MARGINS — DROP 14
“She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.”
— Kate Chopin, The Awakening
This is not a collection built for comfort.
The five pieces that follow do not resolve one another. They do not share a subject, a register, or a conclusion. What they share is a condition: the particular pressure of a self that is mid-revision, not yet hardened into the next form, still warm enough to be shaped and still frightened of what the shaping costs.
MARGINS does not curate arguments. It curates direction.
What you will find here is not five writers who have arrived. It is five writers caught in the moment before arrival, which is the only moment that tells the truth about the journey.
Pay attention to what the language reaches for when the writer isn’t watching. That is where the Drop lives.
— MARGINS
DIOVANNA OBAFUNMILAYO
Explode Beneath a Pane of Glass1
This piece refuses to explain itself, and that refusal is the whole argument.
At 6:27pm on March 7th, 2026, while bombs fall somewhere not-that-far, a writer lists everything she wants to make: naked under glass, rocking horse backwards, plate of pennies underfoot, a flock of chicks in a pale yellow room, a jazz-techno-house poetry album. The list keeps arriving. She cannot stop it. And then she names what all of it accumulates to: nothing, and a timestamp.
That equation is the architecture.
The artistic vision is not aspiration.
It is documentation. A self that cannot stop generating desire even when desire has nowhere to land, when the world outside is burning, when love (which she describes as the ultimate divinity) is being forcibly removed from its pedestal. The tone she calls apathy is not apathy. Apathy does not make lists this precise. This is the register of a person trying to reframe the thing that organizes her life while her body resists the reframing in real time.
The sentence that does the most work in this piece is the one she almost buries:
“I have gone to bed many nights unexcited or appreciative of the accomplishments I’ve attained, because a lover wasn’t waiting for me at home.”
That is not a confession about romance. It is a confession about infrastructure. Love has been the load-bearing wall. She is trying to rebuild the house while still living in it. The art, the images, the visions, the incessant writing, is not separate from that project. It is the project. Every image is an attempt to find something that can hold the weight she is trying to remove from love.
The piece is 347 words. That is not a flaw. It is the exact duration of the sensation. The timestamp device is not stylistic. It is a formal commitment to the present tense, to the body in the room, to the world burning just outside the frame. She is not writing from after. She is writing from inside. That is the hardest thing a writer can do, and she does it without announcing the difficulty.
What the language is practicing beneath the surface: a future self who has found other sources of weight-bearing. She is not there yet. This piece is the distance between the woman who went to bed unexcited and the woman who will not.
Strip away the visions and the timestamp and you are left with something uncomfortably recognizable: a person trying to manage their own hunger without quite admitting how organized their life has been around it. The next piece does not strip anything away. It walks directly into the hunger. It gives it a gallery, a boyfriend, a smirk.
IRA MADISON III
Portrait of a White Boyfriend — Fiction2
This piece is fiction. That is how you know it is telling the truth.
The narrator arrives at a Chelsea gallery for his boyfriend Fallon’s show performing three roles at once: supportive partner, cultural critic, and the most interesting person in the room who happens to not be on the wall. The fiction frame allows what the essay form would not, the narrator to be morally complicated without having to account for it directly. He is not on trial. He is just telling a story. That permission is the whole trap.
Watch what the narrator values. It is not Fallon.
It is the storyline Fallon enables.
The boyfriend is a plot device from the first paragraph: broke white artist, Parsons scholarship, street cred, the kind of authentic struggle that would make the narrator’s own proximity to failure feel romantic rather than simply true. “I wasn’t going to become the most famous person in New York by being the Olivia Pope to his Fitzgerald Grant.” That sentence is not disappointment. It is a writer cataloguing the narrative value of his own relationship in real time. He is not in love. He is in a storyline.
The man at the gallery who dismantles Basquiat, who wants to sleep with the narrator, who finally reveals that Fallon lied about the scholarship, the parents, the gallery, should be the destabilizing event. It is not. The narrator smirks. He does not have a broke white boyfriend. He has a rich one. And a picture to pose for. The smirk is the piece’s most honest moment and its most damning one.
He reorganizes the betrayal into a better story before the feeling has finished arriving. The lie becomes an upgrade. The exposure becomes a punchline.
He is not hurt. He is recast.
That smirk is not satisfaction.
It is a man who knows how to make whatever happens serve him narratively, and who has been doing it long enough that it no longer feels like a choice. The fiction form is not just a frame. It is the writer’s own cover, the distance that allows the piece to be this precise about manipulation without implicating the person doing the manipulating. The narrator knows exactly what he is doing. The writer knows the narrator knows. And the form lets everyone pretend it is just a story.
What the language is practicing beneath the surface: a person who is more invested in the shape of his life than in the life itself. Who would rather have a rich white boyfriend and a picture to pose for than admit, even once, that he wanted something real and was given something curated. He cannot stay in the destabilization long enough to feel it. The story has to continue. He has to be the one who wasn’t fooled.
The gallery closes around him. The photograph gets taken. Nothing is resolved. That is not an accident.
