“Hanging Fire” is a lyric poem told from the perspective of a 14-year-old Black girl facing the anxieties and insecurities that attend a young person’s coming of age. The poem appeared in The Black Unicorn (1978), which was Audre Lorde’s seventh poetry collection. The poem’s unusual title is an alteration of “hang fire.” This phrase is idiomatic in English, and it means “delayed progress.” However, the phrase has its origins in the field of firearms, where it refers to an unexpected delay between the triggering and firing of a gun. The title therefore has two chief meanings. First, it serves as a general metaphor for the insecure teenage years that separate childhood and adulthood. And second, it harbors a threat of violence that could come at any moment. Both meanings are important for the poem, in which the speaker’s everyday anxieties about her skin and boys intermingle with repeated concerns about premature death. The speaker’s mind races through these and other worries in a nonlinear, stream-of-consciousness style. Yet she continually returns to a refrain in which she observes that her mother is still withdrawn in her bedroom, the closed door of which leaves the speaker isolated and alone with her many anxieties.

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