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

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)

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)

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

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

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.

Getting BENT

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

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?"

5:00AM's song

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.