Justice
- Mariah M.
I wish
to be thick and viscous
make choke anyone who dares
place me in their mouth without a coat of honey
on the tongue
If you’re gonna keep my name in your mouth
make a bed
for me
If not I will swell up
and out to my liking
Your ability to breathe does not supercede my deserving
of comfort
for I no longer shy away from
taking up space
Your tongue became mine once
my name left your throat
If and when it returns
to normal
you will miss how full your mouth felt
The relief and surrender as you’ll be slow
to speak for once
Or the bonus gift of you not speaking
at all
You remind me that silence glistens not
because it is golden but because
it’s dressed in saliva
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.
Who or what in your life benefits from your discomfort or your staying small? What might it cost for you to finally take up space and prioritize your pleasure?