Editor’s Note

Yesterday, my heart ached. It ached and ached, loud and groaning like the stairs of an abandoned home, and I decided to tuck my aching in words. Many say that words are therapeutic. Perhaps it’s the gentle curvature of the lowercase r, or that such letters create words like rhapsodomancy and revirescent, but I’ve invested in this healing service and tucked my aching between its line breaks. Within the pages of our inaugural issue, lies the aching of myself and twenty-one Black creatives from around the world. Our collective aching, unique to each soul but shared by our skin, rests here. It sleeps during the morning christenings of Omolabake Salako’s “Suffering Is An Old Name,” and wakes in an illuminated room from Joseph Griffin's "to boast. - intense self appreciation." It painfully stitches the wounds in Ty Halton’s “battle scars,” twists around the lemongrass of Kathryn H. Ross’s “God’s Garden,” and distractedly recites the Lord’s prayer in Ololade Akinlabi Ige’s “Adieu.” It weaves through every stanza and paragraph, hiding behind the hand in Sulola Imran Abiola’s Pains Behind Your Palms.

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Our pain is not a single narrative. It will be tucked between a billion words before it finds an identical. Issue I reflects this. This issue holds all kinds of pain, from physical to religious to silent pain, and it's this variety that held yesterday’s aching. I hope that you too, can leave behind your aching here. Let it curl up in these words and find solace in its beauty.

Creating this issue has been a long, laborious journey, packed with late nights and early mornings. Even so, I would gladly do it a thousand times over. I am eternally grateful for the opportunity to examine the work of writers and artists from across the globe, expressing their pain, and to share it with you all. Today, I thank all the Afros who submitted their pain for providing amazing content to share, and I thank our hundreds of supporters for providing this platform. This couldn’t have been created without you.

With joy,

Chinonye Omeirondi

Header Image by Glauco Zuccaccia