by Stephanie Rogers-Moore

Daughter of Bettye and Freddie
in Flushing, Queens.
Still waiting for Publisher’s Clearinghouse
to find our apartment
and for the Mets to have a World Series season,
I’m just saying!
But that’s not the reason I’m calling.
You see…It’s about poetry.
Momma used to write it, now I recite it
and Daddy makes copies and mounts
Colored Cardboard Paper behind it.
“To make it look professional,” he says.
I just think it looks cool, so I go with it.
As far as Church goes,
It’s practically a Family Praise Project!
All dressed up for Anniversary services
and Special events…
but now it’s not as safe a bet as I thought.
A poem I gave to my Youth Leader
up and disappeared.
Daddy brought a spare copy before Service,
coming to my rescue, just like YOU,
and I thought the crisis was over
only to discover
that Original piece of Colored Cardboard Paper
in my youth leader’s hands for another service a month later!
Now I’m not old enough to throw hands about it
(especially since YOU say to turn the other cheek),
but this is how I Praise to honor YOU and my Family!
How can I do that if the words can get stolen from me?
I don’t even want an apology…
well yeah, I DO,
but it’s more important to me, for my Family,
to find a way through this calamity!
If Cardboard Paper copies aren’t the key
for all this poetry,
what Praise can I offer
where you’ll know that it’s Me?

ODE TO “THE REVOLUTION”!*
(*And the Prince who started it all)

One summer, back in the 80’s
when my Deacon Daddy and
First Lady Momma went food shopping,
my Brother was in charge of watching over me
while I was playing sick.
No, you heard that right, and I was good at it!
I had to be, because my Brother and I
were on a mission!
As soon as my father’s blue Chevy Nova
pulled out of the parking lot,
my Brother was out the door with our allowance
and Mama’s video rental card in hand.
I dashed to the kitchen to make popcorn
and sneak Sugar Babies from my Dad’s secret stash.
10 minutes! In, out, get the tape in the VCR!
Take note of the travel time, grab the snacks!
Press PLAY!
At long last,
“Ladies and Gentlemen…The Revolution!”
blasted through our TV speakers.
Despite our parents’ nay-sayings
and “I know what’s best for you” intentions,
“Purple Rain” was on the console,
shaking windows and cracking open the door
to wild styles and rock-filled, seductive music
beyond anything
we’d already been taught to know.
We’d done it!
Phase One of Our Plan was complete,
and my Brother and I became covert revolutionaries
in our own way.
But true success would only be realized
once the tape was rewound and returned
to the store
before our parents were due to return home.

by Crystal D. Mayo

He was a cautionary tale from the moment he said, “Hello”
His beguiling eyes and alabaster smile
Didn’t resemble any scoundrel or brute
She had read about in fairytales
He knew she was a novice
Beginning to chose
Just the right words for her sentences
On the climax
Of finding herself as a woman
Creating her own backstory for her memoirs

He didn’t find her pretty
But when she lingered on his every word
Forgetting her voice had a say in his conversation
She became his beautiful conquest
The freshly written cursive lines
He wanted to be the first to bind his imprint against.
He serenaded her ears
with sweet metaphors
Seductive similes
She listened intently with baited breath
At the vivid storylines
He envisioned for her
And within a season
She was infatuated
Only skimming the pages of his chapters
Not heeding warnings
To read his story
Cover to cover
From those who had already seen the context clues.

And even when doubts
Or suspicions
arose
He edited them
With oracles of romantic hyperboles
That glistened between his alabaster teeth

And on 22nd of an August night
He stretched her naked body
Beneath his mahogany skin
Into the shapes
of what felt like love
Ironing out any creases of his foreboding truths
With sweet alliterations whispered in her ears
Until she gave herself to him so freely
She murmured poetic
soliloquies into the bedsheets and pillows

And he took every ancient
Every regal part of her
With greedy hands
Never leaving a little of herself
For herself
And it wasn’t until months later
She realized it was missing
And could never get it back

And so they began their relationship
With him writing the preface
And the first chapters
And with all her free spirit
That colored outside of the lines
edited
Controlled with punctuations
And when resisted
She wore red ink lines on the margins of her face

