Nick Perere reads his poem, “Show Choir,” for the Louisiana Words Tour 2025 at George's Place in Baton Rouge, LA.

 Louis Toliver Jr. reads his poem, “He Likes Me for Me,” for the Louisiana Words Tour 2025 at George's Place in Baton Rouge, LA.

   On a regular, I order the Taco Bell Build Your Own Luxe Box.   I almost always get a Chalupa Supreme, a five layer burrito (easy on the beans), Fiesta potatoes, and a Baja Blast (upgrade to large).   All this for six dollars and eighty-one cents.   Meanwhile, tariffs go into effect.   What tariffs?   Nevermind on the tariffs.   High tariffs!   Beautiful tariffs destroying economies and people’s well-beings.   Canada is pissed at us.   Canada.   The Department of Education is being dismantled.   Concentration camps are being erected.   Let’s get rid of the National Weather Service amidst the floods, tornadoes, hurricanes.   Thrown into unbroken promise of no wars.   Breaking News!   BREAKING NEWS!   B R E A K I N G   N E WS!   The sole of my working shoes have given out.   Much like the soul of this constant chaos country.   But a constant I can rely on? Is a gr...

Let that fucker burn. Let the fire crackle like the whips once did— like bone meeting leather, like screams swallowed by the trees. Let the white columns crumble to ash. Not as tragedy— but as truth, unearthing itself from beneath generations of silence. Nottoway is not a mansion. It’s a mausoleum. A lie carved in stone to honor the hands that held the whip, not the backs that bore it. They called it the “White Castle.” A place of beauty. A place for weddings, for photo ops, for pretending that horror can be made elegant if the curtains match the guilt. But no paint can cover what happened there. Blood doesn’t wash out with white linens. And pain doesn’t forget just because you renamed it history. I’m not Black. And I won’t pretend to carry that weight. But I also won’t ignore it. My people—the Guanches—were taken too. Our language silenced. Our land stolen. Our names nearly erased. So yes, I know colonization. Yes, I know what it means to be disappeared. But I also know this— my skin ...