The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Roadmap: A Choreopoem by Monica Prince

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is an excerpt from Roadmap: A Choreopoem by Monica Prince (Santa Fe Writer’s Project 2023).

A Child, a Shot, a Name

THE NOVELIST (once silent)
…
There are Black people in the future.

They grow up. They grow old. You have a choice—
will you love him now, when he can still smell
the flowers you present, or will you only love him

later, a hashtag for the cause, another morsel
stuck in the bloody teeth of white supremacy’s maw?
…

Monica Prince (she/her) serves as an Associate Professor of Activist and Performance Writing at Susquehanna University and the author of three choreopoems, Roadmap, How to Exterminate the Black Woman, and the recently released FORCE. She writes, teaches, and performs choreopoems across the nation, and she shares her life with her polycule and three disrespectful cats.

Jacob Jardel (he/they) is a CHamoru writer, scholar, and educator born in Guåhan (Guam), raised in California and Oklahoma, and currently based in Kansas City. He’s currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Humanities with a focus in English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. A former Editor for The Sosland Journal and The Central Dissent, his work has appeared in The 580 Mixtapes Vol. 1, Fanachu’s Voices of the Diaspora zine, and No. 1 Magazine. He is also a member of the Garden Party Collective, through which he published his poetry chapbook Full-Blooded CHamaole in 2024. Online, Jacob lives at his website itsjacobj.com, on Instagram and Threads @itsjacobj, and sometimes on BlueSky @itsjacobj.bsky.social. Offline, he lives with his partner, his cat, and his ever-growing board game and Magic the Gathering collection.