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Notes On Loving A Black Man Taylor Steele 1. When he leaves the house, know he may not come back. If he comes back, know he may not be whole. Knowing this will not make you any readier for either. 2. When a bullet is the only thing that grounds him Enough to weather the hands of porcelain, Glass shards full with promise, lily torn from womb, Remember, a bullet has never made a happy hymn Of Black skin. And “grounded” here means dead, The way Black skin means dead, And dead means nothing to porcelain, glass, lily But the inconvenience of a fallen tree limb on the way to the grocery store. 3. It’s World War IV. The President is still our President. He livestreams himself singing nursery rhymes About democracy, so we hum it At work not noticing, so we Tuck our children in night, That they grow up unafraid to bear buds of dusk, Knowing someone will burn the tree they fell from, They are the tree. That song just be so stuck in their heads— 4. Oh, how well-oiled the rig is! Hear that whistle a-blowin’? Better get off the train tracks! It’s not that...

Stand with Ferguson

We Stand With Ferguson

Apogee Journal

19 Aug 2014

The acts of police brutality against Black people in recent weeks, in particular the shootings of Michael Brown and John Crawford in Missouri and Ohio and the homicide of Eric Garner in New York, bring us to outrage and indignation. The staff of Apogee stand behind the idea that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” We stand in solidarity with the people of Ferguson, Missouri, as they seek to make sense of Michael Brown’s pointless death, and raise their voices against the ongoing, systematic oppression of Black and Brown bodies in America. We stand with them as they continue to rightfully protest in Missouri, and we witness with the rest of the world, including Amnesty International, as community members, protestors, and journalists suffer a disproportionate, violent response. We will raise our voices too in New York on August 23rd to take a stand against the repeated abuse of police power in America, the militarization of the people meant to protect us, and the victim-blaming that is a double injustice against the murdered. We are thankful for the strong activist networks in this country, which mainstream media often leads us to believe do not exist. We encourage you to follow mobilizers The Dream Defenders and the National Action Network, and activists like Anonymous, Feminista Jones and Avis...

Poetry Uncategorized

The Vulture is a Patient Bird

Apogee Journal

14 Aug 2014

By Fathima Cader One thousand hollow bones suspended from one small island’s underbelly, watery roots seeking anchorage, ours its submerged landscape of crags, broken into language and served with wooden spoons half-toned with salt’s residue, sickled for the hoarding of pre-dawn prayer, the lowering light of day, the remains of night splattered onto paddy fields, darkness packed beneath fingernails, broken from sifting through cracks in parched soil, every fissure a new stanza, a new border, from where we come and to whom we belong, this knowledge of god as place, confluence of meanings and homecomings; meanwhile, our bearing of witness, our presence, our martyrs. We saw; we saw, ya haqq, this scrabbling through time’s departures, we saw, our shahadah. * Voices carry poorly under the sea, granulating, wires carrying roughly to me my mother reminding me that today marks thirteen years ago that we moved here, our first mooring a dollhouse Mississauga hotel, home for the singularity of one month, its corridors loud with the noise of other people’s luggage, and our first neighbours Afghani and bustling, before we knew enough to know what manner of stories subsequent years would give us to share. This is the week of voices...