I’ve known too many disasters to trust the world like they do. The boys doing traditionally boy things. In 1975, a girl on the stairwell in middle school stopped to say I act like a girl sometimes, a boy at other times. I never had the comfort of a closet. My masculine and femme get […]
MAYDAY:Black
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Cowrie Shells and Calico
Ladies at the Club
Yesterday at the swim club in Berkeley, two women about my age were sitting in the hot tub, giggling about adventures on beaches along the opposite coast. I joined them. When they asked about my teenage memories of the same, I hesitated. I don’t know them except as our paths cross at the pool. I […]
Despair Descended First
by Ulysses Hill
This story is a product of the MAYDAY:Black Incubator. It doesn’t take long for a child to realize they’re poor. No longer than the moment they’re exposed to something more. I was in the fifth grade. After waiting in line for an hour at a charity event, I received just one present, an astronaut […]
“I Tried To Cover My Tracks.”
This story is a product of the MAYDAY:Black Incubator. “The history of publishing and the political nature of art cannot be understood without taking into account the relative powerlessness of marginalized artists who do not own the keys to social, political, and economic power. It seems we can never be given anything without a […]
How to Tell a Pure Rage Story
by Matthew E. Henry
Editor’s Note: This article contains words that are racist and may be upsetting. “…if I could somehow re-create the fatal whiteness of that light…then you would believe…” Tim O’Brien, poet This is true. All of it. I was invited to read my poetry at a Christian college in the US Midwest. Someone had encountered […]
N. K. Jemisin on H. P. Lovecraft: Deconstructing the Original Boogeyman
Note: This article displays a poem credited to H. P. Lovecraft. The poem contains a word that is racist and offensive in its context. Howard Phillips Lovecraft has been dead for over eighty years, but his influence on supernatural horror fiction is well documented, and respected in most literary circles today. Since his death, he’s […]
Yes, Yes, Y’all! — and It Don’t Stop
This story is the inaugural product of the MAYDAY:Black Incubator. On an August night, sealed with frizzy edges and afro pick salutes, fingers caress vinyl darker than the night sky. From that moment, Black American culture orbited turntables in a South Bronx neighborhood, and young hip-hop grew to become a bold storyteller and an agent […]
50Years Later, the Demands of ‘The Black Manifesto’ Are Still Unmet
by Carla Bell
This story, first published at Electric Literature in 2020, is among its “Favorite Essays About Radicalism and Resistance.” One Sunday in the spring of 1969, James Forman walked into the sanctuary of Riverside Church in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, barreled his way to the pulpit, commandeered the microphone, and before many wide-eyed and […]
Holding Myself Together
“Your skills are not what we need at this time.” Five years ago, my boss, Laura, not her real name, terminated my employment with these words. Face-to-face in an office the size of a coat closet, sat this middle-aged white woman, Chief Development Officer at the foundation, and I, former Director of Cause Marketing and […]
Sons of The Confederacy 2.0: Not Just a Few Bad Apples
Finally, after one of the most suspenseful and unnerving elections of my lifetime, the United States Congress was poised on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, to certify Electoral College votes, a long-held ceremonial element of every incoming presidential cabinet. Instead, mayhem descended on the capital city, and Congress itself, as a mob of Trump supporters laid […]
