I glow in a salted room
an old scream surrounded by wasps
Breezes
tease the floor’s fruiting body
Dogs
unbox shadows in the sea between them
Tesseract
panes sound a green organ hiss of folded earth
Soft depressions in compost mold thickening
as
the small hand’s tick drains my leaky leg
Soft gel glamour shots:
snapping cockle stanchioned in holly
The idea of a day is Hermaphroditic
Segmented worm
of gathering worms
enters and leaves me repeatedly
agape
in intramural storming
All
the doors on this street are the same shade
same hinge-bending load over all my coming
Averaged
night on the tiles swollen full
In puce of dawn, desire like some thick and dirty glasses I undress myself for ghosts of drink to dull its bite
*
Adam Tedesco is a founding editor of REALITY BEACH, a journal of new poetics. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Diagram, Prelude, Conduit, Powderkeg, jubilat, Fence, and elsewhere. He is the author of several chapbooks, most recently Misrule (Ursus Americanus), as well as the collection Mary Oliver (Lithic Press, 2019).
Politeness
Mires, burns with
Incandescent fire
Rosily blushes stone
Fruits and frolics through
Green—green—green
Gone blue.
I am acetylene sun
Flower
Reconverting unto virgin.
I am
Cherubim
Attending you.
I am haunt
Constitutes glue.
Dearest Sylvia—gold
Contortions making
Strict mask manifold—
I have become
Methane-hydrate:
Alive myth
Furbishing
Fire twinned ice.
sentimental films hector’s theft facing a haitian geography shed legal through illegal neon all i want is a job all that electrocutes genitals the pleasure and the kids’s food flurries from the muffler hector the slave of minutiae makes elegance die with the magic of a begging hand for the mantra i love the way you put me in the big house i love the way you put me in the big house that the cops return and to rob for free all over the world obscene poem that i wrote remember me sunset boulevard buddy body what’s lethal breathes sentimental films to lose las enfermeras and find the doctor in hector the first the acidic theft facing a haitian geography shed legal through illegal all i want is a job neon to a vessel all that electrocutes genitals the pleasure the buttons falling off the clothes and the kids’s food flurries from the muffler fat tuesday hector the slave of minutiae makes elegance die with the magic of a begging hand for the mantra i love the way you put me in the big house i love the way you put me in the big house sentimental films to lose las enfermeras and find the doctor in hector the first the ditch the acidic theft a haitian geography shed legal through illegal all i want is a job neon the water swimmers all that electrocutes genitals the pleasure the buttons falling off the clothes body what’s lethal breathes hector slave making elegance die with the magic of a begging hand for the mantra i love the way you put me in the big house i love the way you put me in the big house the cops return to rob all the parts of the world in the poem that i wrote ashtray chica remember me sunset boulevard deadly body breathes remember me hector obscene dream where he wants to say he says without saying nada
The woman comes
in her winding sheet, her shroud. An antique corset cuts into her softening
flesh, the tiny bones fragile and painful. Her nine days’ elegy begins in Blood
Forest.
Her fingertips
are stained the colour of mourning, azalea-dark. The soil is running with dark
juices, there is dirt on the hem of her gold party dress.
She is ready to
lie down.
She has
researched murder ballads. Almost every traditional song is set in the forest,
the woods, the corrupted idyll. The most common way is strangulation, her
throat between his flat palms. Almost as popular is the knife, the gore bluing
the tip of his weapon, the grass stained purple. There are ballads where there
is the feeling of a blunt instrument, a rock, a piece of forest quartz, the
decayed and calcified white stump of a tree. This murder ballad she is writing
is for the forest itself, for the blood-red rhododendron.
Haga, the woman learns, means enclosure, a portion of woodland marked off
for cutting. Haga becomes hawthorn,
quickthorn, thorn-apple, May-Tree,
hawberry:
a supernatural portal, where the hag straddles the boundary of both
worlds, is a hedge-rider or a witch or a ghost. She is a hægtesse: a woman of prophecy. Oracle.
After Morticia Addams describing Wednesday’s role model (“Wednesday’s great-aunt Calpurnia. She was burned as a witch in 1706. They said she danced naked in the town square and enslaved a minster .. but don’t worry. We’ve told Wednesday: college first.”)
