IT'S YOUR MUG ANNIVERSARY ISSUE Carolyn Joyner SWOLLEN PLAITS AND STIFF PONYTAILS Something about the rhythmic flash, the pattern, the flicker of high yellow against the shadow of dusk; the firefly’s entering, but even more, its leaving with the tiny lantern attached to the underside of its belly gone. We knew nothing of lampyrids, luminous nocturnal members of the beetle family, the precise system of signals that bring the sexes together. To us they were simply lightning bugs, the chance to adorn fingers and wrists with diamonds, give ourselves something that we had never had. Pretty belonged to someone else, not colored girls with swollen plaits and stiff ponytails, skin too brown to be Rapunzel in the school play. RED, WHITE AND BLEAK Title from a Blake Gopnik Washington Post article Day yells red in a familiar hue, but not like the wood of a red fir, or the buds on a red maple, it’s more the color of a president caught red-handed, the smell of a bank redlining, not like the bodies of red mullet or red snapper, but shades of the red herring media moguls smoke for copy-cat screens. It bears no similarity to redeye gravy or cayenne, it’s the red of surveillance agencies red-dogging (like life’s one big football game), the red- baiting red of those who resist, brave the red heat of red hot to make sense of the white, the blue— stars and stripes whose stripes disappear when you get up close, dissolve, like blue tears in white snow. The blue blanched into a bloodless face. Whitewashed. A white collar stiff with starch. White. Like the outermost ring of an archery target, a sundown town with signs, Whites only within city limits after dark, not the white of elephants, fish or caps on the Red Sea. Definitely not the white space where poets make their homes, but the white-hands-around-the-necks-of-red-people white, the color-of-maximum-lightness-perceived-to-have-no-hue white, a spotlight-casting-red-shadows-similar-to-that- of- blood white—technicolor blood, staring from white building sides, red alleyways screaming with white scrawls, “Neighborhood evicted,” “Bring ‘em home,” “Ridin’ the buzz,” alongside T-bone, Roach, Calypso Girls, Long Bill—homies gone, but not forgotten. Rico. Writing on walls in holla back red, praise the dead white, blurred shades of raw, the somber, the bleak.   Carolyn Joyner has a Master of Arts degree in creative writing from The Johns Hopkins University and her work has been featured in the anthologies 360° A Revolution of Black Poets, Beyond the Frontier, Gathering Ground, and Family Pictures. She has taught workshops for DC WritersCorps, the River of Words project, and the African American Writers Guild's Summer Quest Program. Joyner has been a Cave Canem Fellow, a Hurston-Wright Fellow, and a writer-in-residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and is the recipient of grants from the DC Commission on the Arts. She has read at the Octagon House Museum, the Baltimore Museum of the Arts, the Lincoln Theater, and Gunston Arts Center.   Published in Volume 10:2, Spring 2009.