Six Ten AM

I’ve been reading  Brown Sugar , edited by Carol Taylor—a collection of erotic Black fiction. Don’t ask . Fact is, it’s reshaping what I think erotica can be. I’m a creature of my time, okay? I’m on BookTok, I love it…but sometimes you end up on the side of the algorithm where everyone is purely in search of what is basically written porn. And each to their own—it’s really never that serious. But reading “spice” in everything has gotten completely boring for me, especially as someone who has a complicated relationship with sexuality. Not my sexual orientation—just sex itself. I always thought there was something wrong with me because of my past traumas: being assaulted as a little girl, and then again a few times as a teenager. Some people either shut down or become hypersexual. It comes down to the psyche—how the brain tries to protect itself. With everything I’ve consumed—media, literature—I built up this rigid idea of what sex is  supposed  to look like. This book, wit...

Recently, I was listening to a podcast. The speaker was sharp, authentic, and raw—everything she said had me snapping my fingers like  yes girl, purr!  She was unpacking a whole lot about socialization and gender, and then she said something that made me pause: “Black boys are truly the most vulnerable group.” That sentence stopped me in my tracks, because eish. Eish .  My first instinct wasn’t agreement—it was resistance. I winced, both internally and externally. But I sat with it. I chose not to let my guard go up. I kept listening. I wanted to understand where she was coming from. The episode was about  Forever  on Netflix, but it quickly turned into something bigger: how Black boys are raised to perform, to endure, to dominate—and how, in many ways, they are denied their childhoods. And then she said something else that hit me right in the chest: “You have to talk to your son about rape before you even talk to him about dating.” I had to sit with that, too...

I run a literary group called  Quills on Quire , a name that came to me in a haze of sleep deprivation and quiet rebellion. I had just had my baby, and between breastfeeding, changing diapers, and staring at the same walls day after day, I found myself aching for something more than routine. Stagnation is a strange kind of grief — not of what has ended, but of what refuses to begin. So I started a literary club. I don’t really remember how or why the idea came to me. Maybe it was divine timing. Maybe it was desperation. But in that stillness — that uncomfortable quiet of postpartum — I reached for the one thing that always made sense to me: words. Since then,  Quills on Quire  has grown into a space of shared thought and creativity. People come and go, as life allows, but something remarkable has happened — we’ve all grown. As writers, thinkers, and even as readers. Growth in a time of personal transition has been the most unexpected gift. As I deepen my writing practice,...

If you’ve been around here for a while, then you already know just how much I hated breastfeeding—and how desperate I was to stop. Well, guess what? After 13 months… I did it. Insert dramatic round of applause. Thank you. Thank you very much. Now let me tell you what I’ve been going through. It hasn’t been cute. And before I dive in, let me emphasize this: this is my personal experience. Not a universal truth. Not a guideline. Just me, myself, and I. Cue dramatic exhale. If I had known how painful it would be to stop nursing, trust and believe: my baby would’ve been on formula from the jump. Fresh out the womb to a freshly warmed bottle. Let me give you the short version: Mastitis. Fainting. Dizziness. Nausea. A crushing sense of dread. All because I stopped breastfeeding. And mentally? I was going through it. Yhu.  My boobs were so full I looked like I had a botched boob job that reached all the way up to my collarbones—and they were as hard as granite. The hormonal crash made me ...