“[W]e can define ostranenie as a cognitive-emotional state, the renewed awareness produced when the habitual is depicted in an unusual way. What is habitual differs from reader to reader, from spectator to spectator. The intended effect can fail to manifest itself; conversely, one can experience ostranenie where it was not intended: say, reading a description of one’s country written by an astonished foreigner. There are a great many ways of making things strange — for instance, adopting the perspectives of aliens and animals; naming directly what is usually couched in euphemisms; or describing in minute detail what is usually summed up in a single word.”
 — I really enjoyed this essay about Viktor Shklovsky and his idea of ostranenie, and I am someone who cannot hear the phrase “literary theory” without making the “jerking off” motion so violently that I do damage to my rotator cuff. If you feel strong enough today to make it through something that addresses formalism, “schema-focused therapy” and a bunch of other concepts that require a strong gag reflex, you might want to give it a shot. THIS IS ME RECOMMENDING THIS PIECE BTW.

Let’s face it, most mornings you feel out of sorts. It’s because life is absurd and the things you do lack all meaning and even the occasional moments in which you are fully conscious of the absurdity and meaningless cannot compete with your brain’s belief that it is better to pretend that the useless things you struggle to do each day won’t be completely erased very shortly after the inevitable end of your journey into nothingness. This morning, however, you have a better reason than usual to feel out of sorts, because the stupid setting of the clocks stole an hour away from your rest. By the end of the week you will have adjusted and the cloud of confusion hovering over your head will once again result from your denial of death, but today you can let yourself feel a little better about being so blurry. Here’s ten minutes of techno that has all the right influences and doesn’t care to disguise them. Enjoy.

★★★★ The view out the open end of the window, next to the winter-bleared pane, seemed like something captured through high-quality optics. The ear felt the acoustics extending out indefinitely. The four-year-old was gratified to be free to wear his hoodie, and then at his heels through the school door came another boy in shorts and sandals. Up in the tops of the trees on 64th Street was the first shimmer of green. The clouds thickened but the sun kept pushing through for long moments. Not long past midday, a few tiny drops of rain fell from the bright and mottled sky. On the back side of Lincoln Center the sidewalk was full of branches and the smell of cut green wood, as a worker trimmed the shrubbery back within its bounds. The third-graders launched paper airplanes along the sidewalk at dismissal. Fresh air floated over the couch where the children were staring into a pixelated artificial world.

It turns out that people don’t like to pay for things, even if those things require another human to drive to a cavernous temple to the global supply chain, quickly dash through lanes upon lanes of infinitely varied merchandise like a rodent to collect dozens of extremely specific items (“no, not Perrier, LaCroix!”) and then drive all of those items over to someone’s house — and even if those people are told that they should be happy to pay so little for such a service, which frees them from the bondage of… shopping for their own groceries. So Instacart has found a new way to get paid:

The grocery delivery startup is working with General Mills Inc., Nestlé SA, PepsiCo Inc., Unilever NV, and other consumer goods makers to cover the cost of delivery or provide other discounts when customers buy their products. In addition to the coupons, the companies pay Instacart to advertise on its website. Since introducing the program about six months ago, it now accounts for 15 percent of Instacart’s revenue, said Apoorva Mehta, the company’s chief executive officer.

Shoppers can find discounts when filling up their carts with brands such as Degree, Doritos, DiGiorno, Häagen-Dazs, Quaker Oats, and Stella Artois. Instacart ads promise free delivery if you spend $10 on Red Bull, or consumers can get 75 cents off any Dove soap. Mehta compares the ads to those offered on the side of Google search results. “It’s like AdWords for groceries,” he said.

And this is how, future food historians will one day note, after the failed uprising demanding foodstuff neutrality — so that no PepsiCo-owned potato chip brand could be favored over a Kettle brand chip in the transmission from store shelves to pantries — what was left of the middle class was prepared for a life where all food was Soylent, because after years of drinking nothing but Red Bull and eating DiGiorno for every meal, they weren’t just ready, they were willing.

