1. You must let the pain visit. 2. You must allow it teach you 3. You must not allow it overstay. (Three routes to healing) - Ijeoma Umebinyuo, Questions for Ada Photo source: http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/young-black-woman-on-wooden-boat-dock-she-looks-stock-video-footage/472903806 You are precious. They will never say this enough to you, Black girl. I say it neither to erase what’s been hard nor to ignore the reasons you don't believe you are but to give you

Photo Credit: Maybelline McCoy “we need a god who bleeds now a god whose wounds are not some small male vengeance some pitiful concession to humility a desert swept with dryin’ marrow in honor of the lord we need a god who bleeds spreads her lunar vulva & showers us in shades of scarlet thick & warm like the breath of her our mothers tearing to let us in this place breaks open like our mothers bleeding the planet is heaving mourning our ignorance the moon tugs the seas to hol

As the school year comes to a close and our children and youth prepare to spend their summer at camp or neighborhood swimming pools, at the beach, park barbecues or on the couch binging on Saturday morning cartoons, I remember Brownsville and how we vowed to take it back. We were in the middle of the school year. It was February when I heard an eighteen-year-old girl in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Brownsville, Brooklyn, New York was reportedly gang raped at gunpoi