But destroying is not enough

In the USA when a Black women is in distress

We weaponize her pain and vulnerability

The struggles are deeply rooted

Shaky foundation

Abolition is the radical possibility

Abolition is a remaking of every single system

Feed the people

Resist subjugation

Free the caregivers

Resist fascist ideology

Free the Mamas

Resist discarding people from our society

Who’s in and who’s out?

Who’s in the center?

What you need sis?

More than an inheritance of colonialism

What does the world need?

More than a network of lawyers

You know, law is inherently flawed

But we sit beneath the bridge

Readying a world we’ve yet to imagine

All the ways to be loved

Invite the abolition of border

I can’t imagine what it would look like

Yeah, we have to be ready in a land of reckoning

The artists tried to tell them

Cages aren’t necessary to keep us safe

But their imagination is stunted

Still

In Haiti

In Palestine

In Brooklyn

Little Black Girls & Little Black Boys

Shape for me what is possible

I like to give context, right

Infrastructure in my blood

Architecture of our history

How do we deprogram ourselves?

How do we shift our society’s gaze against the unruly?

Lead them to the path of a healthy and demilitarized planet

Our ancestors whisper the coordinates with compassion: something else is possible

Let us become a new country

Steadfast in the commitment to organizing

Let us become a new country

As we fight the narratives and transform our principles together

Let us become a new country

With this role of abolition and artistry

Break free our minds

Be of service

Be Global in nature when they try to abuse the deported

Stand Together to support the environmentally pillaged

It’s in my blood

All the fiber of my being

Fight against those

That kill for power

Push back against the system that was created to destroy us

Paint the picture

Paint the picture, Abolitionists

Articulate the garden and dream us alive

that’s how love works

A short film celebrating The Elba Hope Foundation Inaugural Impact Brunch at The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Jan, 2026

Lyric Essay by Mahogany L. Browne

And that’s where the work met the pavement. And somehow, we still forgot who we be. Paid off by government grants until we sleep on the Whiskeyed-Similac from a capitalist bottle. We scared to lose healthcare. We stop fighting for childcare cause we don’t have kids. We individuals over We. And that is how death will come fast, quick, and without worry.

Let this be a reminder. We are we because someone stood up and said no. Someone jumped into the sky and flew. Someone ended the plantation. Someone poisoned the Master. Someone stood so we could vote. Got strung up so we could vote. Drowned hundreds of thousands of dreams, so we had a voice to say: I AM A MAN TOO. I AM A WOMAN — WE BE MORE THAN MULES.

I am scrolling through my twitter feed when a video of Dalia Kafi flies across the screen. Caught on camera is a Black woman, detained and leaning against a wall, in a Canadian police station. The Calgary officer, Alex Dunn, enters the frame and tries to remove her headscarf. When Kafi inches away from his probing, without struggle or raised voices, she is instantly slammed, face first, into the cold hard ground. You can hear the smack of bones and flesh against the hard floor. She doesn’t move as he restrains her arms, hands still handcuffed behind her back, awkwardly above her writhing body. Her body is moved by another officer and blood spills from her face and mouth. I close my eyes from the too much of the scene, cover my eyes with my hands, and leave my ears open, waiting and praying to hear a wail from the pixelated screen. I rub my hands across my forehead, the sweat pooling in fear, and I wait for a sound, any sound, to signal Kafi is still alive.

I am scrolling through my Twitter feed when a video of Dalia Kafi flies across the screen. Caught on camera is a Black woman, detained and leaning against a wall, in a Canadian police station. The Calgary officer, Alex Dunn, enters the frame and tries to remove her headscarf. When Kafi inches away from his probing, without struggle or raised voices, she is instantly slammed, face-first, into the cold, hard ground. You can hear the smack of bones and flesh against the hard floor. She doesn’t move as he restrains her arms, hands still handcuffed behind her back, awkwardly above her writhing body. Her body is moved by another officer, and blood spills from her face and mouth. I close my eyes from the too much of the scene, cover my eyes with my hands, and leave my ears open, waiting and praying to hear a wail from the pixelated screen. I rub my hands across my forehead, the sweat pooling in fear, and I wait for a sound, any sound, to signal that Kafi is still alive.

