From “Perspective is Supposed to Yield Clarity”

She said, I wish I prayed, I would pray for you. And,

we all wanted a shape of prayer in our brains, taking over

instead of it chomping on itself. Stupid little elf. God has

never come to me. We surrender in the teeming utterance

of materials soaked with sentences already made in air

and by machines. The country says Freedom, crushed under

its own dream weight. I did not make up this song. Design

Within Reach is having a “Work from home sale.” The coming

apart, the giant laceration across the sky, we all feel it. Look

at the fire, look at it, like all the rage of all the smallest beings.

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“This poem is the continuation of a sequence of poems I began while collaborating with Toi Derricotte on a chapbook titled, A Bruise is a Figure of Remembrance. We published that book and then shortly after the pandemic happened and I wanted to write something that reflected/reflects the complexity of that change both as it happens inside of us and outside of us. And, also, grapple with the helplessness as we face what appears to be unfaceable and unknowable.”
—Dawn Lundy Martin

Black Lives Matter Anthology

“‘No name? But there has to be a name for us.
We must have something to call ourselves.’”

—“My Mother and Lucille Clifton Have Tea” by Parneshia Jones