When she first found the bird, she wondered how a dead thing could flaunt such silk feathers. She even started to prod it with her gaze, then her finger— newly lacquered red with a bleeding brush. She asked the air, but how this thing reach here? It just drop so […]
Nat’s Vision in the garden black flowers growing like trees uninterested by the wind and like towers of shadowed bone and in the arcade the white death a funeral of shawls and dresses all strung like carnival lights and lanterns that reflected into themselves an infinite fire where moths found […]
We Don’t ( ) Anymore we don’t bare our teeth anymore no grit or disgruntled out in public keep your mouth a closeted fist keep your mouth a closed tomb keep your mouth a wired phone careful not to spill out too many too many’s careful not to show […]
In our national discussions about sexual assault and sexism that swirled around the Brett Kavanaugh hearing, we veered toward the historical view of sexual assault as a gendered crime. Men played a variety of roles in this national drama—as perpetrators of sexual violence, as raging patriarchs who have been angered […]
“A November’s Tale: Assaults on the Franchise” lends the title and substance to Convergence 3, our spring/summer double-issue, which closes out our inaugural year. We aim here to turn the spotlight on the ballot–supposedly democracy’s proudest achievement and one of the central linchpins of Republican governance. The extent to which […]
It is safe to say that we have rounded a bend. And by “we” I have in mind, simultaneously, that enduring plea and effort contained in something dubbed a nation, a country, or, not so lately now, a republic; and, a specific and newly energized segment of U.S. civilization. Ten […]
The slave, the nigger, the Negro, the Colored, the Afro-American, the African American, the Black does not and has never had the right to vote. To riff off of Calvin Warren’s assertion, “the figure [of the free Black] does not exist. It is impossible for any Black to be free […]
Take me out to the ball game, Take me out with the crowd; Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack, I don’t care if I never get back. Let me root, root, root for the home team, If they don’t win, it’s a shame. For it’s one, two, three strikes, […]
Remembering Sally Hemings* On November 5, 2008 Whose silken fetters all the senses bind And soft captivity involves the mind. Imagination! Who can sing thy force? (Phillis Wheatley. On Imagination.) Sally Hemings Albemarle County, Virginia Dear Miss Phillis Wheatley, Or would you prefer Mrs. Phillis Peters? A name contains so […]
Over time, voter suppression as political praxis has produced variously sophisticated means of keeping African Americans and others away from exercising the franchise. Even gerrymandering—the redrawing of electoral districts to produce an outcome favoring one political party and a quite ordinary way of cooking the vote—today seems passé. This notion […]
Arts NowAugust 1, 2019
Black Feminist Regard – as Ethics, as AestheticsAugust 1, 2019
a prefatory noteAugust 1, 2019
evolutionAugust 1, 2019