Photo by Tyler Cipriani

You were stupid to think things would get better. You were stupid to even think things wouldn’t get any worse. There is no level so low that once you drop down to it the ground doesn’t sink a few more feet. When you were younger it made more sense to tell yourself that everything would be okay, that the future was bright and the bad parts would fall away. Now you know that the bad parts are the best you’ve got and you should clutch them closely to your heart because whatever happens next can only make them seem comforting. You’re dying slowly and running out the clock, and you’re stuck watching a recital of recrimination and regret. The rest of the show is a series of collisions, concessions and things falling apart, and even though you’re seated way back in the balcony they’re not going to let you get up to go. The good news is come Sunday you get to fast forward through an hour of it. That’s not things getting better, but it’s not nothing either. Take what you can get.

Photo: Shutterstock.com

by Victoria Chiu

There’s a curious disparity in the representation of people of color and other marginalized groups in media, and it extends even into the depths of social media. On Tumblr, the most frequently shared artwork and images often reflect the “white ideal”: thin white girls riding dainty bicycles, pale willowy hands drawing paintbrushes across canvas, the whitewashing of fictional characters who were originally people of color. So, last summer, two young, queer artists of color, Mars and Jam — along with a few of their close friends — launched the Art Hoe Collective to bring more exposure to underrepresented young artists making videos, music, and visual art, and to recognize minority artists who often don’t receive credit for their work online.

The collective, which exists almost entirely online, consists of a group of artists led by a dozen young curators who post artwork, poetry, photography, and performance art to its Instagram and Tumblr accounts, which have an audience of more than thirty-seven thousand followers on Instagram and several thousand more on Tumblr, its secondary platform. The collective’s aesthetic skews toward the bold and brightly colored: Painter Justice Dwight’s pop art-esque portraits and Brooklyn White’s LP album art are prime examples of pieces that strike this chord, and the same cohesive vibe is conveyed through the work of its curators, like Anisa McGowan (shown above) and Myles Loftin. The other week, one of the founding members of the collective, Sage Adams, and I spoke about art, racism, self-cyberbullying, and squad goals while she battled pink eye in her Howard University dorm room.

Why do you think the Art Hoe Collective gained so many followers so quickly?

The Collective is a representation of those who have not found a voice in mainstream media because we’ve been purposefully kept out of the art world. The art world as it is right now is extremely elitist — art galleries and museums, especially, epitomize all the worst parts of exclusion and the shutting out of one people in favor of the raising up of another based on a single narrow definition of what is acceptable and what is not. Art is housed in an isolated sphere — it’s strange to be a minority in the art world and explore all of these concepts that are foreign to the world of high art, but completely normal to regular people of color.

At the end of the day, it’s about the narrative of art, too — stories that focus on black people, for instance, shouldn’t necessarily have to constantly harp on the fact that its main characters are black. There’s a huge gap in media that people are trying to fill with diversified characters, but by evaluating these new shows in terms of whiteness instead of regarding them as their own standalone projects, everything goes back to and supports that idea of white dominance. The Collective tries to break that down and give visibility to artists who maybe don’t want to continually focus on race — who might just want to make art they love and are proud of — but might not be able to break into that elitist world of art and media.

I’m on Tumblr a lot, myself, and it does seem that more often than not the most reblogged and shared artwork posts are usually the work of white artists…

Yes. Exactly.

…and I’m not sure why that is.

Well, it’s that whole unattainable “squad goals” thing. Think Taylor Swift, Gigi and Bella Hadid — it’s like there’s this whole thing where you, as a person of color, will never be able to break through that boundary. It’s not something that I really want to do, but that is what’s popular and it’s difficult for people on Tumblr to break out of that image and create their own content rather than circulate what’s popular: the same Eurocentric beauty standards. Like, you know the #Blackout hashtag? That’s what really changed it for me. #Blackout showed me the huge breadth of the diversity of the black community on Tumblr, so movements like that are pretty cool.

A photo posted by Submit To Arthoecoreps@gmail (@arthoecollective) on Feb 25, 2016 at 3:16pm PST

The idea for the Art Hoe Collective initially grew out of the #arthoe hashtag on Tumblr, and at the time users of color would tag their selfies and art to create an aggregate feed showcasing everyone’s art in one place, making it really conducive to discovery. But in the weeks before the Collective launched, there was some controversy online about the hashtag being appropriated by people — mostly white girls — who were hijacking the tag and undermining its existence as a tool for people of color, right?

