BY: T.J. LOVE

I was shot by a black police officer
I wanted to see what would cross the road first
The tint of his skin
Or the dye in his uniform

I saw past the gilded badge
Scratched the painted surface off and
Saw that the badge was in fact
White

On my dying breath,
I asked him if his parents were proud
He responded that he was raised by Lady Liberty
And Uncle Sam

He said he wanted to make a difference

I said you don't subtract black youths
Take away their lives
Minus their existences
And call the result a difference
What kind of math involves a bloodbath

Who are you to bathe in the skin
Of gods and empresses
Only to represent the new true blue supremacists
Who would rather see you dead with us
Than standing with them?

How many innocent microaggressive jokes did you clench your teeth at around the water cooler when your brothers-in-arms bragged about harming your kind? 

We live in a post-racial society
Where racism goes viral in each and every single post
And cops like you shoot guns to shoot videos and watermark Worldstar on the bottom of the screen

There is no applause for my destruction
But when you killed yourself to become this badge
You were met with
Uproarious praise and swore to love, honor and obey your master
As you traded your black for blue
You bruise brothers
And accuse mothers of not raising their children right
As you play judge jury and executionHER

Name stained with the grand larceny of the life you've stolen
Standard-issue bullets riddle frames and autopsy photos with your imprinted fingerprints tattooed permanent ink on holsters
You who are the prime suspect
Protected by the civil servant veneer
Sterling silver reputation among your peers

Because when Alton Sterling was murdered, you cheered

One day
Your duty will call to the house you grew up in
How the neighborhhood has changed
There's a Starbucks where the corner store used to be
You'll receive a report that said the suspect is black whose hue looks just like you
And is impersonating an officer
And is considered armed and dangerous
And you'll shoot to kill
You won't ask questions
You'll just fire

And let the red tape bury the context
And then you'll be buried next to me
Because you
Were the prime suspect

BY: A.A. REDD

Recently, I was asked a question I couldn’t answer. Not for lack of trying; I did everything I could to try and push myself toward resolution, but every step I took felt rushed and wrong. An hours-long Google search eventually brought me to a website that sold these little bundles of herbs and gemstones that promised to realign my energies and “clarify my mind.” It was cheap, so I was suspicious—but I was also desperate.

When the package got to my house, it was too heavy to bring inside. I opened it on my porch and found out why: instead of a mixture of stones, there was a chunk of white quartz nearly as big as the box itself and a pound of uncut sage. The only other thing in the box was a note: To find the answer to your questions, you must take raw material and raw energy and combine them until they create something new.

I was at a loss—I can barely cut cake, let alone a gemstone. Going at it with a hacksaw didn’t work. Whacking it with sledgehammer didn’t dent it. I even dropped it off the roof of a four-story building a few times. It was also hit by a car (and I learned the hard way that insurance doesn’t cover quartz damage).

Still, even though I hadn’t an epiphany or an answer—and I now had two problems instead of one—I couldn’t give up. The sage and stone stayed on my doorstep while the question remained unanswered, no matter how many methods I revisited.

One night, I got so frustrated that I set the sage in a pile on top of the stone, lit it on fire...

And watched the whole thing melt into my porch.

It wasn’t quartz at all. In fact, I have no idea what it was, but it left a wide, translucent puddle over the red brick of my front porch. When the sun strikes it, it looks like a shimmering sheet of ice; in the moonlight, it looks more like a patch of algae. It’s slick to the touch, almost like marble, and it will not move. Except when it gets bigger. I feel a tremor when I’m near it, and I don’t step on it unless I have to. It seems to be vibrating gently and constantly in its place on the porch. (Or maybe it’s speaking.)

Whatever it’s doing—whatever it is—it still hasn’t helped me answer the question. And after all this, I wasn’t sure I could give a good answer.

So I came back to the question and wrote a story instead.