west harlem, july 2017
“black is everywhere but here it’s not a matter as much as it is a holy question”
Poetry
We are so grateful to all of our partner-poets for sharing their work with us—please enjoy their beautiful words in our Featured Poetry catalogue.
Liberosis
“there’s a word for brown mothers and what they think is best: blanqueamiento”
For the Girls with Dead Horses
“where the girls with dead horses meet / to carefully unfold each creased page”
Salt
“legs wrapped like branches, / toes like roots as old as time”
LOVE IS A BUNDLE OF TEACHINGS
By Moira J.
“the word for breakup sex is salt”
This Is How I Love You
By Joanne Oh
When books grow old / they turn to wood / and grow mushrooms / along the spines.
A Legacy of Torch Song
Fire’s flicker by ancient instinct has always seemed / a morsel of some good thing, some yellow promise / like a notebook patterned in sunflowers
Debt
“Taught us to levitate for a reasonable fee Fed us for a reasonable fee Gave us lung disease for a reasonable fee”
What We Carry
By Sarah Carey
“Mailboxes open, close / like gates to territory lost, or mouths of birds // our hopeful hands still feed, the gone forever get, / the passages we carry inside.”