters with Caribbean ones. I could think of nothing else I wanted to do but write. This is my vocation, my compulsion, a practice as necessary to me as breathing. In that vein, I was so moved by this  letter you wrote to your younger self,  where you said writing is “a lifelong vocation and your development hinges on all of the sacrifices it requires.” What have been some of these sacrifices for you?   Everyone wants to please their family. Imagine living with being a family disappointment for years. Mothers, aunts and uncles shaking their heads at this young woman who is wasting her life on this weird dream and squandering her potential. Why could she not aspire to be a good lawyer like so and so’s child? A writer was not the average aspiration for a child of Caribbean immigrants. My mother enjoyed reading Pepper Seed and was proud of it, yet she would still sometimes say “it’s a pity you did not become a lawyer.” When I decided to work in the arts and be a writer, I remember taking a job working in a poetry organization three days a week. I was the Poetry Educational Coordinator – placing poets into educational settings like schools and colleges to teach workshops and the pay was abysmal. On the other two days I worked freelance: conducting workshops in schools, doing arts commissions, and poetry performances.  This work was sporadic; the organizations and schools would take a long time to pay me, and I would spend a considerable amount of my pay on writing courses, so I was often broke, juggling my bills, armed with this seemingly impossible dream of working in the arts and being a writer, while investing in my writer development. I spent over fifteen years attending evening courses, retreats, and residentials committed to learning craft and becoming a better writer.  There was also a rigid determination, as demonstrated by my steadfast commitment to being accepted to Cave Canem. I spent years applying – even though I had never seen a Black British Writer attend Cave Canem before and had no idea if they would accept international writers like me. I applied repeatedly until I was eventually accepted.  I think it was a sacrifice and a blind determination for an unknown outcome, with a surety that this would somehow pay off.  If you could, what questions would you ask your older self? Am I making the right decisions? Is there anything you would do differently with hindsight?  You’ve led a masterclass for poets about how to bring poems to life on stage. What do you love to see most when a poet is sharing their work aloud?  I love, love, love listening to poets share their work aloud. I like when the poet is so rooted within the work that their voice, body, and soul seem to be working at the same time so intent on passionately conveying their words to the audience. I love when the language, musicality, and imagery converge like a well-cooked meal, and the poet assumes the right tone and temperature to translate the words on the page in a way that hypnotizes me as the reader. The best poets are the ones who make my body leave my seat, while blowing my mind and dragging out emotions I did not know I had. The poet who is best at this is Patricia Smith; it is as if her performances have taken me to the Pentecostal church, where my body rocks and I am testifying, occasionally causing a moan to escape my mouth as response to the poet’s call.  If someone were to visit you who’d never been in Leeds before, where would you take them?  I would take them to a Fish Friday at the Caribbean Cricket Club. Then we would go to a Pre-love or fashion event organized by my friends Ebony Milestone and Khadijah Ibrahiim (poet, fashion stylist, theatre maker, curator and literary activist). We must go to Jam Rock Caribbean restaurant. There is an essential pilgrimage to visit the Plaque and memorial sculpture of David Oiuwale a British Nigerian man who drowned after being chased by police officers in April 1969. The 9.5 (31ft) sculpture, named ‘Hibiscus Rising’ is a beautiful hibiscus flower designed by renowned Artist Yinka Shonibare. They could not leave Leeds without going on one of Joe Williams Heritage Corner’s Leeds Black History Walks looking at the African presence in Yorkshire. How can people support you right now? Thank you for this generous question. They can support me by buying my book ‘Pepper Seed,’ following me on Instagram, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Eventbrite, and TikTok, where they can find out about my teaching, mentoring, and performing endeavors. This can also keep up to date with publications like my forthcoming poetry collection, which will be out in Autumn 2027. On Eventbrite, they can join my mailing list and sign up for courses like  ‘Prompt-A-Mania’ (an all-day online retreat dedicated to producing drafts) and my bespoke Malika’s Monday Mentoring program – (offering bespoke 1-1 mentoring). I am also available for commissions, visiting lecturer, and/or performances.  Name another Black woman writer people should know.  Karen McCarthy Woolf – a poet of Jamaican and British descent. Her work is experimental, necessary, and innovative and has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry and the TS Eliot Prize.  Her recent novel in verse Top Dolls  has been described by Bernardine Evaristo (Booker Prize winner) as an ‘Extraordinary inventive, witty, moving and profound.” While her latest hybrid lyrical essay novel in verse and recent collection ‘Unsafe’ has been described “as an immersive mediation on place, the body, nature and the self whether it’s via tattoos, trees or totemic quality of cats” and “A moving, critical and highly intuitive epic weaving together poetry, documentary and lyric essay. For me the book is in conversation with Layli Long Soldier and Claudia Rankine.  A vital part of McCarthy Woolf’s practice is the anthologizing of Black British poets. Her latest groundbreaking ecological and environmentalist anthology is ‘Mature Matters: vital poems from the Global Majority co-edited with the poet Mona Arshi and recently longlisted for the Jhalak Prize. ### Torch Literary Arts  is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats. Click here to support Torch Literary Arts.

