IMAGES

By Marissa Desir ’25

Where are all the black angels?
Springing out of oceans
Rising from unmarked lots
Loss scripted on their departure
Where are they?...Cause I know they should be here.
The vacancy they leave screams malicious epithets
from the arches of institutions barred entry for centuries

Were they forgotten?
Fierce in their flight, did I blink and miss them?
Magnetic energy budding between each feather, are they just too divine?
Perhaps they’re just waiting on another plane,
waiting to be acknowledged for their existence.

Platitudes against reality,
the truth stings just as their absence.
Where did you put the black angels?
Their mortality turned mythology,
positions on earth laid to rest skyward
Where are those taken away?
Yes, Given new form but melanin exists here
and in the afterlife

Murals upon murals, frescos and reliefs,
Painter, why do you despise its color?
That familiar brush of yours paints faces unfamiliar to mine
Grandmother, grandfather
Ancestors from the first home
Where have you gone?

I feel the breadth of your soul beat like steel drums
Ring like thunder and lay me to sleep upon feathery beds
You are here, not because I imagine it
but because you were true.

So I ask Where are All the Black Angels?
Forced past humanity then never depicted humanely
Painter if you painted with love,
If your brush knew the strokes of B-L-A-C-K,
why do I not see them?
Why can I not find them?

Questions of their disappearance
Posters with their missing faces
We will take matters into our own hands and turn grief into reclamation

WE paint with love,
not how you claim, but actually for that has always been our domain
Our profile starts with browns and continues infinitely

We will bring our black angels home.

Rightfully so because their place is cemented in heirs,
Across time, in our souls, and the walls of family houses
Our canvas and archways shall know the contours of their skin.

Draped in gold, spotlighted by majestic sun,
Defined and empowered
How could our angels have been anywhere but the center?

Breaking up the foul ground
We will follow the course of our oral history
Making picture books of generational stories
Painting dearly departeds of the first century and those whose sun set recently

Not soon enough, we will know exactly where our black angels are.
Conjured before us because they are us,
Invite them down from their ancestral plane,
Acknowledge them with our brush.

We, painters with souls, brown as skin,
Will always remember our black angels.

Our kin.

By Tahareem Ali ’26 

Everytime I come home it feels like I never left.
I’m fifteen again and that look in my
Mom’s eyes makes me cry and rage.

Eyes heavy with sleep before a 9 AM,
I walk past the same tree everyday
Its root are strong
So it bears the seasons, tall and firm.
red then naked then green.

Sometimes I feel irrationally
scared of the dining hall.
And my phone.

My friends are in my shoebox room,
I introduce my plants and posters.
Laughter bubbles out of us
easily in this moment.

Things were only ever beautiful
because I decided that they had to be.
I’ll whittle away at this space
until I belong too.