VERSO / vol. 7 is a new form of sharing art and culture. Each month we’ll curate contributions of writing, poetry and visual art packaged along with personalized editorials and deliver them monthly.

We’re happy to share editorials and photos of already shipped packages with you here.

Hey Friends,

As a black feminist mama, I can often be found on a sofa pulpit raging against the whiteness, heteronormativity and sheer basicness of most family content. I am regularly interrupting my 9-year-old son’s viewing pleasure to be like, “Hey Sekani, you know not only girls can carry babies right? Hey Sekani, you know not all boys like girls right? Hey Sekani, you know not all girls have vagina’s right?” And I love how he kind of looks at me like first of all, why are you always doing this but secondly, duh mom, I KNOW. Part of my job as a parent is to problematize the world as we see it, not because I want it to be hard but because I want it to be beautiful.

Black feminist scholar Joan Morgan once wrote that she needed a feminism that was “brave enough to fuck with the grays”.

The work this month does just that. In their illustrated, meditative piece, Xinan writes, “I am outside of everything that has been fixed”. Do me a favor and sit with the audacity of declaring that so fully. Go ahead, I’ll wait. I personally feel more expansive each time I say it out loud. You should try it. It feels like no to who you think I am, no to what history projects onto me, no to assimilation, no to colluding in my own destruction. The older I get the more yesses I say to all of what truly makes me me. It feels like the kind of continual rebirth that Melody gestures towards in her chapbook. A kind of yes and, yes and to our inner worlds, to the holy spaces we inherit and carry, yes to soft power and ancestral knowledge, yes to old ways of knowing rooted in pleasure and spirit.

I don’t know what you believe in but I wonder if saying yes to our multitudes and fucking with the the grays isn’t only resistance but also a kind of sacred practice. I am more and more interested in how we vibrate collectively toward what’s on the other side of binaries and normativity, towards the magic that makes us all stardust. And more, what does it mean to actively seek out the liminal spaces where we can annotate, edit, redact, and shapeshift not only the constructs that were set out for us, but also the ones that we might be setting for ourselves. The work this month gently pushes us deeper inside ourselves and toward a light, a sacred geometry that reflects beyond what our eyes can see, beyond what language can code, towards a space where we dissolve into that which makes our souls dance.

Melody David

Xinan