Temidayo Testimony Omali Odey , also known as Testimony Odey, is a graduate of English and Literature from the University of Benin. Her writing has been published in magazines and journals, including The Deadlands , Poetry Pause , The FEMINIST Magazine , Brittle Paper , Kalahari Review , Eco-Instigator , Akéwì Magazine , Rising Phoenix Review , and PoeticAfrica . Her work maps the complexities of the human experience, exploring identity, culture, and emotion through lenses of gender, Africanness, love, memory, spirituality, grief, and defiance. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Rongo Artist Residency and MAAR, and has been shortlisted for the African Human Rights Short Story Prize and Brigitte Poirson Literature Prize. Her accolades include the Nigerian Prize for Teen Authors, the inaugural African Teen Writers Awards, the HIASFEST Star Prize, and the Wakaso Poetry Prize. She is a fiction editor at NWF Journal and a fellow of the Ugly Collective. In her free time, she enjoys films, reading, singing, and philosophical conversations. She shares her work and thoughts on social media as @testimonyodey. A HUNDRED, BRILLIANT SUNS You cannot believe you won it. The sun licks your skin wet as you walk home down Agwan-Sarki Street with Eze. He says in Pidgin, “No be say after you travel, you go forget me o.”  You care about him, no doubt, but the only person you do not want to forget is Amara. Amara with eyes the colour of coconut shells. “This one you’re not answering me, I hope you’ve not already started forgetting me,” Eze jokes. A mirthful melody flows from within you, and in that moment of joy where your world is suddenly brighter than it has ever been, you pat his back and assure him solemnly, “Don’t worry, beloved, I will remember you in Paradise.”  The bend leading to your father’s compound is filled with overgrown weeds and tiny sunflowers. A seer need not open one’s eyes to see that in a few days the ugly weeds will choke the hundred brilliant suns to death. You want to save them all before that happens, fill a jar with the light and water they need to prosper. But some things you’re never meant to have the capacity to keep, no matter how much you love and want to save. Sooner or later, even in your utopia-like jar, the suns will wilt, become things made for darkness simply because they were always seeds meant for earth alone.  The compound is wide open. In it, a small, homely structure. A stark contrast to the magnificent glass mansion the retired governor of your state built in his village with diverted funds that could have helped your father mount a better structure. On the worn-out cushion, relatives squeeze themselves like sardines in a can. Each mutters prayers of protection for your journey. It is impossible to count how many times you say “amen.” They come at you like spears – the prayers, the jokes, but most of all, the glances. It feels as though their eyes are sharp microscopes gliding over every inch of your skin, and what they are searching for, you cannot tell.  “See how he’s behaving like oyibo  already,” Amaka, your younger sister, says. You suck air through your teeth and throw her a bombastic side eye. You’ve always behaved like this. How did it suddenly become an imitation of a white person? If Amara were sitting beside you, she would roll her eyes and ask you to give no thought to Amaka’s words. “She’s just a child, and children say stupid things all the time. Just a few hours more, and you’ll be left all alone...with me,” she’d whisper in your ears. The breath from her lips would tingle, your ears would feel funny, and that same funny, tingling sensation would spread through your whole body until you’d be shifting uncomfortably on the cushion, trying to hide an erection.  ☼ Yesterday, your mother leaned by the kitchen door. An aunt was grinding beans and red pepper with a blender. The smell of eggs boiling weaved its way into the parlour. You planned to take some moi-moi to Amara in the evening.  “God is so good,” your mother sighed. It was what she said whenever she felt engulfed with sadness. “May God grant you success so by the time you become a big man in America, you can come and take me out of this suffer-head country.”  Your aunties comforted her with soothing hands and words of encouragement like, “From your mouth to God’s ears. Things will be better, as long as God has secured this Visa for him.”  You imagined God holding the visa, playing a game of Eeny Meeny Miny Moe with all the people who earnestly desired to be told, “Congratulations, your visa application has been successful!”, and his lucky finger landing on you at the end of the game. Your mother sniffed, and something in you crackled. You hated to see her cry, felt your own tears stuck in your throat while hers were a river down her cheeks. Just a few months ago, one of your uncles in Texas had applied for an American Visa Lottery on your behalf. Pray he gets lucky, he had said. God must’ve been tired of seeing the roughly cemented floor leave imprints on your mother’s knee, of listening to her soft wails and pleadings asking him to show up for her son like He did for the three Hebrew children in that strange land of Babylon, because the next time your uncle called, excitement ran through his voice like blood in veins as he said, “He won it! Oh my God!”  If only your father were alive to see this day, he would have thrown a big party with white chickens bought from Orozo market. Papa went to work and never came back. You could still see your mother’s lips moving in ceaseless prayers. Surely, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was not about to turn His back on her. But only the next minute, a man called and said a six-foot dark-skinned elderly man had been found dead. The card in his pocket contained the number which he dialled. Your father always kept an identification card in his pocket. As soon as your mother dropped her phone, her lungs gave way, and she ran to Aunty Ogechi’s house. You had taken care of your younger siblings for the whole day while your mother was gone. You were only in JS2 and did not know how to tell them that someone who had just kissed their foreheads and said the Lord’s prayer with them as they ate breakfast was gone, just like that. Sometimes at midnight, you found your mother muttering unbelievably to herself, “So, my husband don die?”  