This is a reaction that I’ve learned is a defense mechanism. Closing my eyes doesn’t take away the violent images, but it allows me to brace for the pain. The first time I sprained my ankle, I was a center on my high school basketball team. A girl pushed me, and I felt a tear rip through my ankle and up my shin. I think about the way I hobbled off court. The way my coach checked the swelling with both hands, her brown fingers gently assessing the disintegration of a young Black girl. I close my eyes when I think of this pain. I can access it even still. This kind of pain is a moment that will live beneath my skin for always.

Today, eight months into this quarantine life, I close my eyes and allow my hands to linger on the cutting board. I am preparing dinner, something I am still not good at. But my hands clean the seafood. I touch the knives, and the steel is not welcoming. Instruments are a means to an end. The flesh is infinite. Its propensity to touch and be touched. The heat of consent, the balm and healing properties of a body beaconing safety. I am afraid of who I will become without the kindness of human touch.

Someone on my Twitter feed jokes that “quarantine is like prison,” and I close my eyes. My hunger can lead me to a kitchen. My skin has access to showers whenever I choose. This is not close to mass incarceration, and still, it is haunting, the absence of a heartbeat orbiting my own. The light burst of us sharing the fraction of time, breathing the same air, breathing in our own becoming.

Since March 2020, I have only felt the hugs and hands of family members. I miss hugging my girlfriends, the lavish brunches once shared. Dishes of sweet syrup and honey blossoms passed from hand to hand. We rely on fuzzy text messages now. We try not to fill too much space up with grief. A cousin dies. As I write this, it has been 340 days since Breonna Taylor’s body lay dying on the ground. It’s been 340 days as I write this essay, as I #SayHerName, and still, no one has been charged for the crime of her murder. The pain of this injustice feels like a stone in my shoe. It’s the only thing that can touch me without emptying my fear reservoir. The internet fills up my haunts. The social media platforms pull my blood closer to the protest line. The news feed pretends we are angry at being COVID-Stricken, the culminating injustice pulls at the neatness of my survival as the images of so many grieving, dying, and gone fill my screen. Elders and children pepper-sprayed on the way to the voting booth. Elders and children are pepper-sprayed during protest. Face masks only cover their nose and mouth. Their eyes are a sea of sad milk. Their hands, defiant mountains, erecting new skylines amidst the soot. They march and weep, openly. My hands wring themselves a new coat of failure. I am afraid to touch. I am afraid of touch. The Trump administration has shown me what it is capable of doing to bodies like mine. This government has proved my life is not worth saving, even if they are the culprit obstructing the ease of this bittersweet life.

I miss touching. Breonna Taylor was made an example. I miss hugging my friends. Eleanor Bumpurs was made an example. 500,000 and rising have died from COVID-19. Alteria Woods was made an example. I miss the way arms tangle with one another when walking together down a sidewalk, or through a park path. Rekia Boyd was made an example. I almost cry when I begin to dream of dinners with friends and shared plates of joy. Sandra Bland was made an example. I clean my hands when I touch the door, after I open a package, and after I pass a 20 to the food delivery person. The day I vote, I move in front of a computer screen instructing me to submit my ballot. The plexiglass is smudged with my sweat, even though my hands are covered, cold, and trembling.

My anger seethed when I was called “girl” by a white man during a meeting with male colleagues. My rage bubbled and spilled when I was called “ghetto” after trying to board a subway with my child (see: audacity of a woman who refuses to let a man force her and her child aside so that he could board the train first). These consistent acts of violence required balm… a healing property. And so, I found Audre Lorde.

Her text was hidden to the average eye (not listed as required reading in my college literature syllabi as often as Gramsci or Foucault). However, it was Lorde who brought me back from the brink of an all-consuming violence when I read essays like “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” and “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” Lorde explained intersectionality, righteous rage, and the responsibility of artists when dismantling destructive ideologies practiced and guised as nationalism.

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Black girls go missing all the time. And missing doesn’t always mean disappeared, never to be seen again. It can also signal the loss of one’s self. Morrison wrote about Pecola, Claudia, and Frieda and it felt like a mirror was thrust in front of me for the first time in my life. But that is a cliche. Really. It only felt like home. Like shared bath tubs with same aged cousins to preserve the hot water boiled on the stove. It felt like handmade tacos and torillas burned on the hot iron, small hands gratefully grabbing shredded strands from a block of government cheese. It felt like the ice cream man playing Pied Piper and the popsicles shared between empty handed friends. It felt like summer heat and the park was free to be breathless and alive together.

