The Star, or Black, as the Cosmos, after Brianna Daniels
- Mariah M.
Les Fleurs by High Priestess Minnie spins on endless I
challenge my higher self to see how many paths
my fingers can find on this godbody in this anytime and
what other celestials are birthed when I make an orbit of my hips
We Children of Mars make the way by fire,
In this heretime, we fashion a cauldron from a living room
You treat a cauldron the same way you do a skillet With an
oven and know betta
Trade shortening for sweat off your brow The fire
behind rib cage, between thighs
You say into the void, let me be furnace
and the room follows your spelling, thickening
this sauna of a dancefloor, where the sweetest sludge churns
beneath my feet into fertile ground
Sweat flicks off my skin in the form of seeds and
gifted the language of ‘garden’
A stroll through moonbeamed flower beds
be the most potent of seances / of conjures / of worship
Mariah M, or Em, (they/them) is a non-binary Black queer writer, cultureworker, and abolitionist based in Greensboro, North Carolina. They are presently a 2024 Mellon Community Fellow with the Diaspora Solidarities Lab and a Winter Roots.Wounds.Words. Fellow in Speculative Fiction. They are the inaugural artist-in-residence at The Beautiful Project (c. 2023), a two-year Watering Hole fellow (c. 2017, 2019) and an Emergent Poet Fellow with Crescendo Literary (c. 2017). Em moves with the knowing that their identity as an artist is inseparable from their role in community. As an aspiring anarchist & practicing abolitionist, they write to challenge, escape & build the world we live in.
Mariah is a founding member of SaltWater Sojourn, a Blackqueer-autonomous anarchic artist collective based in the South whose members believe in the transformative power art can have on the individual and the collective, as well as the Co-Visionary Architect of Revival of the Seers, a summer rest retreat for Black queer cultural organizers and artists rooted in North Carolina. They are the former Creative Director at the Black Girls’ Guide to Surviving Menopause (c. 2019 - 2024), a storytelling platform centering the lived experiences of Black folk born with uteruses, and stewarded the launch of Hippolyta’s Journal as part of NC BLOC’s Protect Black Freedoms fellowship. You can find Em chatting with trees about Black radical possibility, indoors dancing under red lights and on Substack at Selfish Mars Musings. They have poems published by the Neighbor News Pan-African News Service of Oakland & voicemail poems.
SISTORIES PROMPT
Write in your journal or respond in the comment section below.
In just a few words, write down what needs to be released. Don't think too hard, just let it flow.
Put on a song that makes you move your body. When the moment feels right, say something into the void. (Example: "Let me be _________!")