Poetry by J. Otis Powell!?

Photography by Del Bey

If I don’t say what makes you uncomfortable will you feel safer in my presence? If I speak to you only with my eyes will you ever hear me talking to you? The ghost of uncertain things have more power than we do.

The tongues of dying mothers and their children are as haunting as blood soaked ground. Why must this journey be so dangerous? Why must posterity leave such a gap?

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the greed. It is a strange Nevada where poverty is a necessary evil and privilege is a burden.

I stand outside a castle for slaves are refusing coins minted from my mothers chains. This is my world. I am the flower grown outside this burgundy earth.

I am the woman child whose eyes follow you out of Ghana with God’s caritas for the poor and neglected. The suffering and the dying.

May the fabric of my image become a new texture in the wind. May the rawness of my courage bite you like a frost.