Shante Little

1. Issue · Aug 26, 2026

   Hurricane Baby (opens the original)

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   I came first in a great splitting of the earth.The ground swelled for 24 hours beforeit cracked and the waters rushed forth.Oh, how we forget.My mother looks at me in sidelong glances and winces—I wonder if she feels a pang in her womb, a singeing at the edges of where she tore.I was not born so much as excavated, pulled from a dark country with my fists clenched around its soil.They laid me on her chest, small proof of survival, and called the blood a miracle.If I was the rupture, I was also th

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2. Issue · Jul 11, 2026

   Constellation (opens the original)

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   I don’t know how to comfort my mother. How could I, when she never comforted me? I don’t reach to hug her or hold her hand. Instead we talk around grief, holding lukewarm cups of tea between us. We speak of others and their grief as if it were a placeholder for our own. In the space between us, we hold it all. The silence between our words speaks what our hearts cannot. Sometimes I think about what it would be like if the roles were reversed, if I was her mother instead. How I would hold her and

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3. Issue · Jul 4, 2026

   The River Does Not Forget (opens the original)

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   Staccato gunshots ring out.Violent fireworks fracture the sky.Celebration and mourning collapsing into the same light and sound.There is no stillness to be found in my body when my great-grandmothers watched the rivers turn red before their very eyes.There is no stillness to be found in my body when my great-great-grandmothers turned to see the last of their children—our warriors—flooded from the river banks that once cradled them in a flurry of genocidal paperwork. Documents written in blood. A

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