Yeah — honestly, that was so fucking annoying. The hashtag was originally coined by rapper Babeo Baggins in one of their selfies, and then Mars, one of the founders of the Collective, started talking to me and the other curators about getting together to decide on which platform we were going to launch the Collective. While we were getting our shit together, all these white girls with expensive Fjallraven Kanken backpacks started posting selfies with squiggly lines drawn on them in the #arthoe tag and saying things like, “Oh my god, this is so cute, I want this in my life.” On the side, we were kind of taken aback by it. The tag was started by queer people of color for queer people of color, and because of that we were like, “Um. Go outside; read a book. Open a magazine. The world is your oyster, but #arthoe is for [people of color].” The Collective was the product of a reclamation of the term and a ways for us to assert that this was our space, and we were intent on staying in it. We weren’t going to give up the Collective for anyone.

There are already so many other things we have to tolerate, like white girls overdrawing their lips — somehow, that has become acceptable. But there are some things we just shouldn’t have to concede to, like the creative input and identity of marginalized people. I’m not going to flood the tag I’m a part of with stupid pictures, no matter what anyone says.

I definitely see certain individuals getting upset on social media if they see a space that’s specifically for people of color.

It’s not even just that they aren’t a part of it — they come in and, while in another’s space, demand that people of color educate them on subjects they should already be researching. The attitude is that failure on the part of a person of color to educate a white person on matters of race and intersectionality theory is somehow the responsibility of POC rather than the white community, when in reality it’s definitely not the role of the marginalized to educate the privileged. It’s not “racist” for a person of color to refuse to educate a white person on the topic of race in their own safe space. Failure to educate oneself is, to be frank, laziness.

How does the Collective deal with hateful, racist comments like that now?

On the Art Hoe Collective Instagram page, the curators just ignore it — the sorts of people making those comments obviously know what they’re coming into, so there’s really no need to bother responding. We’ll respond sometimes on our own personal Instagram pages — on my own Instagram, for example, sometimes I’ll reply because at the end of the day racist comments need to be addressed, even if the people who post them demand that you stay quiet about them.

There comes a point when resistance is the only form of communication people will understand. Take Rosa Parks — when she refused to move, when she said “I’m not moving, because this is not okay” — that was powerful. Likewise, there are some things I won’t give up on simply because they are wrong, and the Collective will never shut down just because a few loud commenters feel that a space for people of color is somehow the right place to complain about lack of inclusivity of the privileged.

A photo posted by Submit To Arthoecoreps@gmail (@arthoecollective) on Mar 3, 2016 at 2:22pm PST

I think some of that criticism, in part, comes from a misunderstanding of what the Collective really aims to do.

It tends to come across as an exclusionary factor when we say our page was made by people of color for people of color, but it really isn’t — if anything, it’s a safety precaution. And the Art Hoe Collective is not exclusive toward white people — it’s for marginalized groups, all marginalized groups, and you can most certainly be white and marginalized. If you’re a disabled white person or a queer white person, for example, what you have to say absolutely is important and relevant to the advancement of marginalized communities. But if you’re white, straight, and regular, and you’re not doing anything particularly noteworthy for marginalized people — if you’re Macklemore — then the Art Hoe Collective is not your place!

Another concept some people seem to have difficulty grasping is the idea of “seeing race”: So often the idea of “not seeing race” or being “colorblind” is touted as the solution to racial tension.

I was working with a black artist, a rapper — Rejjie Snow — and he was talking about the distinction between “seeing color” and “not seeing color”; the boundary between acknowledging difference and refusing to acknowledge it. He mentioned that differences don’t have to be negative aspects of identities — the only reason differences are seen as negative is because society has trained us all to believe that a quintessential trait of human nature is exclusion of the Other, when it really is not. It can’t be. Within our own communities we are strong and appreciative of beauty, so what is stopping us from reaching out to other communities and recognizing the strength and beauty of those people? At the same time, though, I don’t want everyone to be wearing box braids and appropriating other cultures because they’re seen as trendy. There’s a very fine line between the two and it’s very difficult to define it for individuals who are not minorities — they just don’t feel it the same way people of color do because they haven’t lived it. A lot of white people have never been told that they can’t cross certain racial or cultural lines, so it’s hard for many of them to recognize where that essential “line” really is.

