My lover asked me to turn my gaze, tilt my chin, adjust my limbs. I watched him tune my real body to match his imagination. I saw the photographs he took of me flick across the camera’s screen. I was spectating. 

“I’m not trying to get rid of you at all,” I lie. That’s exactly what I want to do. Despite his presence as a permanent fixture in my emotional life, I know he can’t give me a commitment.

What he found was a little chunk of plastic, something that could have been a kitchen utensil, the foot or the arm of something, a piece of something bigger, some meaningless trash. No, that’s not quite right. For us, it’s meaningless, but for the kid it’s not. It’s everything for that kid. – From Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny’s “Trash”

Blackman’s writing feels as though you are present with her, sitting on a southern porch with a glass of sweet tea, listening to her grandfather in a rocking chair with a photo album reminiscing about how music brought two disparate communities together—Black and White during from the 1940s to the 1960s in Nashville, Tennessee.