That is the piece
.Two pieces in, and the field is already showing its pressure point: the self that keeps the story moving so it does not have to feel the thing the story is covering. The next piece names that mechanism directly. It is the only piece in this Drop that arrives with an explicit argument. That argument turns out to be its most honest confession.
TIMELINES & TANGENTS
Choosing Yourself Is Making You Lonely3
This piece almost wrote itself differently. The writer tells you that in the second paragraph, which is the most important sentence in the piece. She almost wrote the essay everyone writes: solitude saved me, I learned to eat alone, the best version of you doesn’t need anyone. She has read that essay a hundred times.
So have you.
She chose not to write it.
What she wrote instead is more uncomfortable. She carries an immigrant inheritance of collectivism, Ubuntu, the village that does not ask before it arrives, already carrying food, already knowing what needs to be done. And she collides that inheritance against the Western self-optimization gospel she absorbed without consenting to, the choose yourself, protect your peace architecture that turned solitude into an identity and loneliness into a growth stage. The collision is the piece’s engine. It does not resolve. It is not supposed to.
The diagnostic charge lands in the third act, buried under the careful argumentation: she got so good at holding herself together that she forgot what it felt like to be held. She chose herself so thoroughly that she locked the door from the inside and called it a boundary. That sentence is not a conclusion. It is a confession. The philosophy she has been dismantling, she built her whole life inside it. She knows this. She is writing about it while still living it.
That gap between understanding and change is where MARGINS lives.
The piece presses hardest where it is most personal. Not the philosophical framework, not the Ubuntu citation, not the Surgeon General’s report on loneliness. It presses hardest in the Thai restaurant, alone, building a fantasy in her head because the present was too quiet. She lets the fantasy run. Then she snaps out of it. Looks at her plate. The food is really good. Decides, tiredly, that this might be fine. That moment is the whole piece’s emotional truth. Not fine as resolution. Fine as the exhausted permission she gives herself to keep going without what she actually wants.
Where the piece loses some nerve: the ending calls the reader to action. Send this to someone you’ve been meaning to call. Then call them. That is the comforting gesture the rest of the piece refuses. It flatters the reader at the exact moment when not being flattered was the point. It is worth noting because it reveals the strain: the writer knows what she wants to say, but she also wants the reader to feel okay.
Those two desires are not always compatible.
What the language is practicing beneath the surface: a person trying to reconstruct the village in apartment-sized increments, one book club, one run club, one coffee shop at a time. Not yet willing to admit that the apartment, however well-furnished, is not the village. Not yet willing to let that cost her the story of herself as someone who is fine alone.
Three pieces in, and the pressure has accumulated into something specific: the particular loneliness of a self that is too well-constructed to let anyone fully in. The next piece does not argue this. It inhabits it. In lowercase. Without apologizing for what that costs.
OWETHU MKHIZE
I’m Tired of Almost Feeling Something4
The lowercase is not stylistic. It is permission. Permission to stay unresolved without announcing the unresolvedness. Permission to write toward maturity that is still being constructed without having to claim it as already arrived. Permission to speak quietly enough that the piece does not have to be held accountable for its own uncertainty.
The writer met someone at the wrong time. No drama. No betrayal. Just the particular violence of timing, which is quiet and has no one to blame and does not announce itself as violence. They did not end badly. Life pulled in different directions. Responsibilities. Growth. All the things that sound mature and reasonable and feel, at 2am, like absolute nonsense.
What the language is rehearsing beneath the stated content: the future self who has metabolized this. Who knows that some connections exist only to raise the standard. Who has moved on in action and in feeling both. That self is not here. The piece is the distance between the writer lying awake and the writer who has decided it is okay. It keeps trying to close that distance with “maybe.” Maybe not everything is meant to be replaced. Maybe some connections are just meant to show you what’s out there. Maybe that’s okay. The maybes are not humility.
They are the residue of a feeling the writer has not finished having.
The piece cannot go where it would need to go to be fully honest. It approaches the edge, the admission that it is not okay, that the standard this person raised has made everything since feel slightly less, that moving on in actions is not the same as moving on, and then it turns. “maybe that’s okay.” That turn is the most documentable thing here. Not as failure. As evidence. Of a writer practicing the acceptance that has not yet arrived in the body.
There is a specific cruelty in this kind of almost.
Not the cruelty of abandonment or betrayal, both of which give you something to push against. The cruelty of the connection that was real and is simply gone, that leaves you with a standard and no one to hold it, that makes you grateful and bereft in the same breath. The piece knows this. It does not say it directly. It says it in lowercase, in ellipses, in the way it cannot stop returning to her without ever quite naming what it wants to say.
What cannot be unseen: the writer at the end of the piece, still not done wishing they had more time. The honesty of that. The willingness to admit it even after all the maybes. That is the piece’s most alive moment, and it is the last sentence.
Four pieces in, and the field has moved from the fragment to the fiction to the argument to the lyric confession. The last piece does not enter quietly. It enters with a body at seven years old, a dressing table thrown across a room, and a question about whether she was Simba or Scar. It has not answered that question yet. It may be the most honest thing in this Drop.
