---

Verdant

A thin, bumpy sheet of ice covers the asphalt.
Grind my heels in and see the ice pebbles make sloped mountains.
I can see the small white footprint peaks behind me.
This is how I imagine myself
Walking along, leaving mountains in my path
Cracking ice and leaving marks where I have been
Making my way safely to the landing.

As I walk the ice slowly gets thinner
And finally disappears. Only the concrete is left.
This is how I imagine myself
Slowly thinning until only the bare minimum is left.

Sometimes ice is a good thing
The Earth’s rotation tilts and suddenly, the trees shed their shields,
A sky sends down bullets of frozen oceans,
A whole new coat of fur for every weather-defying creature.
The weak die and only the wise grow back.
This is how I imagine myself
Somehow too wise to stop but too weak to grow a thicker coat.
Not strong enough to resist the weather’s impulses
But somehow not capable of dying off.

All of life is white and cold and stifling.
Ice crackles and falls from the roof
Forming a melting lump on the frozen mulch.
The sun, heating the harsh surface of the all-too-fragile ice sheets.

This is how I always imagine myself.
All I want is one new day
Where birds sing
Nothing is stuck
There is no more cold
And everything is lush and full and not hungry anymore.
verdant.

This selection comes from Fog, available from Bloof Books. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Shannon Wolf.

Dakotah Jennifer is a twenty-year-old black writer currently attending Washington University in St. Louis. She started writing poetry at eight and has loved it ever since. Jennifer has been published in Across the Margin, HerStry, Popsugar, The Pinch Journal, Protean Mag, Apartment Poetry, Paintbucket.page, The Grief Diaries, The Confessionalist Zine, Oral Rinse Zine, and Ripple Zine. She was accepted into the Juniper Writing Workshop at Amherst and the Writing Workshops Paris with Carve Magazine for the 2021 year. She won Washington University’s Harriet Schwenk Kluver award for the 2018-2019 year. Her first chapbook, Fog, is published with Bloof Books, and her second chapbook/zine, Safe Passage, was recently released with Radical Paper Press. Shannon Wolf is a British writer and teacher, living in Louisiana. She is currently a joint MA-MFA candidate in Poetry at McNeese State University. She is the Non-Fiction Editor of The McNeese Review and Social Media Intern for Sundress Publications. She also holds an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. Her poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction (which can also be found under the name Shannon Bushby) have appeared in The Forge and Great Weather for Media, among others. You can find her on social media @helloshanwolf.

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Fog

Fog rolls like dice sometimes.
Fog does not do the killing, but somehow, dead bodies show up
where fog has been.
Fog does not choke, but may suffocate.
Fog has no color,
But sometimes
From far away
Looks white.
Fog is the killer that doesn’t fit the gloves
Has no gloves.
Leaves its mark on everything.

She is fog
I am the bodies.
In every circumstance
I am the bodies.

This selection comes from Fog, available from Bloof Books. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Shannon Wolf.

Dakotah Jennifer is a twenty-year-old black writer currently attending Washington University in St. Louis. She started writing poetry at eight and has loved it ever since. Jennifer has been published in Across the Margin, HerStry, Popsugar, The Pinch Journal, Protean Mag, Apartment Poetry, Paintbucket.page, The Grief Diaries, The Confessionalist Zine, Oral Rinse Zine, and Ripple Zine. She was accepted into the Juniper Writing Workshop at Amherst and the Writing Workshops Paris with Carve Magazine for the 2021 year. She won Washington University’s Harriet Schwenk Kluver award for the 2018-2019 year. Her first chapbook, Fog, is published with Bloof Books, and her second chapbook/zine, Safe Passage, was recently released with Radical Paper Press. Shannon Wolf is a British writer and teacher, living in Louisiana. She is currently a joint MA-MFA candidate in Poetry at McNeese State University. She is the Non-Fiction Editor of The McNeese Review and Social Media Intern for Sundress Publications. She also holds an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. Her poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction (which can also be found under the name Shannon Bushby) have appeared in The Forge and Great Weather for Media, among others. You can find her on social media @helloshanwolf.

---

Proof

You want to know why they ask you for proof,
For evidence in the case,
You know they’ll never indict a man they see themselves in
But you try anyway.
You want to know why you don’t cry when the boys are dead
but when they are alive.
Why you mourn the country and not the fallen.
You count stars as if they are not already dead.
You tell oblivious boys you love them and then run away with it.
You know only what you have been told about the struggle,
But also what you trek through every day.
You don’t believe the reports until you see the footage.
You cringe at the gunshot before you realize they did too.
You write poems about boys that aren’t dead or dying,
You make them immortal when they already are.
You write down black and it turns to dust.
You hope to exist but disappear in the mirror.
You research hate crimes to give them the numbers.

They don’t believe you.

This selection comes from Fog, available from Bloof Books. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Shannon Wolf.