Young girls require a patron saint — aunt’s
abysmal ashes antiquate entwined,
Massachusetts grave, with God’s servant
whom she enslaved. Impious mind
in clerical cravat a town square dance
(performed in only raven plaits) bewitched Continue reading “Womannotated – Calpurnia”→
Alone. Of heart failure. Of internal bleeding and liver damage. After
drowning himself in the sludge of the Seine. After losing grip on the slate of
the roof, two weeks after la fête nationale. Of intestinal
breakdown and abdominal swelling. Upon severing the ulnar artery after dismal
sales and a lack of readership. From cancer. Of a heart attack. Four years
after his wife. From bronchial congestion. From a perforated ulcer. At home.
After being run over by a laundry van. From heart failure. From lung cancer.
From heart failure. In Tel Aviv. After a cerebral hemorrhage. From liver
cancer. From post-operative cardiac arrhythmia. After complications from
surgery. Of Parkinson’s Disease. From AIDS. After a stroke. After a stroke.
From lung cancer. From non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. After a heart attack. From
prostate cancer. From breast cancer. After a heart attack. Of old age. Of
chronic lymphocytic leukemia. From complications from liver surgery. At home.
From liver failure. From pancreatic cancer. From pneumonia. Alone in a garden.
After complications from cancer. From heart failure. From prostate cancer.
After a week in the hospital. From pneumonia. After a long illness. After a
stroke. From cancer. Of natural causes. From pancreatic cancer. Of natural
causes, alone.
congregated to sanction the shredding of an_ti_ci_pa_tion* deferment, fermentation, shunter
can you see them? on the porch?
yeah, but they don’t wave
its almost time
shucks
buttercup
cartwheels
licensed
incense
guided
and misguided
like the broken acrylic nail in her palm;
she’s precious and
useless.
come now
let’s go say ‘hi’
*
Chebet Fataba writes and has been published in Burning House Press and on the youth-led African feminist network As Equals Africa. You can find her stories on djembequest.wordpress.com
Tall grass on the outskirts of Los Angeles. I am saddened. Ancient evils inside me. I vomited on my shirt sleeve. I was on the ground … outside someone’s house. They came and picked me up in a Honda Odyssey … that I remember. I continued to vomit on my shirt sleeve. I slide my thumb along the gun handle. Manhattan during a frozen moment. This filthy city. My eyes as sore eyes. My skin as pale skin. Explosive slugs enter my body. The unbreathable atmospheres of NYC. Radioactive elements inside the subway. The next room is a dark room. Your skin tenses … your stomach tightens … this vomiting … your face flushes … the mind shuts down … your phone screen flashes. The sea breathes. The floor is stained with water. An infinitesimally tiny amount of black shit. I push my finger into the water … the air around me. NYC is radioactive … the city is a dark … damp room … a tiny amount of black shit in the corner. I am not youthful anymore. I long to roll in the high grass again. Youthful voices in the high grass. Meteorites overhead. The marble pillars of the sex shop … the cool recesses of the X-rated cinema … the air-tight tomb of the dirty magazines. I don’t think I have ever seen an office on this level before. There are windows … in the centre are two big cabinets containing several small office items. The cabinets are divided by desks and chairs … it seems most common … they are filled with books or papers. Meteorites made from marble pillars. A tiny man in a dark suit. I wear black jeans … I take a deep breath. You don’t deserve praise. A pulsing field over the Bronx. The blood does not flow. There is a room for me. It is completely enclosed. Nothing is happening to me. There is a tiny man. He seems to be wearing a dark suit … there isn’t a light switch … not even a single window. What is happening is… I am still in my room … my life isn’t going anywhere. The man in the suit says something … I don’t remember much about what it was … because in his mind … I am gone. Nino deals in terrible reality … such horror … the machinery of his insides … the soft fields of his slight help. I am in Manhattan … I vomit on my shirt sleeve … this is a frozen moment … I feel sick again … this filthy city. My sore eyes … my pale skin … these explosive … unbreathable atmospheres. It is a horrible day full of inhuman indignity. I am tired and bored. The room is a dim … empty one … with a window open. The light source is out. The walls are damp and greyish. An ice cream cart is parked directly behind the wall. A guy sits down … this person eats from a blue ice cream cone. I move toward the door. I open it and look around. Inside the room is a very … very thin guy. He wears black jeans and a t-shirt with no socks. You take a deep breath … you tell me that you deserve praise for the sex last night. I don’t think so … whirlwinds through my skin. I don’t even know where to start. I know this because we know it already and we’re being played. I am in the Bronx … it smells like oil. I’m surrounded by a pulsing field. A pulsing field that cuts into my heart with the intensity of almost a million. It cuts through my blood flow … my blood and my lungs fill into the pulsing field. It is so bright … so pure and yet un-human and I am unable to respond. I begin breathing deeply. My skin tenses … it feels cold and sticky. My stomach tightens with sickness … my face flushes. My mind shuts down. My eyes are shut. Los Angeles full of ancient evils. My shirt sleeve dragging on the ground. I am inside someone’s house. I am asleep inside a Honda Odyssey. There it is … the pulsing field. I reach into my pocket and pull my phone out. My phone screen flashes with a red and white image. I stare at a portrait of my favourite artist … I stare at that picture of me and the world. I stare at the thing that created me … I sit on the bed of the ocean … feeling the sea breathe through me. I stare into something. I stare into water. I stare at the ocean. There are some things I need before I make love to you … I need to see you … but you are always there … over there … away from here … so here’s a video of an orgasm. I miss you Nino. I prefer you unclothed.
