My father and I swing fists behind his truck in the parking lot of Helen Keller Park. In the periphery, little brown buds of baby black boys are swinging bats for the first time; their older brothers swing game at girls with blooming hips and butter soft skin stretching across new breast; and their no-good daddies, high on heroin, nod away, jean bottoms ragged against concrete and foreheads tilting blissfully towards their laps. This is the park where men kill each other over colors and money; where squad cars are paid lushly to drive obliviously by; where babies taste crack and last night’s saliva on their mommas nipple under Sunday morning sunshine; where that one happy couple, who remembers Athens on the Hill before the late 80s, sways to hums of Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye; and where my daddy and I, mean-eyed with rage and undiagnosed depression, fight like we hate each other and blame each other for how much we’ve been conditioned to hate ourselves.
Jezebel Delilah X is a queer, Black femme performance artist, writer, filmmaker, and teacher. She is co-host of East Bay Open Mic, Culture Fuck, a member of the story telling performance troupe, Griot Noir, and one of the founding members of Deviant Type Press. She has been published in The Womynist and Full of Crow, is a featured writer for BlackGirlDangerous, has written/directed/produced two films that have screened in the Queer Women Of Color Film Festival, and has been a featured reader/performer at events all over the Bay Area. She uses a combination of performative memoir, theatrical poetry, and feminist storytelling to advance her politix of radical love, socioeconomic justice, anti-racism, and community empowerment. She holds a Masters Degree in Creative Writing from Mills College where she focused on Young Adult Fiction and Creative Non-fiction. Here is a recent interview with her: http://elixher.com/inspihered-by-vanessa-rochelle-lewis/
The Bolt Magazine 