Day One On the heels of your father’s murder, you stood at a press conference with your mother, your arm draped around her shoulders. You stood there for a brave moment—you, in your school-boy striped polo shirt, left to be the man of the house in the wake of your daddy’s fresh death. But the weight of it all—the flashing cameras and expectant microphones; your mother’s halting voice and ragged breathing as she read her statement; the memory of the moving images of the cop shooting your father at point-blank range—bullet after bullet after bullet penetrating the same chest you have hugged countless times—became too much to bear, and when you crumbled, I wished to God that his eternal chest, his divine arms, would have been there to catch you. This is who was visible: a web of black men who curved around you and your mother like a crescent moon embracing the black sky. And there was something Godly in their actions. I am my brother’s keeper. I hope that, even in your grief, …

‘Stop The Violence’ Illustration by Dennis de Groot I’ve been thinking and thinking. And thinking. My first visceral experience with police brutality was when I was in the 5th grade (you do the math) with the Rodney King beating. I was a young Black girl, still formulating what it means to be Black in America. Reading the brilliant works of Nikki Giovanni and Gwendolyn Brooks and Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes etc. on my spare time and in school when I had the chance. Writing my own poems as they flowed through me. Making sense of the hurt. To be Black meant pain. It meant beauty that only we saw. It meant feeling invisible and finding some sort of freedom in that. It meant fighting. Always fighting. It meant grandma’s hands and private joys and not having good explanations for why we were snuffed out. Why white people seem to just hate us. Why they always have. From the start of this site, I said I did not want this to become a place that talks …