Survey the demolishing current, then in response feed the muscular fabric of love hand over hand far reach skeins that silk the terrain and therein we don’t get anxious to own each other any longer I just want to drive and talk all night and feel this landscape breathe in my overswell
I’m so nostalgic for the grayshot time we could walk body through veil the time death was no prerequisite for getting down / under the tipped up starry bowl in the grass or sand bowl in the hollow of the sea god’s iliac crest I won’t lie back / won’t lie / I’m comforted by the tactile embrace love’s ripped arm about my shoulder a spell against feelings against my own ambition slingshot straight up into the night to Orion’s cool scowl kiss not / don’t kiss me now if you don’t like it I’ve had your tongue in mine a deal to pass the night companionable no inquiry all query the quarry deep maw of someone / else
or
my bull-faced tender
friend palms / in his minotaur palm his great bowl of a grasp his own heart big
and throbbing a set piece I take it on the tongue I take it despite heft I /
muscle / beating muscle word-seeking muscle vast muscle forged in a cold room
by witch-poor persons by no one really / muscle that grew wild in the field and
loose in the road according only to its own fibrous longing / I take it / hot
on the tongue and mouth around the curse more beauty more brutality and swallow
what I can I’ll take it / back with me the road from desert to sea that
everyone must travel that only a few of us walk in reverse I want / to drive it
blazing but I follow rigor and walk its ruts and witness each unlike life
unfolding not just forward and back but also infinite weft to even
more infinite warp what am I doing here pausing by the gates to there I’m
still / I’m still required here
or
lift my skirt my back
pressed into fast iron gates my skin heated by abandon / abandoned lovers
lost things press me / press me deeply into the moment before I have to return
to / living at the edge of the road with my hand extended to travelers
offer and clutch I cannot hold fast / enough lovers enough daughters enough of
law and sacrifice nothing gets done in the sympathetic dark tonight
instead put me in love’s big arm and incant like you mean it friends tell
me / tell me we have lived far enough over / it’s safe to loose my heart on you
tell me / this love is different from previous loves because now we’re all
dying / a dirge one sings to herself a demeter is up early at the door she
doesn’t want to come in she wants to know if it’s really the hour of living and
what we’ll do at dark with all that salt the weeping leaves on the bodies our
bodies salt for lovers and salt for wounds I can’t bear / another wound / so
say nothing / just pulse beside me pulse inside me my pulse ebbing against
my need I don’t / need you to feel this / same coordinate I need you to spell
it out I need to recite the spell of your names and to recite my lover’s names
to give
men and gods the same
number to reach me to spell my name out in the bowl’s bonefresh
gully I press /
press my bruise to / Orion’s cold lip he / heals me not and hurts me not / and
knotted up against his thigh I am / crossing into the orbit of beauty’s least
known form
or
lift my body that wears
the young cow’s hide and rides like youth and gives light jobs high on the /
rise above the inn the guests can’t see me if they don’t look back and they
don’t / look there what am I doing with shade beauty hanging out by myself
wondering how my tongue got so stained with feeling / I saw my tender friends
assembled on a blue screen I saw numbers accumulate in spells and promises not
grand promises nothing that protects me from / this belief
that every day must include / pain / nothing / the white memory wiping through the present moment gone static gone still in the rush of huntblood / I hear / a wave / will crash tonight / the heavens a wave of starjunk and haters come down the back of Orion’s soft neck my throat too lifted / what could I do but offer you things / what could you do but / refuse me I’m spiral and filled with needles the dark needles that knit the night her angsty skirt that knit your tongue to mine when you fall too long silent I won’t / open my mouth to set you free nor close my teeth to / I resolve to sit so very still back to throne back to thigh back to pulsing muscle as though I don’t hear you I hear you I just want to drive now
Danielle Pafunda is author of nine books including the recent Beshrew (Dusie Press), The Book of Scab (Ricochet Editions), and The Dead Girls Speak in Unison (Bloof Books). She teaches at Rochester Institute of Technology.
