If I’m being honest, yes,
I want you to love me.

But my skin doesn’t know
how to breathe here.

I forget I’m near the ocean until
I hear the seagulls wail.

I’ve been loved by a people
who call you baby at first glance.

I was born in the kind of history
that smacks you in the face.

Come springtime, pollen descends
on the windshields and door knobs.

These days, not even winter
can stop disaster.

I’m so tired of loving her
from other stars.

Baby, here is what I have to offer you:
the high water mark in the yellow house,

the shutter that opens wonky after it flew off in 2005,
the sweat stains in all my clothes that won’t wash out.

Could you love it?
Could you learn to?

Because I have seen
the moon rise over

the Mississippi;
there is only one place for me to go.

Published March 20, 2022

Irene Vázquez is a Black Mexican American poet, journalist, and editor. Irene graduated from Yale with a BA in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and English, as part of the 2021 cohort of Mellon Mays-Bouchet Fellows. Recently, Irene was named a winter/spring 2022 Brooklyn Poets Fellow. Irene’s works have appeared or are forthcoming in Muzzle, the Texas Observer, and the lickety-split, among others. Mostly Irene likes drinking coffee, impulse-buying books, and using the word capacious. Irene’s work can be found at www.irenevazquez.com.

Kwamé Gomez (b.1999 Akron, OH, USA) is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary painter, multimedia visual artist and writer. In 2021 they received their Bachelors of Fine arts from the Myers School of Art located in Akron, OH. Currently, they are completing their Masters of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they received the New Artist Society Scholarship and are set to graduate in 2023. In their work they explore themes of personal ritual, ceremony and transcendentalism through sentimental experiences of the temporal and mundane. Through the language of collage, mixed media and found materials, the act of reimagination through form and material fundamentally grounded in the basis of their multimedia works mirrors the longstanding diasporic tradition of making due. In their collection of works on canvas, panel and paper shape-based mechanisms of abstraction unite with rhythmic expressions of dreamscape in the pursuit of highlighting the sacred connections between Ancestral muscle memories of reinvention, Blackness, and the figure as a pictorial vessel for ceremonial usage. In these sentimental domains, spaces are created where Black people are free to partake in rituals of rest, autonomy, affirmation and processing. Their work has been featured and exhibited at New Image Art Gallery in West Hollywood, California; SoLA Contemporary in Los Angeles, CA; Center for the History of Psychology, Akron OH; and Summit Artspace, Akron OH, among others.