Now the cautionary tale
Had evolved into
An autobiographical drama
That had reached the chapter
Of her coming of age
No longer enamoured by his style of writing
She caught the inferences in his actions
Coming home late
Smelling of indiscretions

She decoded his plagiarism
With fury, sorting them into volumes of anthologies on her shelf
Her ears were plagued with the repetitions of “sorry”
That unapologetically slide
from under his alabaster teeth

But “sorry”couldn’t hold her
When she laid in bed alone at night
But the flashbacks of how they first met did
And for the first time she read his prologue
And realized she was only a character in a narrative
told through someone else’s lenses

She took a deep breath and exhaled
Closing the final chapter of the life
He had written her in
With steady hands she grabbed
Her paper and quill
Dipped the writing tip of the nib
Inside the ink
And began to form the first words of her own epilogue
Her six months of life that stretched inside her belly
Were the inspiration
to write herself out.

by Z Bell

liberate me to my own power
and i’ll dig roots into my intersections
like a tree planted by the water
my children’s children will wade
and caress, in awe, my branches
all my foliage to keep them cool

i survived this way
and now my fists are fruit buds
when i love you
i will tell you
and the juice will be sweet
the wind will sneak more quietly
less of a struggle sound
and more imaginative
like co-creation

born in this way of layers
grown into dimensions
on purpose
circles cycle self-determination
i want my body whole
i want my communities loved
liberate me to legacy
and when i love you
i promise you will always know

TITAN

i am the monster whose mouth waters for connection. i have a tongue that lashes and drips. my saliva is caked thick with anxious communication. i unclench my teeth and the growling vibrato of my roar sounds like a war cry. i mean to sing. i overcorrect the width of my hips and i whip my tail – it’s a crutch. i destroy whole cities with the weight of my heels. i’m heavy. my skin is coarse and scattered with scars. my fists are mostly thumbs and knuckles. i was born in this way – made of crooked earth, phenomenal and dangerous. i take baths in the ocean and there is life swimming around my ankles. i’m always clean. i dry off so close to the sun that i sweat from my pores the way pent water pushes through any crack in any thing that holds. i bleed a lot and i rarely drink blood. i am feared by crowds. they are fans that scream against the divine and the unfamiliar. they disobey my tears so now every flood is salty. they are medicine that fights its way down my throat. i chew when i am lonely and i swallow when it’s not worth the taste. i have a throne and that is where i sleep. i spend my days alone. there are others – far and few. my home is any quiet place where i can stay long enough for the world to forget my name.

KNIGHT

i wear my chest like a shield
and there’s a sword in my throat

this memory feels haunted
so i find a wall that fits snugly against my back
and i swing at the ghosts

i should cry inside a circle of salt
but corners feel more safe but
i shouldn’t stay in any one place

i’m my own hero
kind of like my dead mother is god now
she raised her fists at demons, too

i wear her prayer in my heart
it’s an amulet
and it protects

by Ellen June Wright

More than sixty years have past since an assassin took your life on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, but I want you to know the struggle never ended. We’re still fighting the long fight and though there’s more of us than ever in Congress, the Senate and even the White House, the struggle cuts like barbed wire fencing around the perimeter of a prison where too many of our men and women squander years of their lives becoming chattel for the prison industrial complex.

The struggle is real even though we’ve got black billionaires, something we never thought we’d have, too many of us don’t have two dimes to rub together. We live paycheck to paycheck or unemployment to unemployment check. We’er still last hired and first fired. Too many of us live in the projects and drink water tainted by lead. Too many of our children go to school for years without learning from a black teacher. They learn to fear the police early. It’s not paranoia; it’s wisdom. They’ve seen too many people just like them cut down in the streets by gangs, by dealers, by those paid to protect them.

The struggle is real. If it’s not crack, it’s fentanyl. If it’s not fentanyl, it’s oxycodone over prescribed to make rich people rich as hell, and the church is trying, but its voice is drowned out by everything that’s flashy and loud. Jesus would have to rap the gospel with a hundred-thousand dollar chain around His neck to get their attention.