Photograph is from performance by Leif Holmstrand.
I ubëred
to Topanga. Pinkheat, dust and iced-tea got stuck very practically no cars headed the other way. Call it “Narrative Lost” what did you smell pre-teen runaway
drunk on the grass somebody’s
yard in the valley. Ocean, mallbreeze
ocean-draw, drive-thru
Capital
One. Money dressed-up the
palms. The night smells like fire and it’s not our identities burning. Did
we know how we made real things by pretending to dream? Night smells like seasalt, watchdog on the
cul-de-sac. Salt tastes like skin. Ocean
a mouthful of bodies. Cold sand
smelled like silence. In the
too-familiar I began
not existing. Within objects. The table setting pulls back from my
hands. The sun draws back its life. Nothing fed but our scars. The cars, their stability turns to
wild water turns light hands in the red this scope is longer this weird daylight
of end. Landscape of bloodsugar vertigo thigh muscle sensitized wound since you
left my
bones are heavier.
New gravity. Nude bra.
A summer. Sweat collector babydoll tee arc
of a parking
lot, edge of the
concrete its summer crumbling side where we sat thinking forever as ever like anything
else we did, we assumed Romeo, Romeo more than a
thrill…
Romeo, echo delta this edge of my scalp skin set to: want. A degree in “to keep.” People moving away back into the lines outside of a Best Buy. The 90’s. New York or Baltimore sounds like our youth turning worldwide on digital radio. Who
wasn’t still isn’t afraid? My body
remembers discharging itself into the sharper kind of grass.
The white nights, white
teeth hypnic jerk. Descartes in a darkroom I, too, am sure I’m awake taking pictures but not of what this reminds me. Siri’s confused. I look out the window. Just snow light. No image so.
Or is it a swimming pool
season, location, et cetera
slithery pool light any body of water slip your heat in and draw back the wet bundle
drenched with “and” silence and silence and familiar
silence. Whiskey [I am]
[I don’t] hotel [I
know, I know] [What is] Yankee
candle, flattened
pillow. Smudge in my palm says
uncertainly, “Never.” [I know] [I am]
We watched that film “The
Swimming Pool.” I saw a picture of my body Really
Naked [who’s that] from the back [I turned]
17 that year online. Call it
“Narrative Cost” defrosting
in darkness edited
hypnic jerk. As I begin not existing
… Watch this: the men piss on a
woman good old flickering firelight
and last of all your ex
steps forward as he unbuckles… Someone’s
always making the arc of contact towards
flesh. My art
history teacher said
Lee’s douche hung in the
bathroom. Night smelled like pine… dead
fire… piss… [I turn] [say won’t] [I wrote] “No Point.” A large circle drawn in pencil somewhere inside…
nowhere is nope. Narrative
won’t. A scene she wrote…
actress angrily
masturbating after a fight. They laugh. Okay, that’s dignity call it a wrap. Later, I surrender my boots in
a parking lot. In a dark room, watching my life’s world side
turn. [What is] Inside joke.
Inside-out denim jacket. Denim
both sides. Denim all the way down. Her long thighs. [I wrote] Nevermind, I can’t even find
a beginning.
(Sometimes resulting in a cytokine storm). My beloved pet
chicken, Pyramid, the first time I intentionally beheaded anyone. She had hid
her wound under her wing. “She” will always hide her wound under her wing,
that’s what “she” means.
I took a big swing with the hatchet and hoped to hit hard
enough for a merciful clean cut. We thought she would struggle so we wrapped
her body in a towel and he held her tight. We thought she would struggle but
she didn’t. She rested her head on the log, utterly still, and looked into my
eyes as I held the hatchet over her. I split the empty space between her head
and body again because I wasn’t sure I had been merciful enough.