I pulled apart the pages, sometimes seeing myself, sometimes seeing my cousins, but always witnessing my kin and the negotiation of here and gone; ghost and girl.

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I was a love-thickened girl courtesy of television, because there was nothing in my daily living that showed me Black girls were worthy of soft love. We could make babies. We could be “ride or die.” We could even hold the title of girlfriend-turned-common-law-wife. But we were never held like we were sacred nor soft. Instead, I learned to be held like a bush of thorny thickets.

My paternal grandmother remained married to my grandfather, and while their relationship was fraught with violence in the beginning, it had been put to rest once their grandchildren were old enough to question the bumps in the night. And while they lived under the same roof, they never slept in the same bed after that last fight, and remained each other’s confidant until he passed away from cancer. Here, I learned love suffers and can still be the thing you hold onto the tightest, the longest.

My maternal grandmother, tired of my grandfather’s wandering eyes, divorced him and then secured her own fleet of homes to support their two growing children. But this is a story their grandchildren would never understand, because they remained friends until his passing; he even had a spare pair of keys to her house until his final breath.

I knew couples that were together, but it seemed like it was built from compromise, tiredness, and baked-in regret. So when my mother and her first husband divorced, and my birth father and her never married, it became normal to me. Staying with someone, creating a home, producing children, fostering love in the hands of violence, being abused financially and physically in exchange for a man’s presence. And that was that. Through their stories, I learned that this would be my inheritance if I were lucky.

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Ago Amee: a West African phrase, a call and response, comes from the Akan people of Ghana. This communal action is where the neat margins of a grant report can stifle the museum walls with hard questions, like: Whose land was this before a flag named it? How much of our humanity was lost? And how do we decolonize this place if we’ve lost sight of the stars?

Call and Response is an emergency system, not a performance. This is what happens when someone says, “I am here,” and the room responds, “We are here with you.”

Call-and-response asks listeners to bear some of the weight of the truth. The heavy insistence that we ain’t going anywhere without our liberation attached.

Call. And. Response. It’s how we find each other through the smoke and noise. It is the body saying, “I cannot hold this alone.” There is an emotional structure to how a call creates space, and a response fills it without changing its original feeling. Following this rhythm—your voice, then mine, then yours—teaches us to take turns and can help lessen fear. There is a physical manifestation that reveals: shoulders lowering, breath moving, jaws unclenching; the nervous system learning in real time. The body serves as a witness and an echo.

That reply, right there, is the miracle of miracles.

Call & Response.
Who gets to talk?

Who gets to live after speaking?
Who is paraphrased into disappearance?
Who is considered reliable?
Who is considered “too angry” not to be true?
Do these questions make you uncomfortable?

The truth is, the way stories are gathered in this country often resembles a raid. There is a sudden exposure, lights on, names taken, context stripped, voices ignored. The person(s) remain in the wreckage of their own disclosure, while the mandated reporter files a copy and moves past the carnage.

Click the picture to read the entire essay.

this is not a basement party

this is some grown-up shit

you climb the chipped concrete stairs

flick your wrists like a DJ vinyl scratching

let your red lip pucker open the door to his desire

he ain’t what you want, but who is?

he rides the reggae beat, pushing you against the hot air

but you’re too heartbroken

you are stuck in a city you don’t love

you are stuck in a relationship you don’t love

you are stuck with a government who don’t love you

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Black Girl Magic Ball Fellowship

Bungee Jump off Auckland Bridge, New Zealand, 2017

We don’t see ourselves

the way other sees us

and it’s the hardest part about being alive

Fun house mirrors reflect back a cracked smile

We don’t always remember the echo

of our own laughter

It is so easy to hear the bad things

on repeat

on loop

like a song you can’t tune out

of your head

of your heart

can’t wring free from your hands

all those f…

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1. Black English as Resistance

Sanchez writes in the rhythms and syntax of Black English (African American Vernacular English)-not to imitate but to honor its logic, music, and power. In this linguistic system, “be” can express continuity or habitual action-something ongoing or essential.

