Invincible Skin

Landing with my feet in high heels with my voice over a loudspeaker

2010-07-19T11:27:00.000-07:00

Last night at In Other Words bookstore, I had my first ever performance! I shared the stage with Tash Shatz (who's work you can find here) and BROWNSTAR. Really an incredible night of poetry last night in PDX! It was such an honor to have performed for the first time with such talented people. All of my compulsive editing and rehearsing paid off, because I was really well received! And I totally got bit by the performance bug. Thank you so much to my friends and my close people for supporting me, by either showing up or helping me with my pre-performance anxiety.

XOXO.

P.S. I'm still totally buzzing.

Untitled (for now, seeing as I am not so great with titles)

2010-07-17T00:03:00.001-07:00

I want to be the lip you bite down on when your nerves curl you in like the edges of an aged photograph.
In the wine-dark thickness of the room your girlhood grew up in we nested like herons.
On and on, until the sun birthed in us, the gaping dawn a blooming flower.

A flower:
Dried in my windowsill,
A moment caught, plucked from inevitable decay
And the progress toward,
Pressed flat between heavy words from "zeitgeist" to "zenith".
A snapshot of a first kiss:
Two girls loving frantic like ants to sugar.
I am a sweet tooth, a molar at the back of an unhinged aching expectant jaw.
You are so many daisies in a chain, gathered together in a bird's beak for home.

And then –
An inhale: a swallow diving down my throat.
Hungry for air, I am famished, salivating as though rainfall was born in the roof of my mouth.
Nourish me, please.

Let's feast.
I will peel one hundred pomegranates, dark red fruit-flesh under my fingernails. I will not wash my hands: leave the sticky stains for later so I can remember the color of your lips.
And I will feed you the seeds.
And we will grow new mysteries in the pits of our stomachs, archival fruits that know old names
For love that we will never learn with our tongues.

Leave me with the gauzy pallor of your cheek:
And I will blend paints from an infinite palette.
And I will count your eyelashes with an abacus.

Sing songs of the softest silver spikes and the densest and heaviest cotton.
Sing songs sticky like pumpkin innards.
Sing songs as gentle as virgins braiding hair with their avian fingers.
Sing songs as loud as your touch, loud as the moment all my blood vessels opened and electricity coursed through my veins and filled me full-to-bursting.

And I can promise you this: I will wrap you up in blankets of refrains and choruses.
And I can promise you this: you will have whole swimming pools of paper scraps frantically scrawled for you to dive into.
And I can promise you this: I will lay with you until your fever breaks, rubbing ice cubes on your chapped lips.
And I can promise you this: I will hold your hurt like a wish buried in the earth, sacred somethings for safe keeping.

Show me your spine. Lay it down like a ladder for me to climb in and find you.

Carpe Omnia (For Lucinda, Ida Mae and the Rest of Us)

2010-06-16T18:29:00.001-07:00

Old hands and old lands;
They have known my name.
Women in skirts wide and clanking like church bells,
Braced over tin basins, shucking corn and cleaning yams in the sun.
Old tasks spoken in old words
On African shores
On plantations
In the backyard of the house that I was raised in.
Old hands and old lands;
They have called my name.

Sweat rolls steadily down her knit brows,
Like brooks over pebbles.
Her face in photographs was as stern as a mountain.
She told my grandmother that Kentucky comes from the Iroquois "Ken-tah-ten"

Bare foot Ida Mae taps me on shoulders in my dreams.

I wake up with words wet on my lips, spitting out salmon fat with eggs.
"Ken-tah-ten"
Land of tomorrow.

She calls to me, leaving trails for me to follow in red Kentucky dirt.

Land of tomorrow.

I am the unfinished pages of my mother's journal.
I am the high school diploma that was denied my great-grandmother.
I am her unacknowledged good grades, and the tests she had to take over and over again to prove she wasn't cheating.
I am the rightful place she was denied in the Latin Club.
I am the stolen quills for the sixty-five million and more whose names have been lost, abandoned, or taken.
I am the ink well that illiterate hands dipped found Cardinal feathers into, knowing without having to be told that words are freedom and wordlessness makes you chattel for white men.
I am yellowed and wrinkled pages of torn bible passages, slipped from calloused hand after calloused hand at midnight in reeds.
I am the screaming baby stolen moments after birth, dream-suckling for his mother.
I am the good teeth, strong back, clear eyes and naked childbearing hips that fetched a good prize at the state fair.