A photo posted by Submit To Arthoecoreps@gmail (@arthoecollective) on Jan 21, 2016 at 12:30pm PST

What are the collective’s long-term goals?

I think we’re still trying to figure that out. The vision for the future is definitely physical: It’s definitely an offline, physical space where people can feel safe. The idea is similar to Teen Art Salon, which is a really dope place in New York — every Saturday they open up their studio space and invite people to come in and paint if, say, your parents don’t let you paint in the house. The future for the Collective would be in-person meetups where marginalized people and people of color can connect, network independently, make their own projects, and know that they don’t need the outside world and its white, supremacist, capitalist cisheteropatriarchy to dictate what they can and cannot do.

For instance, the connections with others the curators have been able to make on Tumblr — that’s what we want for all our followers. We’ve done a few meetups so far — we’ve done two, one in DC and one in New York — and we’re just trying to do some more of that. Most of our curators are in school, so the actual coordination of different events all over the country can be difficult, but ultimately we want people to meet us, realize we’re normal people, and understand that they can be their normal selves with us and still be amazing.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Top painting by Anisa Goldman, whose work can also be found on Instagram

This week encompassed two seasons, so there’s a better reason than usual for why it felt so goddamn endless. And yet here we are, at the end of it. There’s not a lot to be happy about these days but we should for sure be happy about this. Anyway, here’s another track from the forthcoming Bat For Lashes record. Apparently it’s a conceptual bit about “a woman whose fiancé has been killed in a crash on the way to the church for their wedding. She flees the scene to take the honeymoon trip alone, resulting in a dark meditation on love, loss, grief, and celebration,” but it’s probably better for everyone if you don’t pay any attention to that and just listen to it as a song. Enjoy!

★★★★★ Haze stuck to everything, filling the spaces between buildings like smoke. On the walk uphill from the school door, the everyday thick hoodie was suddenly too warm. The northern horizon framed by the buildings along the avenue was ocher. It was time to try a more distant coffee shop — almost time to get the coffee iced. Time to think about it. Fifth Avenue felt like Taipei in December. Light dripped down a blank wall of old irregular brick, exposed and waiting to be covered by new construction. Out came pale bare arms and even paler legs. Smokers savored their cigarettes. People sat out on the blocks of stone in the Broadway pedestrian zone. There was just enough coolness on the afternoon air for a man in shirtsleeves to have given his suit jacket to the woman he was with, in a lightweight dress. Uptown at sunset a warm wind was still blowing. Something was chirping outside on the night air.

by Bryan Washington

Everywhere in New Orleans is hellish in June, but the astonishing thing is what the heat does to the people. Some it makes cordial, like the Korean lady in the shop on Freret, who insisted that I take two, three, four Ozarkas from her cooler. The more I insisted that, really, I was fine, the more she insisted that I was not. I was very thirsty, she said. I would take the water and I would leave and I would enjoy my day.

The papers pen annual columns about the weather’s relationship to the murder rate, which seems to spike whenever the sun lingers, or the Saints are losing, or both. Everyone’s on the edge of something. On the streetcar, you’ll see a gaggle of black kids in too-big shirts beside the middle-aged white woman with FUCK tattooed on her neck, and you can’t guess what either of them is thinking, only that it’s probably Not Good. But it is simply too hot to function, let alone kill someone, so the boys nod at the woman from under their snapbacks and the woman smiles in turn, showing all of her teeth.

There are people who move to New Orleans for the labor, and there are people who move to New Orleans for the movies, and there are people who move here for its jazz and its blackness. I do not think I am alone in that I moved down for Moments. Moments! I’d read about them in books, from Tom Piazza to Tennessee Williams, and I’d seen them on HBO, ferried along by Wendell Pierce, and I knew that mine was precisely the mindset that the locals actively loathe: a young person from Elsewhere looking to drive up rent. But I’d only read so many books, and I’d been broke in Houston, and I never thought to wonder how I’d react when those Moments finally came.

