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.

To Ethel (draft 1)

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

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?"

posting. finally. an explination follows.

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

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!

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!