My blood is hot sweat and pork grease and work songs.
My bones are a mortar and pestle to grind corn meal for frying.
My tongue moves quick like freshly unrecognizable feet covered in leeches from days of running in marshes.
My voice was made in dirt floor cabins, by hands dirty with pollen and pricked with thorns from cotton plants, rubbing balms and salves on the backs of children with scars caked thick and misshapen as mud pies on a playground.
My ribs are shoebox guitars played on matchstick porches, holding a heart that is not just my heart, my many hearts beating throaty voices of gospel choirs.

There is always the faintest taste of iron in the back of my throat. Blood and rust tickle my sinuses; I wake in the night smelling smoke. At first, I do not know whether the house has burned down. Then the stench of charred bodies, the burned strange fruit like Cain's rejected sacrafice.

Land of tomorrow. Land of tomorrow. Land of tomorrow. "Louder" she commands like an approaching siren.
"Scream. Scream like a train whistle, baby girl. Land of tomorrow. Land of tomorrow."
"Shout it like hallelujahs at dawn" she says. "Shout it from can-see to can't-see."
Land of tomorrow. Land of tomorrow. Land of tomorrow. Land of tomorrow.

Mixing mud and water from dirty rivers,
I mould new mouths.
Mouths with teeth bared
Maybe grinning, maybe growling, maybe both at once, but always open.
When you deny me, it is with this mouth I speak.
Mouths red with lipstick, swollen and pursed lips
Having been beaten, or having been kissed.
Mouths full of rage sizzling like hot oil in cast iron pans, bruised and missing teeth.
When they bash me and the ones I love, I spit burning blood into the sky, raining acid stars upon their up turned, confused faces.

By the time you have seen this, it will be too late. I will eat you alive, I am not afraid to be a monster.

I dare you to forget what I have done in their names.

For Beloveds Everywhere

2010-06-10T15:33:00.001-07:00

My friends and lovers, we don't cry the way mother's mothers used to cry.

These women used to cry whole mud rivers made of
swollen mounds of flesh, more hematoma than breast
full of lactated milk undrank,
babies spared from slavery and genocide.
Mothers' rivers full of broken bones,
effigies of the old gods and goddesses torn up by their clay roots
deforested and shoved into makeshift dustpan corners
old names buried in the wagging tongues of the colonizers.
Tears that do not stay locked in the lachrymal glands, like patient bullets in loaded rifles.
Tears that go down as smooth as battery acid, waiting to be unearthed from the ribs,
great fossils of past hurts.
The spindly bird-bones of memory.
A wise mestiza once said to me,
"Not every song we sing has to be a song of triumph. Some songs will be of sorrow, of failure."
Sealing away our longings and hurt, lungs esophagus and pitiless stomachs made reservoirs of inky waters black and bursting,
Our bodies sweet and swollen blood oranges, leaking and weeping like fresh tattoos.

The hope to cry out loud, more than mothers and mother's mothers quivering eyes could have prayed for us when they looked down on us in heavy arms, only babies swaddled in tissue paper hope.
My friends and lovers, we can cry hallejuahs-worth of big, outspoken, wailing entitled tears.
We don't have to die secret deaths anymore,
carrying suitcases full of ash to our own burial grounds.
Your statistics will speak, no longer a plot point, a simple of unit of data,
voices as fleshy and proud and wounded as the bodies that hold them.
No more silently ticked charcoal tally-marks on the heart's walls.

This poem is for every woman
who doesn't get to stay home, windows drawn,
hoping to unname themselves when the faint grey whispers of men whose names they knew and didn't know creep onto their bodies
leaving a ripe stink like sulfur.

This is for every woman that doesn't want to.
This is for the ones with tender eyes like horses, the ones who are able to smell lightening and try to warn you, shooting clay arrows to get your attention before it is too late.
This is for the ones whose quivers are always full, the ones who are making and making and making arrows. This is not a metaphor. This is a warning.

Aunt Julia

2010-05-13T01:39:00.000-07:00

Delicate orbs of amber tinted glass, linked with aluminum encased in plastic dyed to look like tortoise shell
Resting gently on the bridge of a bell-pepper nose.
Rising and falling with the gentle crests of smiles.
Slightly too large, slipping in the smallest of increments, so small that she barely notices until they slip down
to the cinnamon colored tip, shining from overactive oil glands.
Nestled beneath eyebrows as unruly as exclamation points,
and rushed back up upon her face, just in time to make the way to watch as her grandchildren dance to celebrate her 80th year.