On Zora Neale Hurston’s first trip to the city, she stayed with the great hoodoo doctor Luke Turner, the supposed grand-nephew of a great hoodoo queen. To reach a final state of enlightenment, or knowingness, or whatever, in order to collect the requisite notes for a piece she was writing, Hurston spent seventy hours on a sofa without water. Talking about it later, she said, “for sixty nine hours I lay there. I had five psychic experiences and awoke at last with no feeling of hunger, only one of exaltation.” It is the kind of anecdote you find in on overpriced visitor’s pamphlet, but I got it from a well-meaning teacher in junior high. It came with a photo of Hurston donning tilted hat and pistol. She’s grinning in the picture, as if she’s found The Point and deemed it ludicrous, and she became my projection of everyone in that city: black people coasting down the streets, fingering bourbon and muttering jazz; men and women and musicians donning capes, mysterious and cunning.

I took my first trip down when I was fourteen — visiting family friends around the way — but after spending most of the day in a hotel, having realized there’d be neither hoodoo nor enlightenment, I slipped out of my room, a little past midnight, and simply didn’t go back. I made a beeline to Bourbon. There is a long list of maladies that can befall a kid in the Quarter, but for better or worse I experienced none of them: I watched a squad of strippers smoking on break outside of Penthouse; I saw a bridesmaid hitch her skirt to take a shit in an alley; and a short, hairy guy in an Alabama sweatshirt walked right up to me, right on the edge of the curb, to lay a sloppy kiss on my left cheek. After that introduction, he gave me a hug. Was I okay? Okay. He apologized, disappearing into the mass. It was probably my first sense of being alone in a crowd — except I wasn’t really alone, because there was a whiff of something in the air and we were united even if we all weren’t blasted or giddy on E.

Walking back to the hotel, hours and hours later, I ended up stepping around Louis Armstrong Park. A quartet of drunks sat on a stage wiping down their instruments. I pulled a chair beside a trio of Asian guys with cameras. The crooner behind the microphone was deeply drunk but asked for requests anyways. But nothing fancy, he said, just the usual shit. After some deliberation, one of the cameramen asked, a little fearfully, for “It’s a Wonderful World.” The crooner groaned, but that’s what they played.

When I arrived a decade later, it was a little less enticing. The city felt grimier. Garbage was everywhere. The roads had been paved with TNT. Rent felt explosive and groceries were astronomical. Louisiana had reached a tipping point. Bobby Jindal’s political antics had stumbled across the national stage, and David Vitter, a long-time senator, was running as the Republican in his stead. But Vitter was, among other things, at the tail end of a prostitution scandal. Although the statute of limitations had elapsed, his constituents hadn’t forgotten, which made it a good a time to be a Democrat. The party had a guy named John Bel Edwards — standing on the “Hope!” platform — who, if elected, would be the only blue governor in the Deep South. His people were out in droves: You couldn’t drive four blocks without running over election signs, especially in Gentilly, a largely black suburb near the levees.

The bodies I saw on Elysian and St. Bernard, all of them campaigning for Edwards, were nearly always black — they were the ones on the ground. They championed this white man as a savior for the state and, by association, its cardinal city. In the general American consciousness, blackness can mean a number of things: culture and authenticity and hip-hop and the rest. It’s less often, and hardly enough, that you see the political girth of it — the anvil-weighted influence of the demographic in a city. It’s delicious to see black people achieve. The transaction in between, the working for the thing to happen, isn’t something we hear enough about — the idea of New Orleans as a “working black city” isn’t as sexy as the idea that it is a violent one.

So, for the first time in a long time, I felt implicated by the actions of people who looked like me. The notion of “representing the race,” whether you’ve fucked up or done something great, isn’t a mindset I’m partial toward, but in New Orleans, all of a sudden, those gestures were amplified. The feeling got tighter whenever I glanced at the crime reports, until I stopped reading them — only to come back to them hours later. The Uptown robberies were a cardinal example: Late at night on August 20th, three gunmen entered the Patois restaurant on Laurel Street and told everyone to get on the fucking floor. They went through patrons’ pockets, took wallets and cash and phones, then left the joint with an empty bottle of Vodka. The restaurant’s co-owner, Leon Touzet, told The Times-Picayune that they “were definitely amateurs.” A few weeks after that, on September 24th, two gunmen robbed the Atchafalaya restaurant on Louisiana Avenue. Not even a week later, the Monkey Hill Bar on Magazine was robbed on a Monday night. The owner, Johnny Vodanovich, said he “knew it was a matter of time.” The police presence in the area rose from “present” to highly visible, and that meant the constant churning of a sort of loose street calculus. People took care to clear the streets in the evenings; when people saw me on the sidewalk, more than a few of them crossed the road. It was another few months before three suspects were named. A fourth one turned himself in shortly afterwards. I was (still) unpacking boxes at my place when I heard, scanning the news for updates on my phone. I’d been looking for that specific thing, the thing I knew I didn’t need to confirm, but when I got to the pictures, I couldn’t help but sigh, because each of them was, without exception, very young and very black.

