That is why today, as we absorb the news that women are still doing the lion’s share of work in the home, I’m urging you to stop. Stop giving. Let the dishes accumulate. Stop sacrificing your time. Stop waking up that little bit earlier to do the laundry. Down your tools. Walk out. Go to the pub. Go on strike. It is only through a collective withdrawal of labour that those who rely on us will realise how vital our work is.
Summer Edward
Growing up as a “third-culture kid” in Trinidad and the US, she is an alumna of the University of Pennsylvania. Her writing has been published in The Millions, Columbia Review, Horn Book Magazine, The Missing Slate, Kweli, Matatu: Journal for African Culture and Society, Bim: Arts for the 21st Century, Moko, sx salon, The Caribbean Writer, Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, and elsewhere. She is a Small Axe Fiction and Poetry Prize shortlistee, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and was selected for the NGC Bocas Lit Fest’s New Talent Showcase that spotlights emerging Caribbean writers. Her work is included in New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean. She is an editor of books for young people and editor-in-chief of Anansesem, an online magazine devoted to Caribbean children’s and young adult literature. She divides her time between her adopted hometown, Philadelphia, and her Caribbean homeland, Trinidad.
Love in the Time of Nationalistic Fever
I had no language for you then.
There in the waiting room,
the river fleeing
its settled frame
of darkening window.
No language
for the things I saw in that twilight
year of leaving you
to your nation of silence.
No language
for the single question we asked
of the countries between us.
Love I would,
were it not for this illness,
walk with you in lands
where only time has seen the hills.
For one like you,
I would break land like bread,
divide countries like war.
Friend, I am not silent.
I am sure you speak my language
like the river soon will speak
the language of the sea.
What is so different
now that you have seen me
cross the river, now that you have seen me
look through the pane?
Had I not met you
in the fever of our wakening,
I would not wait.
I would lead you
across this night
to the country I have found.
Old Year’s Melody
Dry December days
preserve their fragrance
as memory jars
on each acropetal year.
May we always inspire
the lemon balm
of hours yellowed
like poinsettias,
follow the scent
of roots beyond
vetiver screens
of tradition and time,
find sachets of morning
glory among the faded
delicate clothes
of an incensed grandmother.
As this year burns
to its essential midnight, oil
runs down the temples
of wasted women; rose
hips sway to spicy waftures
of an anointed mandolin.
May I always distill
the fixative substance
of seven sisters,
mark the accent
of sorrel and citrus
peels parched
in a well-tuned kitchen,
never miss the stirring
of the pepper pot
as seconds sing
away the wrapped year.
Days, like potpourri,
will lose their freshness.
But now, we gather
from scratch our sage
songs.
Forest Psalmody
“Whoever moves within the forest can partake directly of sacredness . . .”
—from The Island Within
Oh let us hear, upon this rock,
the forest singing in its mass,
Sabbath tongue of tree and fan
leaves playing the wind,
organ ululant
strains of dark and light.
Let us, to the littoral niche
of islands named for saints,
—Saint Giles, unspoiled
as the Hermit’s transfigured face—
tread our weary way.
On behalf of your congregations
of the migrant and the roaming,
I repent for roaming
too far. Our grandmothers knew
the forest, close
procession of canopies
humming godstongue to the sky,
how full the monastery of night
creatures grew in chorus
when silence was the God’s truth of these isles.
Above, constellations
seared on a black anvil heaven,
but only the iguana scuttling through
the forest heard the forging
of our concrete history, naked
foot resting on a now-lost rock.
Let us go then as the Amerindian
to her sylvan worship,
hear the holy witness
of mora, the crappo’s ancient
testimony, pause as black bodies
of tamanduas,
still as zemis before the dark
orison of a peccary, perhaps,
dying in the grave
and ritual circle of the guatacare
grove. Here,
a lamentation of macaws
haunts the bois mulatre.
Across the river’s wide scroll,
bitterns write their lapidary scripture,
drill into moss-crusted stones,
gem the specular surface.
At shore, mangroves hunch over
studying the river’s illumination
as priestly caimans prostrate
in silk tabernacles of water.
To this stand of sacredness
we come supplicant, from forgetful cities.
Shaking off the lonely sleep
of civilization, dead growth of revolutions,
we sing the great forest lyric.
Oh quivering librettos of undergrowth,
oh plainsong of the kiskidee,
oh musical ring of heartwood,
teach us to sing again in your language.
Our Lady of Acres, grant us your benediction.