To Ethel (draft 1)

2010-05-03T02:20:00.000-07:00

Finally, it is storming like Seattle should, and I can move again. As if the raindrops and I are playing freeze tag, and just to be a tease, the storm clouds waited and tapped a toe, giggling as I sat crouched with a pen over a page, waiting for my heart's ink to come out. Here we go. This poem is a response to my beautiful and talented friend Sidony's piece "To Lucille," about her friendships with women.

To Ethel.
I stink. I know I stink because I just smoked a cigarette or five, neither of us have showered in days, we ate burritos at 3am, I'm wearing amber oil on all my pulse points, and I am thinking of that time we fried kimchi in my kitchen when there was nothing else to eat. The odor of my memory is pungent and wafts through my room, all up and down the weathered staircase that looks like it's made of driftwood, following us out the front door as we bundle up (probably much more than we need to) to go get coffee in the flat, grey sunlight. We walk down the street in hats and scarves and legwarmers and tights with geometric designs and sweaters that would make Cosby blush, looking over our shoulders to make sure the white men are looking as we rail against white male privilege. We needn't have worries; of course they are. We are a walking, snarling piece of free form jazz. And in this American northwestern city no-one even thinks twice about looking at the two black girls on the street that look like a moving Picasso.

I wish they all could be California girls.
Ethel, do you remember the day we learned together, in the house that you were raised in, what eyeliner is for (not for making the eyes look larger, but for drawing designs on our faces)? How about that time you cut my god-awful perm off, disembodied strands of hair that looked and felt like they came from a wig on your pink tile floor, leaving only tight, soft ringlets resting lazily on my scalp, and the first step on my path to getting free. The up-all-night reckonings with our brilliance, and how they didn't even realize what we had memorized and learned with our bodies when we were ten years old and younger. How could they possibly be so behind, and we were the ones that needed catch up? We made up languages that simplified even the most abstract concepts into one or two words and knowing glances, and taught one another how to read tarot cards. Remember that one time, when that one white girl said "Bob Dylan is the voice of the revolution," and we both cackled in her face and told her what was up: "Hell no girl, Chuck D is the voice of the fucking revolution" I'm realizing now that we even got that one wrong. Our brown mouths, crinkled into smiles with the faintest of unapologetic hair on the upper lip and glimmering teeth, these hold the voice of any revolution. Because all we have to do is say "I'm alive and I'm taking what's mine" and they'll be quaking in their britches.

God only knows what I'd be without you.
The truth is, you were always the brilliant one of the two of us. By the time I'd met you at eighteen, you already had an intimate knowledge of how to take care of yourself using what you found on the ground in an alley and to fight like a dog for the things that you loved and believed in. You told me about books I had never heard of, moved with me to syncopated rhythms, spat rhymes in my face and encouraged me to spit them right back out. We played dress up in your grandmother's scarves and held photo shoots and philosophical summits in your uncle's living room. Our experienced fingertips moving through record after record and brown-leaved books with dog-eared pages, always hungry for the next thing that we could add to the pastiche we created for our personal viewing pleasure.

We'll have fun, fun, fun till her daddy takes the t-bird away.
Eventually it came time for you to pack up and move back home, because you ran out of money and we both ran out of ideas. A slow-motion punch to the jaw, and suddenly you're gone. Now it's all wilted songs sung from a balcony choked with creeping ivy. For California in December, for another Sagittarius, for knowing it's you from behind by the drawings on your sneakers. We reconvene occasionally now, and it's like it always was: you show me the miracles of putting raw honey in our kinky ass hair, give me a Moleskine notebook; I feed you brown rice and kale cooked in ume plum vinegar, and paint your toenails a color named "Lickity-Split Lime." But there is no more turning around and knowing exactly where you were by the smell of sandalwood and dirt; I, like a lame bloodhound, can't pick up the scent anymore.

Getting BENT

2010-04-20T21:22:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to reveal some exciting news today! In ten days I will be leaving for a month to head to Seattle to study at Bent writing institute! Some of my favorite poets (including Tara Hardy and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha) have taught there. I'm totally thrilled to be spending the next month there and will be posting my writing from that experience throughout the month of May. Look out for it!