My apartment sits in the outskirts — the suburbs, really — surrounded by the highway. It isn’t very large, but there’s a courtyard in the back. There’s room for the kids in the complex to kick the fùtbol onto the main road, and when everyone hits their porches in the evenings, they’ve got their Abitas and their Buds and Modelos in tow. There’s a young-ish Puerto Rican couple in the unit beside mine, and an old black man living below me who bums cigarettes. The Arab lady across the banister is always in tottering in heels. Every day of the week she has an entirely different hairstyle. By my entirely unscientific conclusions, it is probably the most diverse pocket in the New Orleans metropolitan area, which isn’t especially diverse: It’s a black city, home of the oldest black neighborhood in this country, the first major neighborhood maintained by free people of color — slaves who’d toiled and worked and prospered and died and probably hoped they’d get to pass a little something on.

This is all to say that the city I visited years ago isn’t at all the one I’m in now: The population has returned to seventy-nine percent of what it was before Katrina, but the black population has been reduced by nearly a hundred thousand. Just over seventy percent of the people displaced by the storm were black, and at least a third of that group was economically disadvantaged. The Asian population has jumped all of 0.7 percent over the course of fourteen years and the Latino population, comparatively low for the South, has risen by nearly 2.2 percent; the city supports one of the largest Honduran communities outside of Honduras, and it’s generally understood that the influx of Latino workers made rebuilding the city a smoother affair.

But the white people. Oh, man. The white people are renovating shotguns and they are opening gourmet grilled cheese cafes. White people are here and white people are there and white people going where they’ve never gone before, building beautiful things in places they’d have sped past only a year ago. No one I’ve spoken to seems to know how they feel about this. Or they do have an opinion, one they’re ready to defend, but there’s always a lingering but. We’re being priced out, but the Bywater’s safer. Black businesses are closing, but we don’t mind the Whole Foods on Broad Street. You may be geographically in New Orleans, but not in New Orleans at all. The city is very much itself all over, except where it isn’t. It is, ironically, a chiasmus everyone seems to agree on: something needs to change, but too many things are changing.

Near the end of October, a month before the election, if you were driving through Gentilly or Broadview or Mid-City you saw even more Edwards supporters. Some of them had the signs, and some of them fiddled with leaflets, but the bulk of them simply stood in the crowd, in the midst of the thing even if their hands were free. I flirted with the idea of joining them. Occasionally I’d honk a horn in solidarity, or support, or something, and the people turned sharply, and then they saw me, and I think they understood. One let out a yell. Once, a woman ambushed me just outside of the Rouse’s. She told me this election would be different. She said Edwards had the people in mind. I did not contradict her.

Maybe a month later, I was sitting on the patio of a bar in the middle of town, well past two or even three in the morning. It was packed, with this breeze floating just above everyone’s voices, and the streetcar crackling in the background. Someone in the corner collapsed into laughter, and all of a sudden we were having it, a good time. It was one of the evenings I told myself I’ve moved to New Orleans for. It was happening, right then, right there in front of my eyes.

Someone launched into another joke when two black girls, both of them impeccably dressed, made their way onto the patio from the corner. They sidled up to the table, asking for cigarettes, and we quickly distributed them because we had no reason not to. The girls were very funny, and very pretty, and they folded easily into our laughter, until they’d finally made it their own in the funny way that black women can, which also made sense, because it was their city we were in, and all of a sudden they were telling us stories about it.

A man flew out of the bar, moving with an urgency I’ve rarely seen amongst civilians. He told the girls to get the fuck out. He’d had problems with stragglers, they’d been plugging his patrons for money, and he’d seen the two girls come off of the road. He wasn’t having it tonight. Someone had to put a stop to it.

