The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: i love you and i’m not dead by Sade LaNay (fka Murphy)


Toni fries ripe plantains & escovitch fish

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
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