Audio: Danez Smith reads “not an elegy for Mike Brown”
I am sick of writing this poem
but bring the boy. his new name
his same old body. ordinary, black
dead thing. bring him & we will mourn
Video: Goodbye, Morganza
Devon Blackwell’s short documentary explores how her great-grandparents lost the house they had owned since 1892, and the impact of that loss on generations of her family.
Langston Hughes | Beaumont to Detroit: 1943
You tell me that hitler
Is a mighty bad man.
I guess he took lessons
from the ku klux klan.
Desne A. Crossley: A Wallflower and Her Mother
Clueless about west coast Whiteness, for sure. For my anxious mother, this meant I needed her singular brand of watchful encouragement to grow into a whole person, a whole woman—and to be taught some street smarts for life in suburban Palo Alto with its unfamiliar patterns and pitfalls.
Jessie Redmon Fauset: Nostalgia
Lonely log cabin
On the road to Notasulga,
Sighing and sagging and quaking;
Let me breathe to the heart of your walls
A secret—
Terry Blackhawk: A Springfield Ghazal
My grandfather “witnessed a lynching” my father recalled,
but “expressed no shame” about what he’d seen in Springfield.
“Only a boy,” my mother maintained, when my father
began to tell about his father that night in Springfield.
Jean Toomer: Harvest Song
My ears are caked with dust of oat-fields at harvest-time.
Elizabeth Gargano: How Parables Teach Us Who We Are
Octavia Butler’s novel begins in what then seemed a distant future, our current year of 2024. Lauren Olamina, the novel’s protagonist, leads a ragged band of followers through an America that is coming apart at the seams.
Desne A. Crossley: O Rosie Girl
it was one thing for a white man to bed a black woman, but unthinkable that he would marry her. And it was commonplace for a black woman to be forced to open her legs to her employer or his sons. But Martha married white and returned home with the man!
Jean Toomer: Beehive
Earth is a waxen cell of the world comb,
And I, a drone,
Lying on my back,
Lipping honey
Helene Johnson: Invocation
Let me be buried in the rainIn a deep, dripping wood,Under the warm wet breast of EarthWhere once a gnarled tree stood.And paint a picture on my tombWith dirt and … Continue reading
David Kirby: Golden Gate by Clarence Major (Review)
A new world is rising, and for the most part these stories read like field reports about earthlings to an alien race.
Claude McKay: Harlem Shadows
Ah, little dark girls who in slippered feet
Go prowling through the night from street to street!
Brett Wilkins: 6 Mississippi ‘Goon Squad’ Deputies Plead Guilty to Torturing Black Men
Anyone surprised by this, at this point, can only be a willful denier of what Black people have said—and continue to say—about the broken culture of policing in America.