The girl who could’ve been a model took a drag on her cigarette. She asked the man if he knew who her father was. He did not. Nor did we. But when she told us, everyone sort of exhaled — it was a Name That Was Known, a jazz musician. The man didn’t look entirely convinced, but he backed off anyways. He said he was just checking. They’d had problems before. Someone had to fix it. One of the girls said she understood, she didn’t want any trouble, and the man retreated into the doorway.

The mood had been dampened — irremediably, I thought — but eventually it returned. There was laughter again, and jokes. The streetcar tinkling. Many beers later, the daughter of the musician pulled me aside. We were the only black people at the bar, and she joked that she had to make the effort. She asked if I liked it in her city. I told her I hadn’t been around long enough to know. She knocked on the bench between us, cementing our words in the wood. “Me,” she said. “I can’t wait to get the fuck out of here. People come down here from fucking wherever and they think there’s a million things to do.”

“But us,” she continued. “Ain’t nothing left for us. We suffocating. So I got to go.”

After another cigarette, she and her friend waved goodbye. They told us they were going for a walk. This was the only time of day they didn’t have to worry about tourists crowding the park, and they thought it would be romantic. It was well past three in the evening. I wanted to say something about staying safe, but it felt inappropriate, so I didn’t.

In November, hours before the final tally on election night, John Bel Edwards had already wrapped up the vote. The tavern I watched the election in stayed at a medium hum, with about half of the patrons eying the screen above the bar, and the other half crowded at the pool table. I was sitting with a friend, a woman who’d spent most of the month campaigning. One guy sitting beside us, a white dude in a hunting jacket, called it a damn shame. The black guy beside him agreed. The white girl that I came with spoke up, and while I braced for something heated, she only called it a beautiful thing. One of the men grunted. He wasn’t looking for an argument, either. The other rose his mug in a perverse sort of toast.

I thought Edwards’ victory would also be a victory for the black volunteers — the ones doing work on the ground, forcing the rest of us to give a fuck. I imagined them celebrating in the streets, or at least reaping the spoils of their sweat. But the roads were empty that night, and then again the following day. Most of the signs I’d seen posted for weeks evaporated altogether. Every once in a while, I’d find a flyer on Elysian, blown loose and collected on the slope of a traffic island, but it wasn’t any different from what was already there. It’d found its place with the rest of the trash, overshadowed by the renovations beside it. You had no way of knowing when the city would clean it up.

Photo by Shanon Mollreus

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Milking the rest of it

Turn the faucet on
Turn the breast on
Emptied completely of milk
With the tiny hoses in a row
Emptied of when the ships were she
Child of my heart
A dull ache and then
No pain at all
When the muzzle found my mouth
To not let the milk form a crust
Of ice and sugar
On the nipple
And to put the cap on it
Emptied of
The ships where she
Eight tiny roses in a row
Where water goes in
The greenish water
Where the saints
Can grow
You know some will tell you
No you’re already happy
But the trap of your life
Is that you’re trapped in this body
And even though you search
For twenty to eighty years for the demon
In other people
Turn the faucet on
And look in the mirror
The demon
Is you

Dull milk
Aching out the little faucets
In your nipple
To go nowhere
There’s no baby
There’s no mother
Just an endless hallway
Of fear upon fear
Neverending tinted roses
All in a row
The lavender water
We sip on a chilly day
Before we go
On our way
Six tiny horsemen
In moon suits
Leading us not to the promised land
But to a box
Where our reward for surviving this mess
Is to die and then forget
And inside the box
The greatest tormenter of them all
She’s there
To hang you by the teeth
And say
There’s no baby
There’s no mother
Ice cold and stiff
Hacked
And hewed
Me and you
Except thank fully for me
Goodbye hello
Milky one
I’m gone
I’m home
I’m gone
Goodbye
Except thankfully for she
Goodbye milk
Hello love
Nice to meet you tiny faucet
Hello milk
No
Goodbye milk
Goodbye life
Hello life
Goodbye hello
Death
Death
All of it
Death and more death
Goodbye where they roast
The people in the urn
Where they shut the oven door
Before the baby can get out
Help help
I feel the curse
Burning my baby
The dull milk ache
Oh the pain the oak
No no
Goodbye pain
Goodbye

Dorothea Lasky’s most recent book is ROME (Liveright/W.W. Norton).

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.