Someone threw a broom at us when we misread them. We had done everything right but it was no use. The broom just missed our legs.

If we saw someone we recognized from the neighborhood we waved. We didn’t speak to anyone; we didn’t offer them solace. We only offered stillness, our ears or our smiles. For the last half mile we raced. I lost, and I let her go up ahead of me. We were a few feet apart, but without our proximity chaos ensued.

At the crosswalk we met and the chaos subsided. We reached the stoop again, the blue bicycle. The masks were difficult to breathe in. We watched the light change across the street. Men called from their cars (blue, metallic, pearl); someone moved their hand in a way that suggested masturbation. A bus went by and someone with a nose ring looked at us from the window seat. We left the stoop, we stepped off the curb—a hydrant had been undone, and we walked in its path. Someone’s unopened package had been abandoned in the hydrant’s path, and the bottom of the cardboard was overcome, ruined.

CONSTELLATIONS

after Lorna Simpson

The women cut with sharp heavy shears, defunct, found images, pieces from Ebony, Jet, the editorial breasts hanging, and the splintered knowing, drinking peppermint tea, strands stiff with hairspray or stiff with the cosmos, architecture or the earrings, pearls, nail beds and shoulder blades, 19 x 14 gems on gray paper, glued, the body touched with water-soluble paint, an ether, the eyes fixed toward the lens, or the one eye fixed and the other loose, centerfold, on page 119 the plucked eyebrows and on the same page a smile, stiff hair set ablaze, the roof collapsing, save $7.

IN THE SAND, THE NONCONFORMITY OF WOMEN WHO ARE VIOLENTLY SHUSHED