Open the folio of foliage, each leaf
of the canticle turning
toward a new-blooming age,
wildlife of recollection.
The understory telling
our human chronicle.
Bell apple of our Eden
tolling in perennial light.
Eve L. Ewing
A writer and sociologist from Chicago, Illinois, she is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and author of Electric Arches (2017) and Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side (2018). She co-wrote, with Nate Marshall, the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. Her work has appeared in Poetry, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, FADER, and many other journals and newspapers, and has received awards from the Poetry Society of America and the American Library Association.
The Device
It wasn’t like a George Washington Carver kind of thing where one brilliant Negro with a soldering iron made some magic and poof! A miraculous machine. It was an open source kind of situation. Thousands of high-school science-fair whiz kids, this and that engineering club at this and that technical college, the One Black Person at a bunch of Silicon Valley startups getting together with a bunch
of other One Black Persons over craft beer and coding late into the night, even some government folks working off the clock (or so the rumors go). Not just one person. A hive mind of black nerds, obsessive types, scientists and inventors but also historians and archaeologists and the odd astrologer here and there. Project Delta Mother, they called it (goofy name tbh but it’s whatever).
When the time came to flip the switch, the sentimental poetic ones who were in charge of communication and media and symbolism got the idea that it should be the youngest among them to do it. She stood at the front of the stage and seemed unfazed by how long the speeches went on, everyone wanting a moment at the podium to give a benediction or remember a lost comrade or shed a tear or play a short video that never turned out to be that short. She was a gangly one, a fifth-grader from Providence who had started showing up at the high school robotics team meetings when the afterschool science enrichment course at her own school got cut. Her grandmother had bought her a special dress for this momentous occasion, and she didn’t want to wear it but didn’t want to hurt Gramma’s feelings either, so as the starched frill rubbed against the backs of her legs and made her itchy she tried to distract herself by counting the tiles on the ceiling. She was so engrossed and the speeches were so many that she almost didn’t hear her name when it was called. The man in the lab coat whose name she had forgotten beckoned her toward the device, as the audience stood reverent and waiting. Their arms were all in the air to take photos and videos and she thought they looked like they were about to go down a water slide, and that made her smile, which made them smile.
She stood before the machine. It hummed at a low resonance, making her teeth feel funny as she got closer to it. Its ten thousand tiny lights popped into and out of momentary existence every few seconds, twinkling bravely though the theater was bright inside. She blinked at it, and began quietly humming herself.
The man in the lab coat watched her watching the device. After so many late nights with this hulking thing, seeing it in the light of day made him click his tongue. This day was no sleek reveal. No one would be gasping over pocket sizing and carefully beta tested user interfaces. The device was an inelegant hodgepodge, a reflection of the hands that made it. Bits and pieces stuck out of crevices where they should have been hidden—wire, shards of hastily sawn PVC, the odd patch of duct tape. It looked like in a hundred years it might be something you find at a yard sale. But of course, he thought after a second, wouldn’t that be a success? Shouldn’t the device come to be so average and commonplace that it ceases to be magic and comes to be part of everyday life for regular black people all over the country? Wasn’t that the dream? He tilted his head slightly as though it might show him a new angle on the whole thing—just as the girl reached out for the switch.
In that split second, he realized for the first time that the machine might be dangerous. That having a child be the one to do it was symbolic, sure, and also very, very stupid. This was the thought that entered his head as the room filled with flashing lights, and he began to panic. The device was going to explode and kill them all, and the girl would be first to die, and he would live just long enough to see it happen.
But no. Those were flashbulbs. And a thousand journalists, official and not-so-much, captured the moment when the girl activated the device. It roared to life, its internal cooling fans whirring furiously, lights blinking faster and faster. People in the audience began to cry. One man, a pastor who had led a booming rendition of “Lift Every Voice”, fainted. The girl stayed very calm. She had read the manual many times.
“Hello,” she said. Her voice cracked, and she cleared her dry throat and repeated herself, loudly this time. “Hello!” Everyone else in the room fell silent. They waited.
The device’s external speakers began to crackle, like a phone sounds when wind is blowing over the mouthpiece. And then the reply came back, loud and clear. Almost too loud. The man in the lab coat covered his ears. “Hello? Who—Lord, I have prayed for this day! I knew you would find favor with me as you have with my sister Willa. If you only guide my steps, I will be faithful.”
