Remembrance
By Kateema LeeShe grew up hearing about girls
who never made it to womanhood, girls
whose names wore away with each decade
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Blindness Locked Me Out
By Emily K. MichaelThe speed reading class for seventh graders
slumped over tight columns of text spread flat
on tables in the library where in her half-glasses
This Event is For People of Color - Ages 16 and Up
By María FernandaWe leave our leather. Finding a spot on Miya’s
living room floor, we untuck our bound things:
a borrowed yoga mat, a stretched hair tie,
This is the city that I love
By Rosemary FerreiraHabichuelas bubbling on the stovetop. The kitchen door opens to our backyard. My father cuts out a piece of the campo and plants it here in Brooklyn. There are neighbors who knock on the door with a broom to let us know they’re selling pasteles. The train rumbles into a screech in the background, “This is Gates Avenue, the next stop is...”
I keep lighting candles on my stoop and watching the wind snuff them out
By Amy M. AlvarezI keep thinking about Breonna Taylor asleep/ between fresh sheets/ I keeping thinking/ about her skin cooling after a shower/ about her hair wrapped in a satin bonnet/ I think about what she may have dreamed that night
The Proper Way to Prepare the U.S. Flag
By Carmin WongStart with something simple: 13 loosely lingering light-hearted lines that eventually morph / into crowbars ★ corps ★ prison cells ★ bylines.
Poem Resisting Arrest
By Kyle DarganThis poem is guilty. It assumed it retained
the right to ask its question after the page
came up flush against its face.
DREAMers Mark Themselves
By Maricielo Ampudia GutiérrezWith each finger, I pressed on black ink, and one by one placed them on the transmitting screen. Following instruction, I rolled each finger, left to right, and slow—every quarter inch of skin recorded. On the display, perfect fingerprints glowing.
Birthday Poem
By Azia ArmsteadWe wait for the show to begin in an open field on a blazing summer night.
Fireworks are most lucent in the blackness of a sky with no sun which
makes me think of blackness as a metaphor, how colors shine brightest
when contrasted against it.
Again
By Daria-Ann MartineauI find myself noticing you again
eight years later,
you coming out of the earth, pale,
erect, shadow over men.
You can’t be buried.