The afternoon was hot enough that some of them wanted the shade. They stayed by the fire anyway.
“If you can hear my voice, clap twice. If you can hear my voice, clap three times and say it’s gonna be all right.” Melissa Ferrer-Civil, Kansas City’s first Poet Laureate and the director of the academy, quieted the circle the way she always does.
More than thirty of them had gathered into a circle on Sankara Farm, twenty-seven acres of Black-owned land on the edge of Kansas City where culturally relevant food still grows in open defiance of the grocery stores that abandoned our neighborhoods…