Her head was easy to find.
The blood was brown as mud. In a few days it would have been
black. But now it was brown on the little log we chose to chop her on. Flies
began to harvest the rotten blood right away. He swatted them away. “It’s ok,”
I said to him. “Someone has to eat
it,” as if someone had to eat it.
I walked a few feet away for some reason and dropped to the
ground, easy to find. I cried, now that it was done and I was allowed to soften,
being a “she” with a hidden wound. I was forced to make two bodies of her body
out of my own ignorance and he put them both in the hole. He took the towel
away to wash it, although it wasn’t dirty. He hurried to bury her two bodies and
take the towel away for another purpose while I cried.
This was before I thought the State was dying. This was
before I thought my particular structure was ever going to end. All apocalypse
fiction to me was dorky, only an occasion for heroic masturbation! Can you
imagine, now? Bacterial virulence factors allow colonization, immune evasion,
and establishment of disease in the host! He hurried to take the towel away for
another purpose!
I walked a few feet away for some reason. I don’t know where
her grave is now but I’m sure it was poorly dug since I didn’t do it myself. I
imagine her bones must be close enough to the surface for someone, not me, to
smell. This was before I paid any attention. Even this didn’t make me pay
attention.
I think about sepsis every day now. It’s the long death caused by ignorance, which is what is happening. (Current professional recommendations include a number of actions (“bundles”)) that are now too late. (I asked “what is going to happen?” and he said “it’s happening.”) For whom is it “too late”? Whose blood is already rotten brown, brown as the bark on the log covered in flies, soon black? She didn’t struggle.
Molly Brodak is the author of A Little Middle of the Nigh (U of Iowa Press, 2010), Bandit (Grove Atlantic, 2016) and The Cipher (Pleaides Press, 2020).
The only airport departures are nurses, indeed, the goblin blue shirts are departing from the secure rear of the terminal. Not to return or noting returning to the line. The airport is frozen, freezing, free of people waiting in lines for cold water. The lines around her eyes speak to me. We will be needing vodka to wash my hands to take her hands in mine and warm them from the caster oil. I can not free her from the ethanol. The vodka is not as pure as what is inside her, vodka is not dehydrated. Vodka is cold is well known. I had not known I would do this, like this, washing down with the substance that is causing her hands to be cold. Dropping my pursed fingers into a pair of shot glasses, see how it would have to be vodka? I would be pouring the remaining cold and drying the skin even colder then. My hands are cold and colder as the vodka evaporates. I think about a baked potato. Today is a baked potato and a bad peripheral neuropathy day. The term from the cold land of oncology is peripheral neuropathy, though I think the bartender inside will not understand that we are ugly bags of mostly water and salts. I worry that she does not drink water, not nearly enough water is not enough for the nearly identical sharks inside her.
Painting white roses, I photoshopped a chicken to make her look not sick. I photographed and photoshopped a rhode island red to make her feathers more red, more crimson, more vermillion than rust. I had to make her more red and drums. More vermillion meaning more light that I was using the light to hide her inside neon red. Then is red and golden. I do not want to be the golden next generation. The grand henwife thinks the golden hen is the most beautiful, her feathers are the fire in sapphire. The rhode island red is sapphire hard. I do not want to be the golden next generation through and through and I have not driven through rhode island in the new year. Why did the chicken cross the road? To get through to the termite, the great bright termite in Christmas lights. Light and meat might be maybe the boundary. I am dreaming of dark and sticks and I had to draw on the boundary and I had to draw all the sticks that fall in between illness and health. I had to fade to where the boundary was feathers only half falling from her body. I had been dreaming that outside of the dream time it has been happening that she has been darkening and has been keeping her dark feathers to herself. She would be dark and sticks these days.
Cold is also frost. Winter is also wet things held in the head the dream is cold in the morning. Stalactite dripping to drip. A drop. A Stalagmite is the dream in the morning cold. She is the difference between dripping to drip and a drop that has been dropped down. Related to hang the head. Straw fedora to turquoise under-hat to off-white from drama. Straw from the farm. The opposite of dripping is straw from the summer. Straw of strew is to lay flat and not to be confused with hay with the longing vowel. Dry stalks the cold after and afterwards. Bale or bundle held in twine, dried straw presents a fire hazard as it would. If someone dried and polished straw long enough, then it would feel like this sweater. I wore this sweater the day it was warm enough to walk outside. I forgot to worry about the water boiler. If I worry over the boiler enough, I might find the right thing to say. I wore this sweater the day before the dream and it was dry. If I worry over her pipes freezing enough, I might find the right thing to say. All I have is saying the right thing, right like straw polished and polished and the third is not given.