When neighbours and relatives came in black clothing to offer their condolences, your mother would tell the story of how your father died to anyone and everyone: “One stupid okada man knocked him off the road as he was crossing! Imagine! My husband has been crossing this same road for decades… which kind bad luck be dis, God? ” she would whisper, her voice hoarse and stretched taut. As the first son, you felt a need to become the new ‘father.’ But your father never cried, and there you were, muffling your tears on the custard-coloured bed foam your father once slept on.  The moi-moi in your hands smelled of sauced smoked fish and ugwu. You had done a proper calculation of time before leaving home: by nightfall, Amara’s parents would be back from the community health centre where they worked as clerks. If you left now, you’d be able to spend two to three hours with Amara before they arrived. A cloud shielded the sun in the late afternoon sky as you walked to her house. You had not even knocked twice before the doorknob twisted. The look in her eyes spoke of betrayal and anger.  “What have I done this time, my love?” you said as she moved aside to let you in. “You’re travelling,” she said as a matter of fact. “I don’t understand…”  She rolled her eyes before sitting beside you on the three-sitter. “I’m leaving early tomorrow. We can’t afford to quarrel now,” you said when she wouldn’t say a word. Her fingers retied a loose Bantu knot, and she straightened her faded emerald A-gown. “We can afford to. After all, you’re the one travelling across seas where a white woman will steal your heart.”  That’s not true, you wanted to say, but how would you know what was true of a time and place you hadn’t lived in? So, you said instead, “I have sworn on my dead father’s grave that you’re the only woman I will marry, Amara, and I mean it. I will only spend a few years in America and come back for you, I promise.”  It was barely a whisper: “Like you promise-promise swear on your life promise?”  You guffawed, the sound becoming one with the brightness that filled the room, and said, “Yes, yes, I swear on my life promise.”  She told you of plans to learn shoe-making in the city soon, of opening a shop of her own at the end of the day, and of writing you a letter every day in her diary up until the day you would return for her. You enjoyed the way her lips moved as she talked.  “Can I kiss you?”  One nod from her and you felt like you just won another lottery.  You savoured the taste of unzu on her lips like it was the most delicious thing on earth. Perhaps it was. It was the best kiss of your life. Or not. Really, you had nothing to compare it to. Never had you kissed anyone apart from her before. Before you slept that night, you replayed the tryst, wondering how many years it would take for you and her to recreate such a moment again.  ☼ Everyone follows you outside when a blaring horn pierces the air. Eze brings out your black travelling bag. Your younger brothers run to open the gate. Amaka wraps her arms around your back, and your shirt stifles her cries. You run your hands through her roughly plaited hair, already overdue for a good wash with Petals Shampoo and Conditioner. “Don’t leave us,” she whispers. The driver comes down from the car, a polite smile plastered to his face as he greets everyone. Your mother wails, her body trembling as she shakes with tears. She says, “My son is leaving me” again and again. You say, “I swear I’m not. How can I?”  As the driver carefully places your bag in the boot, Uncle Eke says to your mother, “Stop crying, your son has not left to die.” Amaka sits on the floor and holds on to one of your legs, saying, “Brother, will you buy me that oyibo  shoe Cinderella used to wear in that cartoon?” Throwing your head back in a guffaw, you say, “Where in the world would I find a glass slipper?”  “So, you no go buy for me?” she cries. You say in finality, “If I see it, I will. But if I don’t, you’ll have to wait for your Prince Charming to give you one, okay?” She nods and spreads her lips wide. You can tell she is daydreaming about her Prince Charming. You imagine she conjures up images of a handsome, white man with brown eyes and hair, exactly like the Prince in Cinderella’s cartoon.  The driver glances at his wristwatch and sighs. He can sigh all day for all you care. After rounds of hugging, you walk to the car door. Before you can open it, your mother runs to you. You don’t care that it feels like she is squeezing the life out of you in her embrace. Your arms encircle her slender frame, the tears you have been managing to keep from falling finally rolling down. Slowly, she lets you go just enough to raise her arms above your head and put her rosary on your neck. “May God guide you and direct your path. Where men fail, you will succeed. You will not die,” she says, tears choking up her words. You kiss her forehead, tell her you will come back, take her abroad, and give her a better life. Her trembling intensifies. She wipes her eyes dry with the back of her palms. You want to kiss her forehead again, but you’re afraid of breaking into tears all over again. The driver starts the ignition. Amaka runs forward, her big black eyes in plea as she holds your hands. “Come back fast-fast, you hear?” Everyone laughs, and you whisper in her ears, “When I come back, I’ll get you a big job and a big car.” You have no idea why you have just said that. Would you really be able to do that when you come back? You like to imagine you would, that you’d return rich and somewhat powerful. On the road, you think of everything you’re leaving behind. When the driver speeds on the highway, you run your fingers over your mother’s rosary. You have never been much of a believer. But as the car drives into Nnmandi Azikiwe International Airport, you hope God plays another game of Eeny Meeny Miny Moe that ends with his finger pointing at you. GLOSSARY “ No be say after you travel, you go forget me o. ” / Let it not be that you forget me when you travel. oyibo / white person “ So, my husband don die? ” / So, my husband is dead? which kind bad luck be dis, God? ” / What kind of bad luck is this, God? ### Torch Literary Arts  is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Chiagoziem Jideofor is Queer and Igbo. Her work has appeared in Poetry , Michigan Quarterly Review , South Carolina Review , berlin lit , The Lincoln Review , Passages North , Commonwealth’s ADDA , the minnesota review , Sho Poetry Journal , MAYDAY , and elsewhere. She currently lives in Knoxville, Tennessee. when you claim to be from nowhere in particular  a seed doesn’t just fall off is what my grandmother would say   her ideation as crow, as sudden interest  in such conversations about origin, how she perches on the low kitchen stool, prepared for this back and forth ### Torch Literary Arts  is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats. Donate to help Torch amplify Black women writers.

