Listening to My Mother is an Act of Learning to Love Myself When I learned I was pregnant, I was scared because I was the shape of the moon and I didn’t think that my body carried enough light to make the night sky shine. Whittling a daugther from your flesh feels […]
The many tunnels honeycomb me in one by one, I become frozen in deep blue. I become noisy as a bee cloud. I become holy like a rooted tree. The many tunnels open me into their skin, to see the golden lamp, a golden calf reborn. To believe in the candle who outweighs, […]
We are here and you’d like to forget it, have us more hidden then our black faces and tired, old eyes. Isn’t it enough to leave my own country as a teenager? Isn’t it enough to run on bare feet from my home that is at war with itself? Isn’t it enough to be homeless […]
You’re not my own but you read me to bed, and tickles me to the bone love how my fat cheeks dimple up. And I’m barely two and my curls are brand new. And you don’t know what she’s doing, trying to make my braids, Put your head down, hold your head down, hold it […]
Who’s to say I came out of the womb triumphant and beckoning, suckling sunlight and justice with indignant power, bewildered eyes ablaze to teach and be taught, or renting immaculate spaces with poise and unconscious infatuation. Suppose the wind coughed me out into this new world and then made me stand up and become my […]
When the moon rolls out of the sky And you are strangled with darkness. When the trees have lost their leaves And stand in surrender to winter. When every word is a suicide note And your face is dry from crying. This is when hope arrives Like a hurricane of joy […]
Self-Portrait as Exile This time my body will be the map. Each limb burning with the cities that left me breathless and took the lights in my eyes and made them exit signs from or to the darkness depending on which way you are going, and I will follow. Though blind, […]
I am not black. I am not white. I am somewhere between the ink and the page, the word that is blurred out. I am not what you assume She speaks Spanish… can’t quite place her…. definitely not from around here I am from around here. I grew up down that stone road […]
When I think about you trying to open me I think of a can of tomato soup It’s the only thing you can afford when you’re so broke You let strangers into your body. I think of my can opener, how I can never find it in the gore of underused utensils. I think of […]
This lyric poem was inspired by these two Bible verses: Who is that coming up from the wilderness, leaning on her beloved? Song of Solomon 8:5 “I will plant her for myself in the land; I will show my love to the one I called ‘Not my loved one.’ I will say to those called […]
Benediction for Unity It is hard to admit this because we are kind people but we wouldn’t know unity from contempt we wouldn’t know togetherness from war we wouldn’t be able to say that the church body is whole we are too mixed up with who is for us and who is against us we […]