Invincible Skin

2010-04-08T21:18:00.000-07:00

The following poem is one of the first things I wrote when I decided to take my writing seriously enough to do things like edit, make a concerted effort to study the works of other poets I respect and admire, and, God forbid, publish and perform. This is probably it's fourth or fifth draft since its existence. In some ways, this poem has been my touchstone the last year or so, hence the blog title.

Come here.
A little bit closer, and I'll tell you a secret.
I have always wanted teeth like stars
and invincible skin.
Fingertips ridged as old seashells, caress scars
moles, razor burn, ingrown pubic hair, picked-at dead skin on my cuticles.
These are shackles, reminders of my time-sensitive packaging.
Muscles taught, anticipating pain
still hold ready,
still
hold
ready.

This is my palimpsest.

Recall the marks.
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
sound like
Force
Clamp
Prod
Dissect

Cut
to guilty bones and quaking hands from too much caffeine and too few calories.
Survivalism.
***
Survivialism: the urgent act of saving yourself using the bluntest tools made of the crudest materials.
Nightmares haunt my body, dark, thick and expansive as Conrad's Africa. I am tied and nailed down by Lilliputian white men, rope braided thick and rough, taught over my breasts, stomach and hips. It burns, digging like graves into my skin. A flag is stuck into my navel and I am claimed. Suddenly they are wearing bibs and bring out forks and knives. Talk about eating the Other.

This is my palimpsest.
Ghosts hanging round my neck, sometimes it's too damn hard to move like this.
These histories we carry with our skins, in our skins, make them thicker.
And I am learning sooner rather than later that this thickness?
This thickness just makes me feel heavy.
Did you know that a suit of armor weighs 55 pounds? No matter how much I weigh that's still going to be more than half of me.

So I ask you now.
Please, let my body be mine.
Not a force to be reckoned with,
Not a reminder of home you never had,
Not a placeholder at parties and meetings for your high-minded radicalism,Not a symbol of my strength in the face of heteropatriarchialwhitesuprimacist society,
Not a symbol of my failures to be a blushing white lily,
Not a symbol of anything.
Let it be mine and let it be soon,
because I tell you this, Silence eats me when I am starving.
I have felt his dank breath on my shirt collar,
have seen his fangs covered in the blood of other little black girls.
Mama Audre always told me that Silence is death.
Let our bodies go, because soon there will be none of us left.
And if our bodies are not reason enough, remember that we are the appetizer; his appetite is insatiable.
He will most certainly be licking his lips,
looking around and wondering,
"What's for dinner?"

posting. finally. an explination follows.

2010-04-05T22:12:00.000-07:00

So remember how I triumphantly declared "let's get intentional!" some months ago? Notice that I've been lacking in posts since, oh, December?
Here's the thing. Firstly, my lovely home full of technology resistant homos has just recently come around to having an internet connection in our residence. Second, my trusted steed had an unfortunate run in with a bottle of water on the first day of the new year (R.I.P. Macbook motherboard). It does discourage one from making regular blog posts when one has to walk in the rain and cold to spend five dollars on a sandwich and a latte in order to use an internet connection. One spends time on a (well-needed) hiatus from regular internet usage for about four months. One writes a lot using a good old fashioned notebook. But now I'm back! With a new computer I've been saving for and a real live internet connection that I can use from my room. Look for a new blog post (of the non-apologetic variety) in the next few days, now that I've stepped into this decade!

5:00AM's song

2009-12-05T04:54:00.000-08:00

I know what sound the dawn makes;
Slow-burning horn
Rejoicing as it creeps with honey glazed hands,
Waking the autumn leaves and dreamers, still sleeping in their gutters.

let's get intentional!

2009-11-24T22:49:00.000-08:00

For so long I have let this blog sit, hiding and scared in its little corner of the internet. No longer! I decided today I am going to get more intentional about my writing. As such, I am going to update this at least once per week, with anything from incomplete thoughts from my day to pieces of writing I've been working on for months that need a fresh pair of eyes (or a few). Also, I'll be putting this blog OUT THERE so more people can read it. So tell your friends about me!

thoughts on femme

2009-06-27T19:55:00.000-07:00

One of my new favorite quotes:

"People associated short skirs, frenetic dancing, shared flasks, and public necking with feminism" - Linda Scott, "Fresh Lipstick"

People don't like femmes because we're dangerous.