EMPRESS HALIA
Anger Is Her Name. Pt 1 — Becoming Mahalia5
This piece is not finished. It says so. Part one of a series, spirit-led, as many parts as needed. That admission is the most important formal gesture in the Drop. Every other piece in this collection performs some version of completion, a smirk, a maybe, a decision that the apartment might be enough. This one refuses.
The writer personifies anger as a woman who used to visit and now will not leave. That image is the piece’s most original gesture, and then the piece keeps walking away from it. It delivers chronology. It delivers childhood in careful, accumulating detail: the family gathering where her body was examined like a science experiment, the cousin popping wheelies while she stood with training wheels, the moment she pushed her aunt off the truck and watched her fall with a vindicated spirit. The piece keeps saying it is going to dissect anger. What it is actually doing is something harder: trying to locate the first moment the body learned that rage could produce relief. That is not a therapeutic exercise. That is an excavation.
The sentence that carries the whole weight of the piece arrives near the end, almost buried: “Anger has tucked herself underneath my back fat as a child waiting for the whispers of fat and then she appears.” That sentence does not need the twenty-four hundred words that precede it. It is the piece. The body as storage. Shame as the trigger. Rage as the thing that has been living in the body since childhood, coiled inside the physical evidence of being too much, waiting for the word that unlocks it. No metaphor in either document does more work than that one.
The question the piece cannot answer, the one it is building toward across however many parts it will take: Was I Simba or Scar? She asks it after pushing her aunt off the truck. She watched the blood and felt relief and then felt bad and then felt something she describes as falling in love with dominance. The piece does not resolve that. It notes it. It moves on. But the question stays. Because the honest answer is that the body did not distinguish between the two. Relief and power and guilt arrived together and became a single feeling she has been living inside ever since.
The piece is mid-process. That is not a disqualification for MARGINS.
It is the qualification.
MARGINS documents writers before they can stand differently. Empress Halia is still standing inside the thing she is trying to dissect. The anger has not left. It is still showing up in motherhood, in relationships, in the job. She is writing about it in real time because that is the only tool she has. The series will continue. That too is evidence. Some excavations cannot be finished in a single sitting.
AN ACCOUNTING
I thought I was building a Drop about the cost of becoming.
That was not wrong. It was also not the whole truth.
Sitting with these five pieces over the weeks and recent days it took to select and sequence them, what kept returning was something less flattering. I kept going back to Ira. Not to the plot, not to the fictional frame, not to the gallery or the man with aquamarine eyes. To the smirk. The narrator finds out he has been lied to, and his first response is relief. The betrayal becomes an upgrade. The story can continue with him as the one who was not fooled. I read that smirk and felt something I did not immediately want to name.
I know how to do that. I have done it.
I have taken destabilizing information and reorganized it, quickly, before the feeling finished arriving, into a version that served the story I was already telling about myself. I have made losses into redirects, humiliations into material, moments that should have cost me something into the sentence that lands at the end of an essay. I have called that craft. I have called it perspective. I have called it the writer’s necessary distance from his own experience.
Reading Ira’s narrator smirk at the revelation that his boyfriend’s entire identity was performance, I had to ask myself how often my own clarity is a version of that smirk. How often the essay that names something precisely is also the mechanism by which I avoid letting it land. How often MARGINS itself, this practice of looking at what other writers’ language is doing beneath the surface, is a way of staying on the critical side of the glass while never fully being in the room.
Diovanna is trying to remove love from its pedestal while her body resists. Timelines & Tangents locked the door from the inside and called it strength. Owethu keeps saying maybe in lowercase. Empress Halia is asking whether she was Simba or Scar and does not yet have the answer.
None of them have set. None of them have resolved.
None of them have organized the feeling into the sentence that makes the feeling manageable.
I have. Repeatedly.
And I have put that organization in front of readers and called it witness.
That question did not resolve while I was building this Drop. It is still open. I am leaving it open here because closing it would be exactly the problem.
What I am responsible for, having held these five: the recognition that the writer’s control of the story is not neutral. That precision can be a form of evasion. That the sentence which names the thing most clearly is sometimes the sentence that most completely prevents the writer from having to feel it.
These five writers are still warm.
Still in the middle of the casting aside.
The garment is half-off. The self underneath is not yet legible, not yet set, not yet able to be organized into a narrative that serves anyone.
That is not a vulnerability.
That is the only honest condition.
Attention without consequence feels like consent.
Let that be enough—for now.
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CONTRIBUTING ESSAYS
Diovanna Obafunmilayo / Explode beneath a pane of glass. March 27, 2026
Ira Madison III / Portrait of a White Boyfriend. April 24, 2026
Timelines & Tangents / Choosing Yourself Is Making You Lonely. March 22, 2026
Owethu Mkhize / i’m tired of almost feeling something. March 22, 2026
Empress Halia 🧡 / anger is her name. pt 1. April 15, 2026
This is some of the most insightful and moving engagement with my wtiting Ive ever read/received. The ways you analyzed and conversed with my piece sparked questions, realizations, and new thoughts I had not even considered. Thank you for including me in this curation and for being such an attentive reader. I feel seen in a way I dont think Ive ever experienced before.