Editor's Note

It was a lover who first told me about the cobalt crisis in Congo. I can’t recall how the conversation came up. We were seated on the patio of an Italian restaurant, slurping down the last of our spicy mussels, by then giggly off our second carafe of mimosas, when he started talking about how disillusioned he’d become by the apathy people seemed to have about the blood being shed to power our phones.

I listened intently. Watching the mouth that was only moments ago pressed against mine, now moving impassionately as he went on about modern-day slavery, child labor, and the calamitous mining practices happening in the region, and felt something other than the despair my lover expressed. Something more complicated. Something…stickier.

I’ve come back to that moment in time frequently over the last year. 

It has been similarly complicated working to publish a collection centered around pleasure. Several moments have left me wondering how we ever decided on this issue’s themes and grounding texts at all.

We choose the themes and foundational works of each issue well over a year before publication day with the belief that regardless of the time between releasing our submission call and the launch of the issue, our stories will inevitably illuminate what we are (and should be) struggling towards in our everyday lives. For the first time this year we selected two texts rather than just one–Audre Lorde’s seminal essay “Uses of the Erotic,” and Toni Morrison’s  novel, Sula–perhaps with a subconscious knowing that we would need the strength and guidance of two ancestral behemoths to undertake this exploration. We called on southern-rooted Black women, femmes, and nonbinary people to give us their sultry explorations of intimacy, self-embodiment, coming-of-age, rites of passages and personal evolution and per usual, y’all delivered.

But the threats we face in our communities are imminent and ongoing, and I must admit that at times it has felt selfish to be centering the erotic, the sensual, and that which feels good in our bodies while our government actively funds and enables genocides in Palestine, Sudan, Tigray, and Congo, the next climate catastrophe looms in the South, and the facade of American democracy has faltered beyond repair.

However, our intimate engagement with the works in this collection over the past year have only affirmed that it is our duty to interrogate the supposed dissonance between our pleasures and our perils in a society where disembodiment is weaponized to maintain control. Our literary foremothers remind us that our work goes beyond merely resisting. That it is our duty to create a better world. And it is Lorde in that seminal essay who tells us that the creative and the erotic exist on the same plane, calling us to transform our deepest desires into transformative action.

To flirt with life is to insist on living. Further, as kink practitioners can attest, pleasure is not predicated on the absence of rage, fear, pain, or other heavy emotions. Rather, pleasure can create a container for the full range of our natural and human expression so that when we feel, as Lorde says, we can be free. The world we hope to create lies on the other side of a deep and sacred intimacy with the desires of our heart, which often arrives through embodied knowing.

We have found peace in pushing forward with this issue by grounding in the necessity of multiple truths. Yes—my lover was right that there are too many of us far too willing to turn away from that which does not directly affect us. And it is also true that the sacred space we shared that day changed me.

I learned that my ex-lover transitioned from this earthly plane sometime in 2021, but when I close my eyes and drop into my body, I can still feel the heat of that last moment we shared at brunch that day. Sticky with possibility. To vision and create a world that does not yet exist, we must feel into that world first. (Note: See Black Quantum Futures time travel methods). Any form of magic we use to call the future forward will require us to embody where we are headed before we get there. It also requires animal-like instinct and clarity about our present moment.

Embodiment—the act of returning to our natural self that is in harmony with the rest of the natural world—allows us to inhabit the present, the most powerful place that we as humans are called to do the work. As stewards of the here and now, and guardians of that place we cannot see, we must straddle multiple timelines and realities.

Our embodiment and consequently, our presence becomes resistance, radical acceptance, and creation all at once. From this powerful place, we, the underbelly, become dangerous. (Word to Audre Lorde)

-Ashley Nickens

Founder & Editor-In-Chief

NEXT