We can fuck your shit up with our stillettos, the same ones we wore when you were checking us out, and we let you know that we could see you looking just by staring you bold in the face.
we're dangerous because we want you to look, and because we are that type of girl.

We're dangerous because our black as tar, brown as clay, lily white, fat, thin, curvy bodies make your dicks hard and your pussies wet.

We're dangerous because we don't really give a shit who shaves and who doesn't, and where they do and where they don't.

We show our legs, bruised from our romp with last night's mistress, or rollerderby, or dancing, under our sundresses, Carharts, lycra micro minis, and pantsuits.

We're flirtatious, we're coy, we're bold, we're direct, we're innocents and we're sluts. we are all of these as once, and don't see them as paradoxes, but as more chances to expand our arsenal.

We can change a bike tire with the best of the boys and the butches. And if we can't, we're not buying the bullshit that says that it makes us less radical than you.

We play dress up with our girlfriends, our girl-friends, our boyfriends, and our boy-friends.

We take care of one another's kids, and let them play in our makeup, if that's what he, or she, or ze wants to do that day.

By the way, that look that's on display in Forever 21? Yeah, We found some shit in a free box and handcrafted it about a year before they were mass producing it at the Gap.

walking home

2009-06-18T03:11:00.001-07:00

Today I had I really great conversation with the mama of the baby I watch for work. She's writing her dissertation on representations of black female sexuality in cinema.

She provided for me, without having realized it, or at least not letting me in on it if she did, something I've been greatly needing lately, and that's a sense of direction and a pair of open arms.

Sometimes I wonder if the easier path would be better for me over all. I mostly just wonder that when I look at people I used to know. So many of them are living these lives that are, to some degree really appealing, if only for their comfort level. To be the prototypical upwardly-mobile black girl at college, with not a hair out of place or ever letting one's leg hair get long enough to notice, it'd be a lot easier in someways. To force down the parts of me that don't line up with convention, or to ignore the things that I think about, the ones that keep me up at night because they're burning for a voice. I give those things voice, because I've never been able not to notice them. I just got a vocabulary for the voice to speak with in the last couple of years. But when I didn't know the words it was so much easier to keep it quiet.

I wonder if all of the projects, both internal and external, are even worth it. I wonder frankly if I just try to do these things because I can see holes, and wiring, and marionette strings, but can't quite figure out how to make it stop, this system that I see ruining everyone that I love. So I do what I can, in the name of exposing the gears and churning cranks, but maybe I only do it so I can sleep at night.

bell hooks has this bit in "Yearning" where she talks about black folks who are at the margins not only of mainstream white consciousness, but mainstream black consciousness. Those who are committed to explicitly anti-capitalist projects, and don't equate black self-actualization with black capitalism, and are not afraid of losing their "blackness" by consuming all types of cultures. She brings in this awesome quote by Paulo Friere (that I'm gonna butcher) that says that we can begin as objects to then reenter as subjects. All of these projects are an attempt to steak out subjectivity in a culture and society that writes me out as the object, essentially by definition.

Introduction

2009-06-17T02:58:00.001-07:00

I should start out by saying that I am planning to use this blog mostly to air out the things I turn over in my head and with my friends. It seems like writing them down would be a good way to track my thinking. I kind of have a tendency toward cataloging my processing.

Much of it will be political. Some of it will be poetry. Most of it will tackle my life, and how I see my experiences intersecting with privilege and oppression. A lot of it will undoubtedly be a little dramatic (I'm a girl who tends toward extremes, what can I say).

I have a lot of projects floating around too, and a lot of books that I'm reading. I also tend to think a lot about pop culture and the cultures in the often weirdly small and specific communities I'm apart of. I'll have a lot to say about that too.

And I have the good fortune of being surrounded by people who are ridiculously talented, so I'll probably show off some of their stuff too. In case anyone stumbles onto my little corner of the internet.

I'm taking an "it ain't much, but it's mine" attitude toward this whole blogging thing. At least for now.

I also really want to hear feedback from anyone who happens to read this. So please, leave comments and send emails! I'm brownskinnedpalimpsest[at]gmail[dot]com.

Here goes nothing, ya'll!