Dr. King, the struggle is real, but I don’t want to keep you too long. You’re resting in your grave. Your troubles are over. It’s up to us to keep fighting the long fight, to keep bending the arc towards justice.

I Watch Her Out of the Corner of My Eye

how each fork full of food is a particular task to complete, how she uses
her finger to guide the food onto the fork and slowly brings it to her
mouth, how even chewing is an activity that eats up time. She
perseveres through the yellow yam, Irish potato—through the pumpkin
we call squash, the boiled green banana, through the fish, the only flesh
she allows herself to eat. I’m taking notes on what it might be like to
live to be 100 years old, the pros and the cons, the black and white
notebook in my mind filling up leaf by leaf. I haven’t decided yet if it’s
something I want to do. I look at mother’s lap where a good quantity of
food has gathered—fallen from her lips as she tried to chew.

Wear Your Crown

I love this generation unabashedly unashamed of their beautiful black hair in cornrows or bantu knots or locks or wild and free. Ancient furrows of the pharaohs. Architecture of black scalp. Something happen in the 80s; the mod squad Afro went away, and we got hooked on the lie of lye. We swallowed a bill of goods that we would be more successful, more acceptable, more lovable if our hair was beautifully shiny and straight, if it moved when we tossed our heads back. Barbie straight, Peggy Lipton straight, Marsha Brady straight. The message was clear: our men would love us more if our hair was slick and shiny like the girls they so often adore. Yes, I said it. Some of us processed our hair for so long, we forgot what our naturals looked like. All praises go to the young sisters throwing off their mind fetters, sisters embracing their naturals, embracing what God gave them—finding beauty in their unprocessed, unburned, un-fried hair. Yes, Sister, wear your crown. Wear your natural hair.

by L

i gaze above at the bottom of a cluster of coconuts
From this angle, below them, i can’t quite see the way in which they’re connected
But i know they are
i know they are regardless of visual confirmation because everything on this island is
interconnected

The strands of the colorful woven hammock beneath me are able to support me through their
support of each other & together we sway according to the plan of the gentle ocean breeze

Coconuts fall and someone’s kind uncle offers to cut them open and prepare them with love

Nature’s water merges in my Caribbean bloodstream

And the same is true for everyone to lay in this hammock, under this coconut tree, with coconut
in hand, to come & in that way we’re connected too

i may never know them
But i know we are
i know we are regardless of scientific confirmation because everything on this island is
interconnected

Revolutionary Summer School

Revolutionizing hasn’t been a matter of uncovering unimaginable truths
I’ve always known these truths to exist
Way before i had the language

Or rather

before i was wrenched the language to confront the truth with colonized caribbean
parents
before i was gutted the language to conceptualize and articulate the truth in school
before i was stripped of the language to engage my instincts and ancestors

Revolutionizing actually looks like

holding
feeding
& clothing

All things they’ve

wrenched
gutted
& stripped

Now that i’m here,
I can’t stop
Nor do i want to,
I won’t stop

Please stand back

Let Me Begin Again

Talking to you misaligns the gears turning in my head
Gears that circulate one another rhythmically now feel off beat and off balance
Like you’ve made it your business to step into my mind and throw a hinge off
Mothers and partners have the ability to do so they say
that is, push buttons (or throw off hinges)
that the average person can’t

But, let me begin again

I’ve set up a security station at the control center of my mind

Together we ensure our gears circultate one another rhythmically, on beat, and on balance

Sometimes they move a little slower,
sometimes a little faster

But your keycard is invalid at this station, mom

& them gears, they haven’t misaligned since

by QnIrie

“Admitting Mistakes is a Fundamental skill too few of us learn. In part, this is
because we’ve been taught it’s wrong to be wrong.” – Stacey Abrams

Immediately, I had thoughts of childhood and effects of parenting styles.

