African Voices Summer 2016 (Digital) | Page 7
Undressing In The Rain
placed 3rd in Young Chicago Author’s Louder Than A Bomb
University, a national individual college slam event. His work
documents his journey through the world exploring concepts
of social justice, Blackness, Latinidad, masculinity, love and the
search for home. His first collection of poems On The Way Here,
is available from 2Rise Press.
Charles Reese
received a B.A. Degree in Mass Communications & Theatre Arts
from Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA. The multi-faceted
thespian is a long standing member of SAG/ AFTRA and AEA
(the professional film and stage unions). Reese has numerous
performing credits in theatre, television, independent film,
voiceovers and web series. Reese is the editor and original actor
for the Off-Broadway playbook, James Baldwin: A Soul On Fire
by the late playwright, Howard B. Simon.
Zoe Smith-Holladay
is a rising 7th grade creative writing major at the Denver School
of the Arts. She is founder & author of kidsanimalstation.com,
an animal blog that she started when she was eight. In Spring
2016, Smith-Holladay’s first fictional piece of prose “No Man’s
Land” was published in literary magazine Calling Upon Calliope.
Her favorite genres to read and write in are historical fiction,
comedy, and fantasy. When she grows up, she wants to be a
geneticist and would like to find a way to combine her passion
for creative writing and science.
Published on africanvoices.com
Khalil Anthony Peebles
is a polymath, a multi-disciplinary artist working within varying
mediums and media. His work investigates the relationships
between the spirit and space, the black body, sexuality, society,
and the urban experience. Weaving together these artistic
intentions through writing, dance and movement, acting,
painting, arts-admin, education, and song, his work speaks to a
diverse audience and varying communities.
Jawanza Phoenix
is a lawyer and the author of two books of poems, I Need an
Assignment and The Intersection of Beauty and Crime.
Nelly Rosario
is author of Song of the Water Saints: A Novel (Pantheon, 2002),
winner of a PEN/Open Book Award. Her fiction, nonfiction and
poetry appear in various anthologies and journals, including
Callaloo, Meridians, Review, Chess Life, and el diario/La
Prensa. Rosario holds an MFA from Columbia University and
was formerly on faculty in the MFA Program at Texas State
University. She was a recent Visiting Scholar at MIT, her alma
mater, and presently serves as writer/researcher for the Blacks
at MIT History Project. Rosario lives in Brooklyn, where she’s at
work on a speculative novel on community medicine.
Even though there are things
I can’t let go of — your smile
at high noon, or the way you
would stare into my body, as
though I housed a whole
country there. & what’s
a country in a body except a
colony? & colonization can
happen to a heart as well
as a whole people. & people
seem to overlook that love is
not a freight truck that runs
over the worst parts of us;
it is a bird watcher, face
stretched out towards heaven
waiting to spot wings. & what
do I know about heaven? The
same thing I know about wings,
I can’t have it. & so let me be
a pilgrim, searching for forgetting
your smile at high noon, which
I already mentioned & which every
passing day grows fainter. & this
is the point: when love is gone
dress yourself up in the things
you can’t let go of, like armor or
like blossoms. Dress yourself up
so pretty that even the blind
catcall the seams of your silhouette.
Seams round & soft as pillows.
The weather man says chance of rain
& I leave home without my umbrella.
This is living & loving & attempting
to forget — when you stand in torrential
rain during a cold spring & let a memory
wash off like a silk dress —
© 2016 Yesenia Montilla
african Voices
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