Shade Literary Arts

“Winter fog remembers our country; exile abandons beauty I find forgotten queens in mama’s eyes Shadows and daybreak fight a war and misfortune glitters green in mama’s eyes Our uncle says she practices a deranged kind of Islam I pray with no scarf and gather yasmeen in mama’s eyes”

“Winter fog remembers our country; exile abandons beauty I find forgotten queens in mama’s eyes Shadows and daybreak fight a war and misfortune glitters green in mama’s eyes Our uncle says she practices a deranged kind of Islam I pray with no scarf and gather yasmeen in mama’s eyes”

“In the red film born behind my eyelids and the floaters that follow my gaze like the wrinkled heatwaves of your planet I looked around realized I saw no one That night I wore the smell of you still home sea salt and something else, and smelled the same thing when I began to cough for the rest of my life”

"[Essex] Hemphill uses enjambment to position State surveillance in tension with the power tantalizing in queer and interracial touch, portraying the violence of the State as forced intimacy and occupation, speaking to our constrained realities as queer people in America. And his voice offers instruction: document, move, make art, claim it."

"I am never aware of what tries to destroy me, which is why I have been trapped between Pasadena’s sunlight and harsh vapor, the toads making a mockery of me beneath certain stones."

“I have become the lightning field. She has placed the needles across my body, the way the artist placed the tall glittering rods across the desert. Blue needles on my hands, yellow ones on my shins and feet, red ones on my undone face. The room is as dim as dusk.”

“Unlike everything else about you, I uncage my sex I tell all your mussels to fall asleep with me As I don’t think suicide can be explained Does your plate know her motivations? You thank your friend for easing your pain The Nordic one. The one with accomplished femininity The one who committed suicide.”

“Not enough to love your blessings; you’ve got to care for them too. It was a nest of roses I learned to tend, my soul a winged witness unprotected from inaction.”

“the story in me is spineless; it won’t startle for the busy street beyond the bakery glass. on one side, nodding florets of white-headed hydrangeas on limber stems. on the other, a brick wall with orange graffiti that says clit.”

“I’m smacking my rouge lips in the city my body of work is more than where my body ends which I both like and don’t like it means you can catch me but you don’t we’re out of cell range so we don’t know yet that the presi dent is tweeting to provoke war he has an election to win”