“You have to be more than your Mamas was” is half command, half philosophy. It is nodding at the insistence that you must live, continually, in a state of becoming.

So her “be” is doing double work:

• Grammatically, it mirrors the habitual “be” of Black speech;

• Philosophically, that’s about existence and transformation - it’s about being changed, becoming

2. Breakin’ the Colonials’ English

By fracturing grammar, we assert that the rules of “Standard” English are to free Black people’s voice from the colonial structure. Therefore, the way we speak is already poetry. This is a long Black Arts Movement tradition, alongside poets like Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, and Haki Madhubuti, using “broken” English can also signal the introduction of an unbroken truth.

3. “Be” as an Ontological Declaration

In my poetics, the word “be” bears a spiritual and existential charge-a command toward self-definition. My poems, like Sista Sonia Sanchez's, were designed to teach: being is resistance, and becoming is freedom.

To “be” is to act in agency

To “be” is to survive, to affirm your presence, to refuse erasure

4. Breath, Music, & Rhythm

If you take your time, your poetry lines can move like jazz improvisation — short bursts, and syncopated. Studying the Black Tradition canon, I found that using repetition and breaks as rhythm, offering melodic swings of deep emotional swell, or stepping in staccato with “choppy” constructions (mimicking breath) serve as markers where our syncopations mirror speech, song, and heartbeat.

“I Be Using Be Like it Belongs to Us” because I learned that resisting linguistic colonization teaches a philosophy of continual becoming. On the page, I am finally free to change grammatical tenets into gospel.

for this sweet memory

sip my espresso

and steamed oatmilk

I am in the city of love

my love in the room

above me

it feel like a fever/dream

all this slow freedom coursing

through my veins

as if we ain’t dead in the middle

of a colonizer’s den

I enter the front door to meet

the accusation in her eyes

you didn’t even check on me

her face tightened by allergies & grief

I shake away my joy

and tuck it away, like always

Braided from the real-life source material of PEN America 2018 Writing For Justice Fellow Priscilla Ocen’s interviews, this powerful choral performance poem center…

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all these sentences beginning with no cap (to symbolize what? my imperfection, or my smallness??). all these ideas running around and bumping into one another as i try to squeeze the air back into the lungs of my penmanship. i have always written and shared my stories with high school dropouts, because i was a high school dropout. i have always written my stories for the girls kicked out of their homes at a young age because they were too fast/loud/disorderly/angry. after all, i too know what it feels like to wake up one day and all of your things be ransacked and gone. my body has never been safe in this lifetime or this country. and still, my stories have always held a safe place for Black femmes to unravel, reveal, and recover from the maltreatment packaged as punitive protection.

i am three weeks into my recovery from a total knee replacement surgery and this is the first thing i’ve written. pulling corners of my memories aside like old quilts, an attempt to peek at what is on the other side. before this surgery, i would be out and about — pretending the pain isn’t bigger than my will. but the lack of recovery from my last knee procedure required me to be still (for once) and lean into the silence, where the words in my head run oxy-induced and rampant. it also demanded i lean on the community for support, the one i fear i didn’t have. it doesn’t matter how many meals you have delivered, how many babies you watch through the night, how many poems you edit, how many stages you make possible for the career of others — when you are the one in need, the phone line be cemetery silent.

but the folks who pulled through for me (especially the: yoga ball, ice machine for knee, toilet topper, air circulation boots, pre-massage session, books and film recommendations, art supplies, yoga desk deck, flowers, and texts that remind me i am cared for) made it possible for my body to recover and repair, without my losing sight of my place in this world. my partner shut down his entirety for my well-being and i’m better for it.

today was my last in-house rehab session. it is also the day i woke again to the smell of this country on fire. it is no surprise i couldn’t write until now. this began as a small bop to challenge the critic in your head. the one that determines the value of your existence. the one that whispers “you didn’t make this list or that podcast”. surly bitch that voice of comparison. but i am thankful for every moment i return to the page. i am thankful for every person who has read my work. i am thankful for every person that has written me about it, or began their writing journey because of something i said. the gratitude doesn’t last as long as the doubt, but praise the sky, it returns to me. and i am grateful i write when everything around me says i should not. i better not. every time i return to the blank page, in the beginnng, if i’m honest; there is a pain in my chest. it means i still got time to fight; it means i better write like my life depends on it.