How one reacts and respond to anything is said by psychologist to come from how you were reacted to as a child. Fundamental skills, life skills, values, respect, integrity, means of communication, take your pick. From soup to nuts, our foundations of it all are built in child rearing. Now, we could take it to nature versus nurture and add in environmental influence. But we’ll just stick with the basics and look at the grounding of how most learned about right and wrong. From the point of learning to walk the toddler inquisitively touching all insight and bringing to light what adult eyes overlooked, not in sight, the adult reactions began. No, No – don’t touch that! No, No – that’s hot! STOP! Stop running, you’ll hurt yourself! Discipline with minimal word explanations that came with facial expressions, volume, and tones that engraved lasting internalized impressions. That’s a quick visual, audial summation. And in there, as the lessons continued came the handling of mistakes that developed our most often unspoken views of good, bad or indifference we took into adulthood.

Those who received endless reprimand on everything. Trivial for some, huge blowouts for others. Like bumping the bowl of cereal, spilling the milk on the table, and receiving a reaction as if the end of the world was coming. Yelling parents unable to determine difference of needed responses to a child’s learning style, leaves one distraught and in turn becomes challenged when mistakes happen, even in adulthood. The child that was told to be more careful and clean it up when you’re done, non-aggressively will better handle mistakes and be more adapted to admitting them, quickly adjusting.

Now really it could go either way and have opposing effects on an individual regardless of upbringing. The foundation or grounding is built in the early years. However, outside influences does play a role, heavier with some than others. It still comes down to personal choice, will to do or not to do and our developed value systems – made up of combined influences throughout our life’s journey.

On the other side of it is the conversation of determining if wrong is always wrong. Is one’s action or opinion necessarily wrong in all circumstances? How narrow is the line between a mistake that appears wrong but turns out to be a lesson that turns to greatness, verses a detrimental wrong that causes loss of the whole farm? There must be room for wrongs or mistakes that have growth potential. This could really be a discussion all on it’s on, so for now, I’ll leave you with those thoughts.

Dash – Dash Story

History – Herstory – Hxstory
My story – Your story!
We all stem from past journeys paved in preparation for today.
Long days and nights – sweats and tears shed, and trickled on grounds broken by our forefathers and mothers – with determination to set better risen days for future generations –
through hand plowed dirt roads, that became pavement laid foundations, for us to stand on without much thought about how they came about.
Drenched in unspoken pain – breathed joy with hopes of gain for futures to come.
Traditions passed down, some overlooked along rerouted, unchartered pathways – leading to doors that still have locks.
There’s still the residue that won’t let us forget the fights not done until it can be better for our children.
If we could just have better tomorrows with the old house feel of memory wrapped comfort our grandmothers gave.
It would all be worth it.

Before

Beyond the humiliation of life that becomes unpleasant and barely spoken.
Norms we never digested, but bared levels of acceptance, we survived
Well, our people mostly survived it – and carry their scars etched and engraved in the lands we’ve crossed.
Instead of dwelling on the pain of it, we find good, and make sweet, spiced lemonade for our children to drink, while laughing and playing in the comforted surroundings of family
And on special occasions, we take from the savings jar in the cupboard – to ensure we have good dresses, shoes, and a matching purse.
Make sure Miss Ruth has time to get our press and curls.
Now standing at the back door of the theater,
we’ve waited months to attend the annual grand talent display.
Above is the lit sign reminder, COLORED ENTRANCE –
The emotion-flooding reaction doesn’t get old – as anger churns my gut.
But looking down on my little girl, I fixed my invisible mask, with a pat of my face tissue to remove the sweat, and adjust my baby’s hair bow – before we enter.

by Cee Monteiro

“You need to quiet the Earth,” she tells me.

“How?” I ask.

“Speak to it. It needs to hear you.

It needs to hear you above all other things.
Things that are just noise.

You are more than noise, and your voice, your voice …
Your cadence eases its pain.

Speak to the earth properly. Do not whisper.
I did not make you timid.

When you speak,
empty your stomach.
Let the sound shake your chords.

I’ve put you into the Earth, and all that I ask
is that you speak to it.

Into it, out of it, above it.