Bettina Judd is the award-winning author of Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought  and patient. Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist and performer whose research focus is on Black women's creative production and use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. Her book Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern University Press, December 2022) argues that Black women’s creative production is feminist knowledge production produced by registers of affect she calls “feelin.” She is currently Associate Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. Her poems and essays have appeared in Feminist Studies , Torch , Mythium , Meridians and other journals and anthologies. Her collection of poems titled patient. which tackles the history of medical experimentation on and display of Black women won the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Book Prize and was released in November of 2014. As a performer she has been invited to perform for audiences within the United States and internationally. Black Notes in Grief (an excerpt from Feelin ) It is the sound that opens wide everything else. We touch on death in Black studies because we must. Because the condition of Black life is so often described by our proximities to death. ¹ (As in, “The only thing I have to do is stay Black and die.”) In the study of Black death, one must touch (mustn’t they?) the feeling of being in death’s wake. I wonder, in the notes to this chapter, how Black grief is in the structure of Black studies—if not this Black study. The pursuit of this question, How is grief structured within Black studies?  requires a distance from the matter of grief that I would rather relegate to the notes. This book is about feelin after all—about leaning into the affective sedulity of Black creativity and to pursue this question without attending to the experience of grief seems like an ironically performative byproduct of the “race for theory.” ² It’s much easier to talk about than do or be in grief. In the context of this project, it would be disingenuous of me to pursue this question without feelin because the real question about grief in Black studies, about Black people and grief, is . . . . . . . . . ? Because the real question is uttered in a language difficult to transcribe on the page. It is ineffable, this thing called grief, and expository propositional prose sanitizes its contents. The content of this chapter is grief—as well as I could communicate it as I wade through my own experience of grief in the process of writing this book. I wade through grief with Black studies to do this work and also to make sense of Black terror, loss, sadness, and all of the other unnamed affective experiences that grief attends to. Even that attempt to structure grief is too clinical. In my grief, Black studies, particularly Black feminist studies has been my companion—a wrenchingly honest friend. Sometimes too honest, but always there. Such brutal honesty is what I hope to learn from word work—from Black feminist writing that I reference, and from my community of friends that take Black feminism to praxis. These notes are a contemplative commons, an acknowledgment of the “wake work,” to invoke Christina Sharpe, that precedes my own. ³ The notes stop where the meditation on grief, here titled, Salish Sea begins in text, but the citations within these notes inform the poems on a cellular level. I thank Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Saidiya Hartman for crafting examples of this kind of poetic citational practice. ⁴ As these notes close, I imagine myself in a room full of these cited thinkers that I feel. (Imagine, if you will, yourself in the room as voyeur, or if you feelin me, participant.) We are talking and sharing our experiences, we present evidence, pour over archival artifacts, and wonder at what we find. We pontificate, reference, and speechify. We might even laugh. There is a point at which they all must go home, away from the din of our party and as I close the door behind them, their words, thoughts, and feelings have not left me. But, in the silence of the room in which I physically (work with me) remain, I meet myself and all of what could not be said before and after our meeting full of life-breath and sorrow comes up through my belly into my chest, my throat, and eyes. It fills me and overflows—becomes the room. This is what could be recorded. It seemed to be embedded in the language of Black life. The blues is a Black condition. The roots of the musical genre are explicitly drawn from the processes of cultural, spiritual, and bodily displacement and subjection. It would seem that a study of the aesthetics that shape the blues and its descendant musical styles would also be a study of grief, if not grievances (a point I discuss further below). Grief and grievances are cellular to the aesthetics of Black music. As Amiri Baraka notes of the antecedent of the blues, field hollers “were strident laments, more than anything.” ⁵ So cellular were these wordless affective musical riffs to Black music that for Baraka, they could be considered lyrics—lyrics that communicate the ineffable and the identifiable (i.e., This is my grief.) Follow me here. I know that the ability to think through the aesthetics of a genre does not a study of grief