"Hanging Fire" by Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde lived from 1934 to 1992. In addition to writing poetry, she was a political activist for a variety of issues, including racial equality, LGBT rights, and feminism. Many of her poems were closely tied to her activism. This particular poem, though still related to her activism, is less directly connected.

Lorde uses the speaker in "Hanging Fire" to illustrate how adolescents feel isolated in their struggles. The speaker, who introduces herself as a fourteen year old, spends the entire poem worrying, jumping from on anxiety to another. The poem is written with no particular format or rhyme scheme, emphasizing the disjointed nature of the teenager's anxieties. She goes from worrying about her skin to worrying about death in the space of about two lines, and this pattern of jumping between unrelated anxieties continues throughout the poem. Throughout the poem, the teenager's isolation is emphasized. In addition to repeating the phrase "and momma's in the bedroom/ with the door closed," which shows her isolation from her parents, she also outright states that "Nobody even stops to think about my side of it." Clearly, she thinks that she is alone in worrying about her looks, her classmates' opinion of her, death, and the various other concerns which plague teenagers. Yet as almost anyone who is going through or has gone through puberty can attest, many if not all of these problems are quite common. By contrasting the isolation of the speaker with the ubiquity of her problems, the author shows how the speaker's perception differ from reality. The poem serves as a lament of how people often fail to seek support which could be easier to find than one might think. After all, as the last two lines of the poem say, her mother is only a short distance away.