Antinarcissism
By Bri Stokes
Somewhere between the cold civil war unfolding in Los Angeles and the drones and the faulty airplanes and the wildfires and the dead children in Palestine, I lost all sense of time. I tried to birth myself backwards, into a womb-state, into ignorance. I tried to remember what life was like before I could tally the weight of its atrocities. I tried to fall in love in order to make poetry, but the horrors kept pointing and jeering at the foot of my bed.
Young Black Artist seeks to mirror the times, but time is constantly shapeshifting, and who am I—
if not the American soil that raised me? Teeming with verve and too exhausted to stand. Steadfast in my optimism and scared that my neighbors will be taken by masked men. Boundlessly enamored with humanity and terrified of what humanity has made.
We’ve made a contest of astral projection: casting out the soul, sending it to wander like a lost traveler in the desert while the body sinks, while the fingers scroll, while the teeth gnash, while the talking heads propagandize, while desire uncoils and sizes up its target like a cobra, while the trees whisper escape plans to each other, deep down in the roots.
I don’t belong here.
I believe I was born for this.
Bri Stokes is a writer, editor, curator, cultural worker, producer and poet born, raised and living in Los Angeles, on unceded Tongva land. Her writing has appeared in BuzzFeed, 45th Parallel, Epiphany, the Northridge Review, and elsewhere. She is a 2024 Voodoonauts Fellow, a 2024 Resident with The Seventh Wave, and an editorial assistant at HINCHAS Press.