make. There are way too many tributaries, and often, they are less difficult to sit with than grief. But the blues would certainly be core to an aesthetic interrogation of a study of Black grief. The riff marks the communicative possibilities of expressing the ineffable contours of grief’s feeling. There is a story about Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain” that comes to mind here: for the record, George Clinton told Eddie Hazel to make grief out of his guitar. In his words: I told him to play like his mother had died, to picture that day, what he would feel, how he would make sense of his life, how he would take a measure of everything that was inside of him and let it out through his guitar . . . when he started playing, I knew immediately that he understood what I meant. I could see the guitar notes stretching out like a silver web. When we played the solo back, I knew that it was good beyond good, not only a virtuoso display of musicianship but also an unprecedented moment of emotion in pop music. ⁶ The aesthetics of the riff—the circular ascending and descending repetition, the distorted and imperfect tonality of Hazel’s guitar, the vocal-like melismatic divergences express grief as it is felt, sonically. Hazel’s song-length solo was so mesmerizing that Clinton had the rest of the band dropped from the final recording save for a simple melancholic melody on second guitar that points to where Hazel occasionally lands. As the quote suggests, Clinton understands this song to be a signal of the band’s maturity as musicians—that their ability to express emotion matched their technical proficiency. Emotional dexterity within musical proficiency is fundamental to the aesthetics of funk and blues—to be proficient in spanning affective registers through musicianship and grief made that clear. The lesson of the riff is instructive here. As studies of Black folks consider the social conditions of Black people, so they must consider the structures of feeling by which Blackness in Black studies must operate. The “social experience in process” to borrow from Raymond Williams, is ongoing as we feel, think, study, live, write, and teach Black studies. ⁷ The aesthetics of the riff tells us that there is no singular note that encompasses a singular feeling (i.e., grief or pleasure or anger) and no singular series of notes either. Not a solid line pointing us in one particular direction, but “notes stretching out like a silver web.” A study of pleasure would so encounter, nay, become a study of grief—such is the web of Black studies’s dexterous structure of feeling. “Loss?” Recovery uncovers what stays lost. Mamie Till Mobley remembers the painstaking and dreadful process of recovering the body of her son: “I looked deeply at that entire body for something, anything that would help me find my son. Finally, I found him. And lost him.” ⁸ Her son, difficult to recognize because of the brutality of racist violence that ripped him away from life and her mothering arms, is only recoverable through memory. Emmett’s body both a recovery (through memory of his life) and a final rupture (violent death). What is lost stays lost but the open chasm of something was here remains as memory. Saidiya Hartman notes, “the slave was the only one expected to discount her past.” ⁹ This loss was the ongoing process of forgetting homeland, mother. Hartman goes on to describe the folklore of coercive forgetting: Everyone told me a different story about how the slaves began to forget their past. Words like “zombie,” “sorcerer,” “witch,” “succubus,” and “vampire” were whispered to explain it. In these stories, which circulated throughout West Africa, the particulars varied, but all of them ended the same—the slave loses mother. ¹⁰ Perhaps this is the fundamental difference between discussing grief and discussing loss—loss does not require memory whereas grief does remember what has gone. Memory can be lost, too. Hartman’s return to the site of lost memory intones grief through her encounter with memory, mind, and mother, by returning to the place of forgetting. This site-specific experience of remembering what was meant to be forgotten is what Toni Morrison calls rememory. ¹¹ Rememory is the glitch in space/time between what is meant to be forgotten in a past and what is reencountered as memory in the present. Here she presents the concept in the voice of Sethe: I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened. ¹² Whom or what reminds you, refuses release of the tether and makes past time as lucid as the present and carries some message about the future. Or as M. Jacqui Alexander says, “Spirit brings knowledge from past, present, and future to a particular moment called a now.” ¹³ In this bending of space/time, rememory enacts sacred touch—witness from the dead, the unborn, and not to be forgotten. Hartman finds recovery to be illusive as the rupture between Africans and descendants of African slaves expands beyond the width and depth of the Atlantic Ocean. Whatever is thought to have been forgotten has been etched in rememory as hauntings, familiars, and familiar sites of terror that live with those who remember. Rememory means nothing is forgotten though it may be lost, and that memory, along with that loss, makes way for grieving what has gone. I sat down to work on this very book and could only wail in poems. I call this a whale/wail of poems. Much like a crown of sonnets, but named for the grieving orca whale J35 aka Tahlequah, who carried her stillborn calf for seventeen days after its birth. Like a crown of sonnets, the final line of each preceding fourteen-line poem starts the first line of the next poem and the final poem ends with the first line of the very first poem in the sequence. There is no master poem in this sequence, but it does consider what comes after. To be living a footnote to a text about Black life which is inevitably about death. Yet, here we are the in the notes trying to make sense of this wail of poems—trying to build some context for why grief is important for this study. What I am saying is that Black studies is enshrouded by grief. I am feelin Black studies in my grief. Grief is Black studies’ affective sedulity. It is Black