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I had to prepare. I had to be able to save us from what was coming.

The features of the girl in the bathing suit suggest a mixed-race origin.

He resumed his nightly practice of writing without being able to see.

I hold on to the shape of a star the way my aunts hold on to Jesus’s gown.

this country will stick it to infiltrators imprison traitors love neighbors

“As your brother, I ask you, how did you get that scar on your face?”

Taller than most women, Sojourner Truth seemed to rise a little higher.

He was trying to seduce me with his history, which was mine as well.

Men like me and my brothers filmed what we planted for proof we existed.

One said she heard the jazz-band sob when the little dawn was grey.

West Oakland was characterized by unemployment, poverty, and blight.

You never see Westerners, so you don’t think of them as human beings.

Somebody would be a lot happier if she were more like her mother.

Our ambition was a clawing, grasping thing. It got us out of bed.

There was a shout, then a shot fired. I pressed the shutter again and again.

Is anybody out there? Nobody answered, and I felt archaic as prayer.

My brother stealing all the lightbulbs, my parents live without light.

Everyone they pass is consumed by some desperate interior story.

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

It is the night of whores and monsters, but without the killings.

He twisted like a weasel in the sack, lashing backward with his fist.

References to and portrayals of hypocrisy, moral sloth, venery.

These natives have the smiles we haven’t seen since we were children.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

A boy knew he wouldn’t see his mother’s face as he rose from the mat.

She takes her hand to my scalp: eyes close as if tasting lemon cake.

Tanya jokes that she comes to the East Coast now only for funerals.

“No, no,” we say. “We’re fine! Really! We love things just the way they are!”

The man lifted his shirt just enough to show the handle of a pistol.