Mama stopped drinking the water
after daddy passed.
She gets it delivered now—
Ozarka in big jugs.

She was given a truth,
an insurance check,
turned it over and over in the night’s
un-moving, like a precious relic,
like a polished stone.

States away, I still sleepwalk
to the riverbank,
beg to re-live
even the barest mornings:
the time catching trout
Cassie snagged my arm with her fish hook,
harvesting the June tomatoes,
his steamboat laugh,
even the nights I’d hear him
praying for a son.

My daughter only knows
his charcoal

outline,
the rubbings of a grave;

I tell her stories
of how she was born:
sculpted from star
dust and red clay

.In the dream,
undone promises
fog up the marshland,
and the river’s frozen over,
as though I’m ready
to forgive.
I know it’s just as hard
in heaven, but I still want
to swim.

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.