With it.”

by Jeannetta Craigwell-Graham

If you put your four eyes and my four eyes together we would have eight. Eight is not a dozen but it’s not just one. It’s enough sight to hide our shock that Shayla did the dirty deed on her grandmother’s good couch. She told us that the cover on the settee rubbed her rump raw when he started to rock into her. We were thirteen but we couldn’t see that we were too young for plastic rendezvous.

The mall was our office. We would show up on time and regular to the candy shop and the store that sold slutty club tops. We would suck on hard jawbreakers with a twelve-dollar top covered by our coats because, even if neither of our mothers were in close proximity, they would sense that our skin had been exposed when we got home. We both suffered from close mothers. The kind that knew your shoe was about to get untied while it was still knotted. This did not stop us from taking the cusp of our womanhood for ourselves. They obviously had had us. They weren’t telling us how we were supposed to get from here in the mall to the house with the rose bushes on Shelley Drive.

I remember our folded notes. I know now they were the love letters that I was waiting for from Darren or Chris, whatever knobble-headed boy that gave me that feeling in my eardrums that thunder could not get in if I tried. You were not afraid to tell me that you loved me even if my mother had bought my shoes two sizes too large. When I read them, I wonder where all those feelings have gone. If someone today would ask me to write how I felt about anything, I would use big words to cover up what feels like a whole lot of nothing. Our adult minds will tell us it is because of all those teenage hormones but I think it is just because we have to explain this shadow dancing that we call life.

When my dad got a new job and we had to move I thought we would show how made up miles and maps could be. There were no real lines separating North Carolina and Virginia. But on my first visit back the summer after the move, I found out you were dating Darren or Chris, whatever pointy-boned boy that had given me a feeling of sweating on the inside. I was upset with you. You locked yourself in the bathroom for two hours. You were the first person to show me the bathroom is the only true place someone can be alone in the world without anyone questioning it. When you came out of the bathroom you were different. You were hard and fast with your explanation of how Darren or Chris came to be. I was not even here anymore. You needed someone to love but not in a couch-taking kind of way. You explained that all you and Darren or Chris ever did was go to the mall, go to the candy shop and visit the store with slutty club tops staying only long enough for a jawbreaker to break down to a sugary little pill.

by Jahnelle McMillan

“Are you mad?” Arjun chuckled, rolling his shoulders into the back of the sofa.

“It’s the anniversary gift I want,” Jyoti said, tossing the hedge shears onto the coffee table. The Japanese steel gleamed under the lamp. She had only asked the minimum of Arjun, one simple favor any self-respecting, human Londoner would do for their well-deserving, endlessly supportive partner. Kill the alien who moved into the flat upstairs.

Jyoti watched every BBC news segment about the alien murders and the response from Scotland Yard. Many people had been doing it lately, from school librarians in Istanbul to your average stock market hacker on the Central Tube line. There were tutorials on TikTok and subreddits with alien autopsy diagrams and tricks to not get caught. She read the message boards late into the evening, liking the posts recommending tarps and tools and reporting posters asking for mercy and integration with the blue creatures. It really seemed no different from Arjun shopping at the village market, except he might need laundry detergent to clean the entrails from his locs.

Jyoti had been watching, well, stalking, her prey for just over a fortnight. She couldn’t take it anymore – the alien’s smug, beluga-like face when it entered the building, nor the scent its spongey-blue skin would leave in the elevator and hallways. Her chest stiffened with hate each time she shared a small pleasantry, “Morning,” and heard the cheerful, “G’day” in response. An Aussie? In Brixton? Worst of all, it wore a hat and trench, Burberry of course, and its appendage made the coat pop out like a tent around its pelvis. One evening, after a particularly stressful day of resolving the incompetence of her coworkers, Jyoti narrowly made it to the elevator to see the appendage sticking out through a gap in the small brown buttons. It looked like a shameless, shriveled penis jutting its way into everyone’s lives, safe spaces, and sanities. She narrowly made it to the hall and vomited across the entry to her apartment.

If Arjun truly loved her, she’d have an alien carcass on her couch in time for their anniversary dinner next week. Other women would ask for a grand wedding or an all-inclusive holiday in the Maldives. Jyoti wasn’t asking him for much. That creature had to go.