My love was bound in red silk,/ Thrust out forcefully to claim long-forgotten aristocratic titles/ When the ships of old have/ Taken on the air for water/ And it is blood they inhabit, not the/ Sweat falling
Vietnam, 1953: the last of the rain/ has settled. a rainbow/ begins to form as i/ go out to grab some/ groceries. the produce/ man smiles and waves/ as i head home./ metal against wood./ burning embers./ boiling broth./ and just like that:/ dinner is served.
"I have felt within Venezuela throughout my entire life while spending all of my twenty outside of it. In an attempt to finally understand what happened to the beautiful country in my mother’s stories, I begin to ask questions and start memorizing her recipes."
How did trance-possession, an act traditionally praised for its practical utility and transcendent powers across sub-Saharan Africa, come to epitomize heresy?
The street art on in this Paris neighborhood "speaks to what it’s like to exist along make-shift margins, with its layers of paper and paint revealing what time and history can cover up."
"Sometimes I feel like an ex-pat in my own nation,/ and an outsider among my own people
until I remember/ Grandpa’s hands teaching me to scour banks for mudbugs/ to be eaten at dinner, like he did as a kid."
"The intersections of my identity became points of confusion for me: I was Black like the people I was seeing, but I wasn’t African. I did not even know if I should call myself African-American or if I was being seen as just American, or if it mattered."