The first-person speaker of “Hanging Fire” is a fourteen-year-old girl who’s ruminating on a wide variety of anxieties and concerns. Many of these concerns are typical of teenage girls. For instance, she worries about imperfections on her skin, about the boy she has a crush on, and about looking foolish at an upcoming dance. She also fixates on the injustice of not getting on the math team, despite having the grades to merit such an achievement. However, the speaker also has some concerns that seem less typical for adolescents. Most notably, she appears to have a preoccupation with premature death. She brings this topic up twice in the poem. At the end of the first stanza, she asks, “what if I die / before morning[?]” (lines 8–9). Later, at the end of the poem’s third stanza, she again wonders, “will I live long enough / to grow up[?]” (lines 32–33). Teenagers aren’t normally so tuned into their own mortality, which suggests that something more might be going on with the speaker than meets the eye.

One important factor that likely plays into the speaker’s particularly acute sense of anxiety and insecurity is her experience as a Black girl. For some readers, it may not be immediately obvious that the speaker is Black. However, the reference she makes in the first stanza to her “ashy” knees strongly implies that this is the case. When dark-complexioned skin becomes dry, the dead skin cells can create a gray-white appearance. The “ashy” look of her knees offers a key to understanding the speaker’s earlier complaint: “my skin has betrayed me” (line 2). Although this statement could simply refer to imperfections caused by puberty, the betrayal of the speaker’s skin could also refer to her experience as a Black girl. In this sense, if her skin has “betrayed” her, it’s because she understands that her skin color unfairly subjects her to anti-Black racism and injustice. The fact that she also identifies as female complicates matters further, since she must additionally face her society’s entrenched gender inequity. This intersection of Blackness and womanhood marks a point of crisis in the poem. Whether consciously or not, the speaker seems to identify this crisis with her mother, who’s withdrawn and unavailable for support.

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