Julia Rose Lewis is the author of Phenomenology of the Feral (Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2017). James Miller and she co-authored Strays (Haverthorn 2017). She has published the pamphlets Zeroing Event (Zarf Poetry 2016), Exhalation Halves Lambda (Finishing Line Press 2017), How to Hypnotize a Lobster (Fathom Books 2018), Archeology and the Beast (Luminous Press 2018), and Miscellaneous (Sampson Low 2019).
I’m at this journal launch party and people keep ignoring that I am in the issue of the journal that the party is for but what’s going on here I don’t remember this journal oh i’m dreaming the only person who seems excited about these poems is ch who is passing me in a conga line & the woman behind him looks exactly like Mary J Blige ch was happy I was annoyed then confused then relieved and glad no one in the room seemed to know or care who I was except Sara Jane Stoner who had solicited the work–publishing is not as fun as it used to be it does not feel the same I used to want to celebrate & now it’s like oh look I did it oh look I did it oh look I did it I did it I did it:::: for a long time I was not sure I was going to survive I was not sure that I was any good & I feel an unrelenting drive to succeed to be good enough to earn love///I want people to realize how important it is to pay attention to refuse to become an accomplice<<<Shay burned all of my journals in the backyard she couldn’t read them because I made a code so that the words would be protected & I came home from school to ashes in a trashbin & she grinned she grinned and gloated oh look i did it oh look i did it & I could not cry no I just deadened myself inside I was already dead inside scooped myself out empty empty & she knew that writing was all I wanted to do>>>or maybe it’s that when people disrespect me I do not want to internalize it to be able to say the way people see me is not me the way people treat me is not me people do not even fucking know me it’s like how Tyler in a Good Friday homily said that Jesus was someone so intensely and uniquely living the truth of their identity and that was radical then & it’s still radical now & then I think about how Jive said I had the power to make people face the truth about themselves & then how dark the first season finale of Black Jesus got because it seems like Jesus could just be a homeless mentally ill Black man in Compton but it only looks like that if you refuse to believe he is who he says he is. I’m always trying to be who I say I am and I don’t think I live up to the hype it’s like how Nanami becomes the land god of the shrine in Kamisama Kiss but she doesn’t always trust her power as a land god because she still has the body and thoughts and feelings of a girl in high school & I never thought it was weird that there is no canonical gospel account of Jesus between childhood & the start of their ministry at thirty it takes such a long time to become to be comfortable with who you are and everything else in the world and I know that but I still get frustrated with myself & my body & my feelings///saw the same mother & daughter on the bus I make it to campus on time I’m sweaty or like dewy after I go to the library it rains a little bit I send a few emails then walk with Walser
“Why is it that black women are always writing about trauma?”
I was thirteen when Shay burned my
journals. It was punishment. These were
from bookstores, they were gifts from
friends and mentors. I liked things that
were just for me (I had to share a bed
with X and Kathy). I liked to write in
something beautiful. I liked to write
everyday. I had been journaling for
four years. Suddenly holding a pen,
having paper was grounds for a beating.
Mark had been molesting me for two years.
I did not want him to put his penis inside me
and I was afraid that he would. He said
it was up to me. He had lied, before, when
he said that it
would not happen again.
I never smiled. After a poetry reading
during my sophomore year at Notre Dame,
an upperclassman, a white boy I didn’t know
told me he hoped that I would start writing
something lighter. Humiliation does
not have to be harmful. Hegemony
requests that we suffer without making a sound.
[1] Anne Spencer (Aquarius, 1882-1975) Poet,
librarian, activist. Her papers are archived at the Albert and Shirley Small
Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.
[2] Nella Larsen (Aries, 1891-1964) Novelist,
nurse, librarian. Her letters are archived at the Schomburg Center for Research
in Black Culture.
Sade LaNay (fka Murphy) is a poet and artist from Houston, TX. They are the author of Härte (Downstate Legacies) self portrait (Birds of Lace) and Dream Machine (co•im•press). This poem is from their forthcoming collection I love you and I’m not dead (Argos Books).
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 