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A Woman Overboard

a blog by Tzynya L. Pinchback

  • A massacre, an abortion, and learning to shot a gun

    Three events in converged on my life in 1999 that altered my understanding of who gets to determine a life is valuable. . ...

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    A massacre, an abortion, and learning to shot a gun

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Journal · July 12, 2022

A massacre, an abortion, and learning to shot a gun

Three events in converged on my life in 1999 that altered my understanding of who gets to determine a life... Read More

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blackpixiedreamgirl

This brown girl all in yellow just over her should This brown girl
all in yellow
just over
her shoulder
the ocean
reseding 
and mellow.

#beach #yellow #naturalista
#blackgirljoy✨
A little water for your woes. #beach #scituatelig A little water for your woes.

#beach #scituatelighthouse #harbor #turban
Night Swim by @joankwon16 is achingly beautiful an Night Swim by @joankwon16 is achingly beautiful and breathtaking. 

#Nightswim #poetry #memoir #suicideawarness #beachvibes
I am black. Skin the color of wet sand. Eyes like I am black. Skin the color of wet sand. Eyes like dusk.

Hair coiled except for a swatch that has no pigment or curl and turns itself auburn in the summer sun. There is a birthmark on my back, a right of soil, in the shape of a country with too many original sins to name. A country that does not record my signature on its manifest. I am simultaneously passenger and stowaway. How many trips north ’til I’m free? How many nights ’til the robes and masks stop coming? Like the women before me, I am moored to and marooned on this land without the required currency to guarantee safe passage.

*from essay "The Motherbaby" published in @midnightandindigo*

 #4thofjuly #whattotheslaveisthefourthofjuly #blackmermaidsofinstagram #scarf #blackgirlmagic
My daughter’s second name is carried, most vivid My daughter’s second name is carried, most vividly, in the ache of a rural Tennessee woman of disputed racial identity.

It is said that no word crossed her lips in service of jest or kindness after the night they stole her husband. Very tall, very proud, and very black, he was dragged from their bed by robed and masked men and hanged in his yard as she and their children stood witness. A punishment for the crime of marrying a white-looking and handsome woman. Later photographs display her steely-eyed and grimaced, her black hair wrapped twice like a noose around her neck.

*from essay "The Motherbaby" published in @midnightandindigo*

 #4thofjuly #blackhistory #whattotheslaveisthefourthofjuly #blackmermaidsofinstagram
My daughter’s first name is a woman born in 1814 My daughter’s first name is a woman born in 1814 Virginia.

A woman who was made free at the age of 15, by the man who owned her, so she could bear and tend his children. A woman plucked from one captivity only to be shoved into another new plantation, new geography, and new soil that did not require her hand. Years of pretend emancipation came to an abrupt end with his death and she would flee north with the children to escape re-enslavement. The lack of a patriarch and a constant craving for what they once had, scattered the children. Freedom is a taste not easily wiped from the tongue. Some went seeking fortune. Others took full advantage of their skin and disappeared into whiteness.

*from essay "The Motherbaby" published in @midnightandindigo*

#independenceday #4thofjuly #whattotheslaveisthefourthofjuly #blackmermaidsofinstagram #pbspinchback
My daughter is black. Skin like turned earth. Eyes My daughter is black. Skin like turned earth. Eyes the color of midnight. A black freckle on the underside of her wrist matches mine and another just to the left of her smile. This land does not make space for her so I gave her a pickaxe before I taught her to walk. When we have been separated for a time, I greet her by pressing my nose to her face where the lush springy hair feathers and lays flat against the skin to breathe in a scent that is familiar, that is me. All the memories of her since birth come flooding, in a flash, and we are again grounded, home.

*from essay "The Motherbaby" published in @midnightandindigo*

#independenceday #4thofjuly #whattotheslaveisthefourthofjuly #blackmermaidsofinstagram
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A girl who is mermaid who is disabled who is poet walks into a bar and buys a drink. After two glasses of a blushing wine, her sight blurs, small tremors pulse beneath her skin, and she collapses in diabetic shock. Her body of water and a handful of red cinnamon candies spilling to the floor.

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