I am fourteen
and my skin has betrayed me
the boy I cannot live without
still sucks his thumb
in secret
how come my knees are
always so ashy

The speaker opens the poem with these seven lines, in which she introduces herself as a fourteen-year-old girl with seemingly normal teenage anxieties about things like acne and crushes on boys. These lines make it immediately clear that, despite having a first-person narrator, “Hanging Fire” isn’t your typical lyric poem. Lyric poems often allow time and space for the speaker’s train of thought to develop from one moment to the next. In Lorde’s poem, however, the rapid and nonlinear movement between thoughts is more extreme than the typical lyric poem. The enjambed lines and lack of punctuation in this opening passage nicely demonstrate just how rapid and nonlinear the speaker’s thoughts are. In this regard, “Hanging Fire” arguably approximates a technique known as stream-of-consciousness, which mimics the nonlinear flow of thoughts, perceptions, and associations in ordinary experience. One of the key thoughts in this opening passage is the speaker’s closing observation about her knees being “always so ashy.” Though mentioned briefly among the speaker’s other concerns, this reference to ashy knees is significant for the way it strongly implies that the speaker is Black.

what if I die
before morning

In lines 8–9, the speaker introduces a concern with her premature death. This concern will appear again near the poem’s end: “will I live long enough / to grow up[?]” (lines 32–33). Two points are worth making about these moments. First, in both cases, the speaker phrases her concern about premature death as a rhetorical question, which emphasizes the deep sense of insecurity that underlies her anxiety. Second, the speaker’s concern about her own mortality is an unusual preoccupation for a teenager, and it signals something more troubling than everyday anxieties about pimples and boys. One possibility is that the speaker could be suffering from mental illness. Alternatively, as a Black girl who is beginning to come of age, the speaker could be developing a more conscious awareness of her place in society. Specifically she may be starting to understand the pervasiveness of anti-Black racism and misogyny, and to grapple with the fact that Black women live at the intersection of both forms of oppression. In this regard, the speaker’s concern about premature death may relate to a growing awareness of the dangers that threaten Black women’s well-being.

Nobody even stops to think
about my side of it    
I should have been on Math Team
my marks were better than his
why do I have to be
the one
wearing braces

Whereas the speaker spends most of the poem listing the many anxieties in her life, these lines (24–30) are different in the sense that they foreground matters of injustice rather than worry. For instance, the speaker feels that no one ever tries to consider her point of view. She experiences this lack of consideration as a form of injustice that devalues her perspective. A more acute sense of injustice appears in her complaint about a boy who got admitted to the math team and shut her out of the experience, even though she had superior grades. In this case, the injustice is institutional and systemic, and causes feelings of both frustration and disempowerment. Finally, the speaker expresses a more personal or existential sense of injustice when she asks, rhetorically, “why do I have to be / the one / wearing braces[?]” No doubt her braces make her feel awkward, which further hampers her already compromised self-confidence.

and momma’s in the bedroom
with the door closed.

These lines constitute the refrain that repeats at the end of each of the poem’s three stanzas (lines 10–11; 22–23; and 34–35). Because this refrain repeats three times, it comes to have a central importance in the poem. Throughout all the anxieties and insecurities that plague our speaker, the one worry she continuously circles back to relates to her mother, who’s “in the bedroom / with the door closed.” This repetition suggests that the speaker may be physically returning to the hallway, checking again and again to see if the door has opened. For whatever reason, however, the speaker’s mother is not available for her daughter, and the broken line of communication has left the speaker on her own and without adult guidance. The separation of mother and daughter in this poem also suggests a deeper crisis in Black womanhood. Although we readers don’t have any concrete information about why the speaker’s mother has withdrawn, we can infer that her own challenges, like her daughter’s, may be informed by her experiences as a Black woman.

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