Shade Literary Arts

“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."