studies’ errant and unproductive feeling that challenges Western civilization’s organizing systems of knowledge. Even as Black studies asserts productivity—toward freedom, against academy, challenging knowledge itself—grief bookends such claims with “circles and circles of sorrow”—the repeating riff, the everything and nothingness to which Western civilization finds no order, use, or value, particularly in the living ghosts of not quite humans. ³³ The number doesn’t matter, shouldn’t matter. This chapter is not about the dead but about the conditions of life for those left behind to live and remember. I may count the ones I mourn. They were my 11, my 12, my 13, but to count them just increases the number and forces me to ask myself, who do I choose to mourn? I recount their names in this wail. Their accumulation, their numbering is an effort to communicate a feeling of loss that cannot be neatly processed. As Woubshet notes of compounding loss in the early era of AIDS, “the pain, the confounded psyche, the exhausted body and soul—of each loss are compounded by the memory and experience of the losses just before.” ³⁴ The steps of grief, the periods of mourning, the promise of linear time’s healing properties fail when accumulation becomes stasis. To count may give credence to the “mathematics of unliving” that, as Katherine McKittrick notes, produces Blackness through a sum of violence and violations. ³⁵ What is missing, unrecognized—unrecognizable—in the archive and its tabulations is the evidence of grief. Grieving responds with the enumeration of the dead with its same song wail. Chaotic and uncontained. This Black study in grief is interested in that which is and must be unaccounted for. This Black grief is an accumulation of feeling How do you grieve that which is ongoing? Or as Hartman queries, “How might we understand mourning, when the event has yet to end? When the injuries not only perdure, but are inflicted anew? Can one mourn what has yet ceased happening?” ³⁸ Injuries, inflicted anew. For instance, the fear of police violence in the course of grieving. In the summer of 2016 when doctors told my mother, uncle, and me that my grandmother was absolutely dying and there was no other course of action to take to stop the process, I went into hysterics, crying and begging my grandmother to stay with us at her bed. Nurses called security as my uncle shook me into a calmer state, telling me that security would drag me out of the hospital. Sexist and racist medicine has so sanitized the course and culture of death and dying to make such an outburst of grief from a Black woman intolerable if illegible. By making death the domain of the (white) and male-dominated medical field, the family is estranged from the process of dying. My outburst is dangerous chaos, not a rational course of the grieving process that accompanies the death of someone who is loved. As Sharon Holland notes, “The family is constructed as unstable, relative to the ‘neutral’ and universalizing gaze of attending physicians.” ³⁹ The hospital, unequipped for the unruly knowledge of death and dying by the family, is however equipped, through its carceral allegiances, for the emotional outbursts of Black people via security systems and police force, violence, and confinement. Like Black deaths caused by state violence, there can be no Black witness—or rather—Black witness is disregarded as untrustworthy. If as Holland writes, “death, as an unspeakable subject in a hospital ward, is divested of its own language and is consumed by the scientific knowledge in the physicians’ possession,” Black grief is the language by which Black death is acknowledged—even its tone and pitch is wildly outside the aspects of bedside care that can be served in the medical field or Western knowledge. ⁴⁰ To think that my own life or the life of my family members might have been in danger because of my expressions of grief is personally overwhelming, but also signifies on griefs accumulated and confluent. My Black grief grieved by the confines of ungrievability. There is no common sense for Black grief that holds space for grieving even as Black death is so common-sense, to be expected, and to be in fact so “juridically sound” as Sharpe notes, that the nation’s functioning depends on the reproduction of Black death. Black expressions of grief may take iconic status in the process of attempts at juridical redress as the widely produced photos of Mamie Till Mobley weeping over her son’s coffin and the photo of Tracy Martin, Trayvon Martin’s father’s open-mouthed wail demonstrate. These images produce the narratives of grief as grievance necessary for certain kinds of movement building and are so legible as productive strategy. Grief itself, however, becomes lost in grievance’s show. As the aftermaths of the attempts at juridical redress for Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin (and on . . .) demonstrate, no such reparation could be found. What else could we expect our grief to do if Black death is, as Sharpe notes, “a predictable and constitutive aspect of this democracy?” ⁴¹ What is our grief—loud and disruptive—if not for us? Remember? They gone. Holloway ends Passed On with such an illustration of the ways of grief to arrest—to flow forcefully through cracks unexpected or unexamined. On her way to view the site of Richard Wright’s remains with her daughter Ayana, she begins to recount her childhood practice of collecting chestnuts to make necklaces, and then: We were relaxed and at ease until we got to the site where those who had been cremated were interred. There I stopped silent, stilled but for the tears that clouded my sight. I thought of my child, our son, her brother, and I could go no further. And so, we left together, her hand in mine, turned toward home. ⁴² Grief is the perfume of our stifled air. Even in the most joyous of our days we may be caught by its waft—blown in by the weather and our weathering. ⁴³ My knees might buckle from its sudden strength and bring me to the earth beneath, senses shaken by gravity’s pull. All that is left is this sound. Further Notes Yemaya and the Maiden of Deception Pass (Kw?kwál?lw?t) Yemaya appears here as mother of the children of water