The man in the lab coat looked, wild-eyed, at the girl. He began to gesture at her frantically, but she only nodded, unperturbed, and pulled a folded-up piece of paper out of her dress pocket. She had practiced for this. As the audience looked on in awe, she spoke, slowly and deliberately. Mostly she had it memorized, but she looked down at the paper every few seconds to be sure not to mess up.
“Hello. Please stay calm. This is not God, or a dream, and you are not going crazy. I am talking to you from many years in the future.” She gulped once, and continued. “I am using a device built by the colored people of this country.” She felt funny saying colored, but the history people said it would be better that way. “As you know, we were stolen from our homeland and brought here. We have had many difficulties and our families have been hurt and separated. In my time, we are not slaves. But we face challenges. We need help from our ancestors, but you have been lost to us. So we worked very hard and made this special machine. It allows us to talk to you inside your head, even though we are far apart. It is like yelling over a river.” The poets had added that part and it hadn’t made much sense when she first practiced that line, but now it seemed right. “I am your great-great-great-granddaughter. I am the first person in history to use this device. People from all over are here with me, watching. We have many questions for you. And other people will use the device to talk to their ancestors, too. So now, Grandmother, my first question is . . .”
She looked down at the paper to get it exactly right.
“What words can you offer us to help us be free as black people in a world that does not love us?”
The girl stared at the device as though a face might appear amidst the plastic and metal, then gulped again and folded the paper back up and stuck it in a sweaty rectangle back into her pocket. She turned toward the audience, seeing them as though for the first time. The device was crackling and humming and buzzing and shaking and so were they. People had their shoes off and feet up on the seats of the auditorium, rocking forward and back like babies. They wept. They grinned. They scribbled into notebooks and clicked photograph after photograph. They bit their nails. They grasped at each other’s shoulders, holding each other up while they waited. And waited. The man in the lab coat sat cross-legged on the stage, leaning against the podium as though alone in his own living room, and stared at her with his mouth agape. She turned back toward the device, wondering if the connection had been lost.
“Grandmoth—” she began. But sound from the device cut her off, echoing across the auditorium, bouncing against brick and plaster and ricocheting in everyone’s ears. It was laughter. It began hoarse and raspy and then unfolded into ringing peals and gasps, sounding and resounding louder and louder. The device sputtered and flashed and began to get hot, tape curling off and the smell of melting plastic curling forth from the rear vents, and the audience gasped, and the woman somewhere in America, sometime in America, laughed and laughed and laughed. And the little girl put her hands on her own cheeks and felt their warmth, and the woman laughed. And the lights in the auditorium began to flicker and fade, and still the woman laughed. She laughed, and laughed, and laughed.
home-going
I have endeavored to show that ants find their way home by virtue of something which they acquire by experience and retain; in other words, that they acquire from their environment impressions which influence their home-going.
—Charles H. Turner
sprawled on my belly on
the hot sidewalk in front
of the house on Fletcher
that would later become
the old house, after the
old house which became
the old-old house. when
the others were jumping
fences or climbing over
rotted-out cars or putting
on lipliner i let my elbows
get ashy and scrape
d
on the cracked cement,
considering the ants
the business of the
mighty and unimportant
small black bodies
armored by god
up and down the creases
of my palm, tiny and
determined travelers
ants carry their dead
without ceremony
an ant is stronger than it looks
an ant can be replaced
some ants can fly
ants invented queens
an ant does not steal
an ant takes
back what you
Epistle to the Dead and Dying
for Eric Garner
(found poem after Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “The Haunted Oak”)
Pray you bare your veins
Pray you shudder
Pray you leave
Pray you leave
Pray you leave
Pray you leave
Pray you leave
Pray you free
Pray over me in the moonlight guiltless
Pray the moonlight down
Pray the the sore away
Pray you grow old old
Pray you fast fast
Pray a howl night wind
Pray a sky
Pray a raised hand beat steady
Pray a raised hand beat
Pray a steady beat
Do not stay
Do not be foolish
Do not weep
Pray you feel the rope
Pray you feel the weight
Pray you leave
Pray you leave
Pray you leave
Pray you leave a memory of your face
Vangile Gantsho
South African-born, she is a poet, healer and co-founder of impepho press. Unapologetically womanist, she has travelled the African continent and the globe, participating in poetry plays, events and festivals. She is the author of two poetry collections: Undressing in front of the window (2015) and red cotton (2016). She holds an MA from the University of Rhodes and was named one of the Mail & Guardian’s Top Young 200 South Africans of 2018.
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