Chicago is inhospitable in winter and is no place for the impoverished and aged. This was such a place, a warehouse for those without recourse, a prison for innocent elders with no grandchildren to rescue them, or more tragically, grandchildren who actively declined to do so.

i.

I tried to find a distant cousin named Carla in photographs and again in Auntie Mack’s voice and again in Ma’s wrinkles while watching TV. The last time she was found was by the police on the train tracks.

queer (adj.) 1500: strange, peculiar, eccentric, oblique,
off-center, oblique, from PIE root *terkw- to twist.
related: queerly.

At twenty-one, I wrote the first draft of a personal essay, “On Blackening the Queer.”

One of the Girls Who Lived/collective noun/a girl who is alive, who has stayed alive, but who has not done much living.

One of Those Girls Who Lived/collective noun/a girl who has lived for a short time, or for a long time, who has done a considerable amount of living.

We’d been forgotten so long, we’d become accustomed to feeling secluded. Jeffery Manor felt like living on the kind of suburban cul-de-sac where identical homes seem to pop out of boxes assembled, but it resisted such cold evenness with its homes of varying styles…

It is no coincidence that this issue, that these stories, were published in mid-June. June for Black folk has a particular indelible significance that is difficult for this poet to pen. June is a month that means freedom.

Most days I find the taste of mango between your legs, but other times it surprises where I least expect it, lingering on your fingertips or behind your knee, on the end of a sun-burnished strand of hair. Some days green and self-protective, plaintive and tart or sharp and haughty, other days almost rudely overripe, tender and gushing over my teeth.

A waygookin was the only witness to the Gongdeok hit and run. That night, Izzy—the foreigner in question—heard the crash before she saw it. On a side street that spidered out somewhere near Gongdeok station, wheels squealed, sounding like something dying.

I lost my mother’s red plastic heart sunglasses when I was seven. She used to wear them with a pair of dark denim pedal-pushers whose seams were stitched with blood-red thread.

She waits for me by the curb outside the public elementary school while other kids gather to walk home together. A lucky few get whisked away, ushered into cars far better than mine.

No one ever thought that I would become friends with the loosest Black girl in town, a girl whose cool confidence belied her tumultuous mind. Her name was Candice, and I met her the summer I turned sixteen, just a week after she turned eighteen.

six children jump Double-Dutch in autumn

rain, and the ropes’ helix is a seventh seeing.

It opens and closes like an eye-

lid and through its quickfire lens the smallest

You never understood the point, the Word
of God in every hotel nightstand. Thought

it heresy. Don’t they know what happens here?
It became your secret fascination, logging

Sometimes, it is the door & a consonant of creaks always

behind it, other times it is just the heart unmasking

itself behind worry’s blur sacristy, a horse bothered about weather.

how often should I sashay in this sackcloth, the sky’s

undone hem of silver, the country that claims me?

every day I am a fugitive traveling on the ship of mother’s

countenance. I stretch towards the emptiness of her eyes,

Every night at six, my parents return from a moon
and dust off their spacesuits at the garage door.

Their commute back is as much work as the mission;
with a well-dented rocket, they keep their distance

NOTE: On March 26, 2018, Jennifer Hart drove herself, her wife, Sarah, and their six adopted Black children off of a Pacific coast cliff in Mendocino, CA, after nearly a decade of documented abuse allegations. Devonte Hart, the 15-year old pictured in this viral photo, is the only child whose body has not been found. All personas are fictionalized.

after Ai

Any tiny sliver of hope
these kids had
at a normal life is gone
gone going gone. At first,

the man ate,
bit right through the sweetbitter of her,
and how could he not—
He swore she begged, didn’t she—

real niggas just multiply, he said, selling himself
to anybody that will buy the pursuit of billions as liberation work.