and of water itself. Known also as Yemoja, Yemanj., Iemanj., and Jana.na (all matters of geographic and cultural location), this orisha is revered as an embodiment of motherhood, nurturance, as well as communications and trade cross the waters. As Solimar Otero and Toyin Falola note in the introduction of Yemoja: Gender, Sexuality, and Creativity in the Latina/o and Afro-Atlantic Diasporas this orisha is “also associated with other water deities, such as Ol.k.n in Nigeria and Mami Wata across West and Central Africa.” ⁴⁴ For her followers in the Americas, she often has special meaning as a nurturing mother who protects her scattered children across the waters—connecting them to Africa’s Western shores. As poet Olive Senior writes: “From Caribbean shore / to far-off Angola, she’ll / spread out her blue cloth / let us cross over—.” ⁴⁵ She appears in relation to the Samish spirit/deity Kw?kw.l?lw?t (pronounced Ko-kwal-alwoot) also known as the Maiden of Deception Pass who wades around in the waters of the Salish Sea and sometimes in the wake of canoes. ⁴⁶ Once human, she sacrificed herself to dwell forever in the waters with the king of the sea so that her people could eat. ⁴⁷ She acts as a sea-dwelling guardian who provides her people with sustenance from the waters of the Salish Sea and the surrounding fresh waters. She continues to be a guardian of her people. [Notes to the Notes] 1 Claudia Rankine titles an essay on racial violence with a quote from a friend, “The condition of Black life is one of mourning.” Claudia Rankine, “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning,” New York Times , June 22, 2015, sec. Magazine, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/magazine/the-condition-of-black-life-is-one-of-mourning.html . 2 Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique , no. 6 (1987): 52. https://doi.org/10.2307/1354255 . 3 Sharpe describes “wake work” as new ways of “plotting, mapping, and collecting the archives of the everyday of Black immanent and imminent death” as well as “tracking the ways we resist, rupture, and disrupt that immanence and imminence aesthetically and materially.” In that spirit, this chapter does not “seek to explain or resolve” the structure of grief for a Black collective, but simply grieves and tarries with other studies of grief and grieving. Christina Sharpe,  In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 13, 14. 4 Saidiya V. Hartman,  Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019); Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World  (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 5 Leroi Jones [Amiri Baraka],  Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999), 28, 60. 6 George Clinton and Ben Greenman,  Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017), 103; italics mine. 7 Raymond Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” in  Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132. 8 Mamie Till-Mobley and Christopher Benson, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America  (New York: Random House, 2011), 247. 9 Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route  (New York: Macmillan, 2008), 155. 10 Hartman, 155. 11 See also Rae Paris’s poetic collection that takes up the site-specific aspect of rememory. Rae Paris, The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory ( Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017). 12 Toni Morrison,  Beloved  (New York: Knopf, 2007), 43. 33 From Nell’s moments while thinking of her friend, Sula. Toni Morrison, Sula  (New York: Knopf, 2007), 155. 34 Woubshet, The Calendar of Loss , 3. 35 Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,”  Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 17. 38 Saidiya V. Hartman, “The Time of Slavery,” South Atlantic Quarterly  101, no. 4 (2002): 758. 39 Holland, Raising the Dead , 34. 40 Holland, 35. 41 Sharpe, In the Wake , 7. 42 Holloway, Passed On,  212. 43 Christina Sharpe describes weather as “antiblackness as total climate.” Sharpe, In the Wake , 105. 44 Solimar Otero and Toyin Falola, Yemoja: Gender, Sexuality, and Creativity in the Latina/o and Afro-Atlantic Diasporas  (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), xix, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washington/detail.action?docID=3408785 . 45 Olive Senior, “Yemoja: Mother of Waters,” Conjunctions, no. 27 (1996): 58. 46 Ella E. Clark, Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest  (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 199, https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520350960 . 47 There are various versions of this legend. I was first introduced to the story through a 2015 film by Longhouse Media in conjunction with the tribute to Kw?kw.l?lw?t erected at Rosario Beach in Anacortes, Washington, Coast Salish lands (Longhouse Media, Maiden of Deception Pass: Guardian of Her Samish People,   https://vimeo.com/130576433 ). See also Brent Douglas Galloway, Phonology, Morphology, and Classified Word List for the Samish Dialect of Straits Salish  (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1990), 100–115,  http://muse.jhu.edu/book/65590 ; Kenneth C. Hansen, The Maiden of Deception Pass: A Spirit in Cedar (Anacortes, WA: Samish Experience Productions, 1983); Clark, Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest , 199–201. Copyright © 2023 by Northwestern University. Published 2023 by Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved. THE INTERVIEW   This interview was conducted between Bettina Judd and Jae Nichelle on February 3, 2026. Bettina Judd Interview Questions Thank you so much for sharing this excerpt from Feelin on grief and the short film of your wail of poems. There are a few videos that accompany Feelin  and more from your previous projects, all with such a meditative quality to them. What was producing this film like for you? Did you know, while writing the sonnets, that you would record them? Thank you for engaging the excerpt. It’s really important to me. I didn’t know that the poems would do much at all when I wrote them. They were a practice of processing mourning that correlated to the grief ritual of this whale named Talequah or J35—a female in the J pod of southern resident orcas who had recently given birth to a calf that died within minutes of being born. I didn’t know that there was any essential audio component of the poems until I reached the penultimate poem that required a literal wail. I read the poem a few times in public and it took so much out of me. I decided that it needed to be recorded so that I didn’t have to perform that visceral sonic expression of grief every time. It made sense then that there would be an audio portion and the visual made even more sense as I had all of this footage I took of the Salish Sea—waters that this whale I mourned with calls home.  