New Work in Persephone’s Daughters

The aim of this lit magazine is to empower women, but it also aims to be completely inclusive in regards to applicants/contributors. We love you. We’re not here to tell you to stay strong, because you’re already doing exactly that.

It’s Better Out Than In

Talking to myself--especially when it becomes a lot of talk all of a sudden, always tells me there is something I'm trying to work out of my brain and especially out of my body. It's interesting that I haven't been able to run lately, one of my choice ways of working stuff out of my mind and body.

Stranger in a Strange Land

I'm only recently accepting the extent to which my physical body has been intrinsic to how I self-identify.  The realization has come on the heels of a bunch more that are the result of the heart failure (cardiomyopathy if you like big words) diagnosis in September. My body has changed significantly in the way I use it for self-identification purposes.   [...]

Without Rock or Shore

I've been trying to ignore the tug in my gut that has persisted since I first read about this story yesterday. It was the stark inhumanity of it for sure; the sheer violence; the unchecked toxic masculinity; the questions about how is it that the ability to find a jersey is easier than locating a publicly; pinging-off-cell-phone-towers [...]

Tune In!

Remember those posts: I am a miracle (that's my story and I'm sticking to it). and Didn't Yesterday say you couldn't yet you did? Mrs. Burke read them and thought they were worth sharing. So I'll be sharing them. On November 16th at 6 on the radio (in my Donna Summer voice). Tune in!

Body Talk

The training, racing, and creative process...is a triumph over the physical and psychic conditions just outside the parameters of control which would censor and stilt performance.

Black Death and the What Ifs (is not a singing group)

So what if the mission of those profiting from Black Death porn is to accomplish their stated mission: to remind The State (of mind) that Black and Brown lives should be recognized and treated as actual lives? What if The State (of mind) changed as a result of their activism? The Black Death porn market would be diminished, right? No demand so no need for a supply. No supply no profit. So another what if--what if Black Death porn proliferates in order to keep this market going?

Black Lives Matter: Death By Assimilation

There are few, if any, choices a black body can make that do not speak its history, including the requisite traumas and proud triumphs over them. Under the gaze of the status quo, this body, with its history written all over it, is an indictment of the status quo. Erasing that physical body becomes critical to sustaining not just the aesthetic of the status quo but more importantly its structure. Erasure is not necessarily the literal murder of it, though that is one way to erase it, but more typically, the suppression of it. Suppression often comes in the form of assimilating the black body into the status quo.

Black Rage and the Invisible Black Body

I am here to talk about silence. And the violence of it.  How it traumatizes the body that practices it as well as the bodies it is imposed upon. I want to talk about how it (silence, I mean)—and I made up this word—invisibilizes.  And how that act—to render someone, a body, invisible is violence. [...]

You Made It Out Alive: On the Murder of Janese Talton-Jackson

He took sex instead of your life; maybe the glass bottle he threw at you missed; you were named “bitch” and any other list of monikers that do not appear on your birth certificate; the old woman turned on the porch light and startled him and his pistol away; he left you in the street alone and lost in a city that was not your own. You made it out alive. None of those were missteps of the fragile male ego or drunkenness. They were not about how you lead him on or were rude or rash when you refused to comply to his demand for your attention. They were about the agency you have over your life and how you live it and being denied that agency so often