walking to school a leaf fell off a branch onto my lips kisskiss nature a dog on Dekalb and Marcy licked my hand do trees have a sense of themselves? walking down Decatur, the trees have name tags: gingko ash pear maple sycamore are the names they know themselves by different? is their language more gestural? what does it feel like to be a tree in a city? does concrete bury your roots? what eroticisms are trees expressing that we don’t recognize? I was enjoying myself saw those flowers that look like purple gramophone horns pigeons eating cheese puffs until a brown man turned away from his conversation to leer at me “nice” I wanted to stop & scream “NOT NICE–NASTY” & pummel his face with my bag until he’s on the uneven concrete & I don’t have time so I frowned & kept walking to school
³¹ Toni Cade Bambara (Aries, 1935-1995) Writer, activist, educator. Her papers are in the archives at Spelman College.
This selection comes from the book, i love you and i’m not dead, available from Argos Books. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Clark .
Sade LaNay (fka Murphy) is a poet and artist from Houston, TX. Sade holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Pratt Institute and a BA in Studio Art and Theology from the University of Notre Dame. They are the author of Härte (Downstate Legacies, 2018) self portrait (Birds of Lace, 2018) Dream Machine (co•im•press, 2014) and the forthcoming I love you and I’m not dead (Argos Books). Her poems are included in the Bettering American Poetry and Best American Experimental Poetry anthologies.
Sarah Clark is a disabled non-binary Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at Anomaly (www.anmly.org), Co-Editor of the Bettering American Poetry series (www.betteringamericanpoetry.com) and The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2021), a reader at The Atlas Review and Doubleback Books, and an Editorial Board member at Sundress Press. She curated Anomaly‘s GLITTERBRAIN folio (http://anmly.org/ap25-glitterbrain/) and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms (http://anmly.org/ap-27-indigenous-futures/), edited Drunken Boat’s folios on Sound Art, “Desire & Interaction,” and a collection of global indigenous art and literature, “First Peoples, Plural.” They were co-editor of Apogee Journal‘s #NoDAPL #Still Here folio, and co-edited Apogee Journal‘s series “WE OUTLAST EMPIRE,” of work against imperialism, and “Place[meant]“, on place and meaning, and is a former Executive Board member at VIDA. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations. www.twitter.com/petitobjetb