In the notes, you write, “Black studies is enshrouded by grief.” When did you first feel this realization? I did not expect that these poems would be in the book Feelin  in any particular way. But when I reflected on the process of writing the poems, I saw myself referring to texts in Black studies that identified the ways that I was experiencing this very personal grief that came to a particular head after a series of deaths in my family—particularly the death of my father James Russell Judd. It seemed that I was mourning a new person in my family before I could get over the last death. What Dagmawi Wobushet would call “compounding loss,” or Saidiya Hartman asks, “How might we understand mourning, when the event has yet to end? When the injuries not only perdure, but are inflicted anew? Can one mourn what has yet ceased happening?” I was actively existing within, feeling and thinking through Black Studies.  Feelin is a multimedia experience, reflecting your skill as an interdisciplinary artist and scholar. What has been one of your favorite moments where you experimented with a new medium? The Salish Sea mourning meditation is a project I feel really good about. I managed to create it and place it in a book. It is the first chapter and puts out there, immediately, the stakes of the project as a whole. I think it does that quite rigorously. I’d never really worked with visual media in this way. I experimented with animation here and there. I’d done some animation with poems from my first book, patient.  but they were not integrated with the book in the same way. These animations in “Salish Sea” involved more hand drawing. I played with sound a bit more too. It was fun.  How would you describe your literary practice? Has it changed between publishing your first book, patient , and now? I’m trying my best to write and engage with people and ideas in a meaningful way. I am trying to learn. I think of my practice as one of curiosity. I’m in search of beauty—whatever that may mean. In terms of the change in my literary practice—I think so. I hope so in good ways and some way that aren’t so good. When I wrote patient.  I was writing it in a kind of opposition to my work as a scholar. I was trying to figure out what kind of writer and artist I wanted to be. In many ways, those questions remain open ended. But I was escaping academia through those poems and by writing in a creative community. I was still very much learning how to do research and scholarship and patient.  is a reflection of me processing those earlier experiences in learning how to conduct research.  Torch was your first publication! Can you speak to the importance and impact of those first yeses in your career?  Yes, it was! It was my first official professional publication. Ask my mother, and my first publication was at 10 years old in one of those old vanity presses. Amanda Johnston and I met at Cave Canem and I recited this poem at the fellows reading. She liked it enough to want to publish it. It meant a lot to me because in many ways, I was tying my workshop experience to whether I would pursue poetry at all. Amanda’s ask was one of those moments where I stepped out on faith and everything fell in place. I am  supposed to be a poet. It is  work that people would want to see. I’m a very different writer now than I was then, but without that publication and without that time, I would not be the writer I am now.  In a 2015 interview , you mentioned the poems in your first book wouldn’t have existed without the Cave Canem community. Who or what is holding you and fueling your work right now? I have friends, some of whom I met through the CC community who I share work with, who hold my feet to the fire to write that book, to listen to a poem, to read and critique my work. My mother and my friends Jericho, Anastacia, and Phillip. Now that I am more clearly writing in hybrid styles, I would say my colleagues in Gender and Black Studies as well. And, in Writer’s Digest , you said you hope people will “heed to the words of Nina Simone, ‘Stop and think, and feel again,’ especially in this political and social moment.” What are you feeling these days? Whose words are you holding on to? I’m still feeling Nina for sure. Still aware of the importance of the power and intensity of music to change my condition—to make me calm or brave, to remain in sensation at a time when it would be quite reasonable to check out, disassociate, flee the body for fear of feeling the terror that this moment in this country and world demands. Not so much words at this time, but vibrations. Sounds that remind me to come back into my body. Alice Coltrane’s Ptah the El Daoud has been good to me recently. Which of the cities you’ve lived in has the best food? In every city where I have lived, I have had a kitchen.  But really it depends on the cuisine. I am really enjoying what I am experiencing in Atlanta right now.  What is your current obsession? My dog, Kujichagulia.  How can people support you right now? Me? Take care of each other. Organize. Know your neighbor. Be brave. Vote. Feel. Grieve. Scream the wins as loud as the losses. Do not let what is happening in this moment go over without resistance. Turn off AI searches. Read a book. Defend your local library. Check my books out of it. Return them. Tell someone about them. Name another Black woman writer people should know. Tafisha Edwards https://theoffingmag.com/poetry/the-double-blind/ ### Torch Literary Arts  is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats. Click here to support Torch Literary Arts.