Cover Photo: A photograph of the author at her graduation in the arms of her father, both looking proud
Photograph courtesy of the author

What Is Left, What Is Held, What Is Grown As Roots

Always the most vulnerable will die. There will be others, too, but it begins there. And we see, in slow moving real time, whose life is valued, whose life is not.

When I miss baba at school, I cry on the inside so no one can see

alive

.

This is science, called logicThis is how you choose a good mangocalled discernment.

Hope Wabuke is a poet, writer, and assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, VONA, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women Writers, and is the author of the forthcoming memoir Please Don't Kill My Black Son Please.