Dear Reader, by Tyrese Coleman
I’ve been spending a lot of time imagining myself in love scenes. Not always sex scenes, though sometimes, my imagination involves sex, I’m not gonna lie.
Joy as an Act of Resistance: Julia Mallory
There are few things one can imagine that would be as difficult as losing a child to a senseless act of violence.
Chasing Waterfalls” and “Edges,” by Julia Mallory
A month after my 17 year old son's earthly shell joined his spirit, I was up in the mountains chasing waterfalls with a man I loved but had not yet told.
Church Ladies, Writing, and Love: Deesha Philyaw
Love: Deesha Philyaw’s much-awaited collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies contains a myriad of facets of this basic human emotion.
How to Make Love to a Physicist, by Deesha Philyaw
How do you make love to a physicist? You do it on Pi Day—pi is a constant, also irrational—but the groundwork is laid months in advance.
Poems, by M. Saida Agostini
to you, I am worth less then the camera you shot me with the money you make selling this daguerreotype to other white men who hide me
Two Poems, by celeste doaks
Like everything else
non-white and woman
the doctor said, it should go.
A History of Ghosts, by Faylita Hicks
It was an oddly warm night in November when Ray decided to jump from my third-floor balcony and into the mostly abandoned parking lot below.
In Favor of Romantic Love’s Inevitable Destruction, by Haley Holifield
“You have to teach them all that stuff,” she says, “Men don’t know what to do. They need help figuring it out.” I pump the brakes for dramatic effect.
High-top Serenade, by Serena Simpson
When you’re a little kid growing up in urban America, especially a little kid growing up in public housing in urban America, hardly anything gains you more clout on school grounds than the right pair of kicks.
Like Breathing, by Vonetta Young
Today, a Saturday, in the mall, there are lots of men who remind me of my dad: going bald, not-too-tall, skin the same color as the bark on the pine trees behind my school, tummies starting to poke out.
Good Girls, by Lindsay Ferguson
We’re on a smoke break when Claudia tells me that her husband said she’s ugly when she cries, and I almost ask her, What he do, what happened this time, but then I think, Don’t be a fool, this is what you been waiting for, and I take her hands, look into her eyes, and start to give her all my best ideas on how to leave Greg
HBCU Love, by Lauren Francis Sharma
Of course, Evelyn would bring up the list. Because, inevitably, Evelyn will ask Sanaya about a man. And it won’t be in the way people asked when Sanaya was in her 20s or 30s, it’ll be in the don’t-mean-to-but-have-to-ask way of her 40s.
The H in Heartache is Silent, by Diana Veiga
The front of the white envelope had her name scribbled in purple ink. She had not noticed it before when she had first grabbed it from atop the pile of stamped mail, but now the more she stared, the more she could see that he had squeezed the letter ‘H’ between the ‘C’ and the ‘O,” as if he had forgotten how to spell her name.