Dakotah Jennifer is a twenty-year-old black writer currently attending Washington University in St. Louis. She started writing poetry at eight and has loved it ever since. Jennifer has been published in Across the Margin, HerStry, Popsugar, The Pinch Journal, Protean Mag, Apartment Poetry, Paintbucket.page, The Grief Diaries, The Confessionalist Zine, Oral Rinse Zine, and Ripple Zine. She was accepted into the Juniper Writing Workshop at Amherst and the Writing Workshops Paris with Carve Magazine for the 2021 year. She won Washington University’s Harriet Schwenk Kluver award for the 2018-2019 year. Her first chapbook, Fog, is published with Bloof Books, and her second chapbook/zine, Safe Passage, was recently released with Radical Paper Press. Shannon Wolf is a British writer and teacher, living in Louisiana. She is currently a joint MA-MFA candidate in Poetry at McNeese State University. She is the Non-Fiction Editor of The McNeese Review and Social Media Intern for Sundress Publications. She also holds an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. Her poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction (which can also be found under the name Shannon Bushby) have appeared in The Forge and Great Weather for Media, among others. You can find her on social media @helloshanwolf.

---

Silence

At first the silence was so small,
I could always hear it but never could stop it from breaking.
Then the silence was so loud,
I almost couldn’t talk over it.
it would smother my voice until it was only affirmation.
And then came a haunting silence, that only I could hear, a monster,
dressed as something gruesome, that turned out to be me.
After that the silence was small again but, not in the same way.
It was small in the way a bomb is before it explodes.
Then, a silence unexpected,
A polite silence, that filled the room with questions and
uncomfortable tension.
This is when the silence changed into something else all together.
The silence was not only mine,
It was every woman’s, every black and brown child’s, the oppressed
with the oppressor’s hand sealed over their mouth and nose.
Then a silence for only me,
A silence that I was born into,
A bloody, birth of a silence,
It stumbled out of my mother’s womb and planted itself in my
favorite blanket.
And finally, at last,
A noise,
A sound
Louder than the loudest silences
Finally,
Me,
Laughing as loud as I could
And no one saying a
word.

This selection comes from Fog, available from Bloof Books. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Shannon Wolf.

Dakotah Jennifer is a twenty-year-old black writer currently attending Washington University in St. Louis. She started writing poetry at eight and has loved it ever since. Jennifer has been published in Across the Margin, HerStry, Popsugar, The Pinch Journal, Protean Mag, Apartment Poetry, Paintbucket.page, The Grief Diaries, The Confessionalist Zine, Oral Rinse Zine, and Ripple Zine. She was accepted into the Juniper Writing Workshop at Amherst and the Writing Workshops Paris with Carve Magazine for the 2021 year. She won Washington University’s Harriet Schwenk Kluver award for the 2018-2019 year. Her first chapbook, Fog, is published with Bloof Books, and her second chapbook/zine, Safe Passage, was recently released with Radical Paper Press. Shannon Wolf is a British writer and teacher, living in Louisiana. She is currently a joint MA-MFA candidate in Poetry at McNeese State University. She is the Non-Fiction Editor of The McNeese Review and Social Media Intern for Sundress Publications. She also holds an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. Her poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction (which can also be found under the name Shannon Bushby) have appeared in The Forge and Great Weather for Media, among others. You can find her on social media @helloshanwolf.

---

Ode to Sitting With My Legs Uncrossed

after Ross Gay

And sure,
It is not the way to
Be a woman or
Polite
But I do often sit
With my legs free of each other
Just to feel my skin breathe.
Or so that the blood keeps rushing to
Every limb and does not
Discriminate. Like maybe
I sit this way so that
When they find
Me,
I’m already on my way to standing
With my hands kissing
The sky.
My legs stay free
Just in case my body cannot. For
If metal sears through meat
In anything but a kitchen in Baltimore
Where my mother still wants her child kicking
Rivers will redden under
My touch. From god
I get only the wish to keep both feet on the floor
in fear of
not running and
It’s almost a reason to
smile
when I don’t strangle my legs and still call
It womanhood.

This selection comes from Fog, available from Bloof Books. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Shannon Wolf.

Dakotah Jennifer is a twenty-year-old black writer currently attending Washington University in St. Louis. She started writing poetry at eight and has loved it ever since. Jennifer has been published in Across the Margin, HerStry, Popsugar, The Pinch Journal, Protean Mag, Apartment Poetry, Paintbucket.page, The Grief Diaries, The Confessionalist Zine, Oral Rinse Zine, and Ripple Zine. She was accepted into the Juniper Writing Workshop at Amherst and the Writing Workshops Paris with Carve Magazine for the 2021 year. She won Washington University’s Harriet Schwenk Kluver award for the 2018-2019 year. Her first chapbook, Fog, is published with Bloof Books, and her second chapbook/zine, Safe Passage, was recently released with Radical Paper Press. Shannon Wolf is a British writer and teacher, living in Louisiana. She is currently a joint MA-MFA candidate in Poetry at McNeese State University. She is the Non-Fiction Editor of The McNeese Review and Social Media Intern for Sundress Publications. She also holds an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. Her poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction (which can also be found under the name Shannon Bushby) have appeared in The Forge and Great Weather for Media, among others. You can find her on social media @helloshanwolf.