Poetry
poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence ~ Audre Lorde
My Faith in Fate
You used to be someone—
Never mind who, never mind when,
But you used to
Cry at heartbreaking moments of a talkie,
Sob at the words at the end of a knife,
Do your tears dry up when you’re sixty?
Or is it all gone,
That surface-level sorrow, that lonesome feeling,
At the sight of your first wrinkle in the mirror?
You wished to be someone—
Never mind those dreams, never mind them at all,
Because they are figments of your imagination,
And they linger, still, in the corners of your mind,
Vanishing behind the shadows of your children,
And on the heels of your husband’s leather shoes,
A singer, no, you couldn’t get to the highest notes,
A surgeon, no, you hate ketchup and blood,
Resigned to being somebody’s wife, someone’s mother.
You talked about yourself—
Never mind your name, never mind your voice,
They see your face, pat your husband on the back,
They talk to you through your husband,
You don’t know words, you are deaf and mute,
You are spoken for, and speak only when spoken to,
A child, you are ushered towards the other wives,
Have fun, play with toys till it’s time to go,
You hate them all, the talking heads and drunkards.
You don’t know what to do–
Never mind yourself, never mind yourself at all,
They don’t know your name, they don’t remember,
You are Mrs So-and-So, So-and-So’s mother!
Your mother-in-law is a mother only to to your husband,
Only till you belong to the Earth once more,
To be resigned to fate once is divine punishment,
To meet a coincidence of fate again divine death,
And yet the dirt in between your toes disappears.
by Leya Kuan
I will not swallow the mothballs you try to feed me
I am at my softest physically and mentally
and that makes some people uncomfortable
(with themselves).
Statues of aphrodite reveal that the goddess of beauty and love
had some meat on her bones, as do I,
but I know I am not the West’s ideal type.
Maybe that’s why I’m not allowed to take up more space.
Maybe that's why I’m given less room to wiggle in.
My ass and tits have grown a bit
when it happened; I didn't realize that it was sacrilege.
I wonder what Taino deity represents beauty. I wonder what she looks like.
Is her hair long? Does she view herself as a her? Does she think she is beautiful? Or does that assessment come from others? Does she even care for beauty? Or is it just a known part of her?
I’ve gone through a metamorphosis and came out the other end thicker.
Who says the caterpillar must become a butterfly?
Maybe I’m a moth.
I like my softness, it makes me sturdier, and don’t we all need some padding
from the beatings of this world
from the beating of our own hearts
from the beating of the drums that tells you to get back up.
The butterfly is drawn to the flower.
I am drawn to the light
in the darkness.
The Fireflies Sing Tonight
Murmurs hum in the thick August air like the
beating of a bumblebee's heart, the invisible
orchestra's cadence drawing the final curtain upon
the fox's tail cradling an orange sun.
Mother runs through the auburn fields, coal-colored
braids trailing in the wind. Her weathered hands carry a
tin pot, where she drops moonstones, bluebonnets and
lovebugs in a concoction of sap — "Honeypot tricks," she calls them.
As the sky becomes swatched with indigo hues and
black clouds, I take a wooden spoon and clang it against
Mother's honeypot. The fireflies come to feast upon her offerings
and, in return, show me the path to the city.
Twinkling lights dot the skyline as jazz beyond the bayou
shakes the earth beneath the soles of my feet. Coca-Cola lines
stretch around the curb as ladies in black sequins and
smoky pearls enter golden doors under neon lights. Boys
and girls in summer shorts & pinstripe tees chase the sparks
of orange fireworks.
I follow them but they are lost in cobblestone storefronts. Busboy
caps line the streetlamps as newspaper rags form coats of steel along the
brick walls of alleyways. A man with broken teeth who looks like me
asks, "Got a quarter for me, Missy?" but the fireflies ignore him and fly on.
I sequester myself in a silent theater as a piano crescendo
collides with the rainstorm brewing outside. The movie
begins to play, and I begin to cry for Mother.
My body in your mouth
Baby fat:
To my mother you say:
she cute eeh,
watch har likkle chubby cheeks
and chunky thighs
I could just love har up.
I coo and smile, not understanding.
Pickney tings:
To my mother you say:
yuh never breastfeed har enough,
look how she look malnourished,
mawga bad bad; look how she tough?
I look down at skinny legs,
skinny, strong legs,
skinny, strong, brown legs
that let me run from boys who want to touch what’s not theirs
that lift me up into trees that girls
shouldn’t climb
that make me keep in step with
my granddad’s long strides.
I was confused.
Force ripe:
To my mother you say:
pickney nuh fi get breast so soon
smaddy must a feel dem up;
go get har checked out –
mark my words.
I look down at the bumps
raised higher than welts
nipples protruding beyond the swells
my tears rolled off them
like waterfalls over mountains.
I do not understand my body’s changing
I do not want this change
I squeeze them like pimples
they do not burst
but keep growing like
ripened fruits upon my chest.
I do not understand this change in my body.
Grown:
To me you say:
When di baby due? Di belly look round eeh.
A hope a nuh girl pickney yuh going have –
dem gi too much trouble fi raise.
I look down at my belly
empty of womb –
the site of life
and death.
I look at its softness
the rolls that shake
when I belly laugh
the joy that bubbles up and can’t be contained
the rolls that shake when I dance
when no one’s looking
the rolls that lovers hang on
to for dear life
when riding that high wave.
I smile,
I understand.
my body
that holds me up
it brings me joy
and pain in equal measure
it is a source of beauty
and shame
But it deserves to be loved
every inch of it
deserves all the sweet
and empowering things to be whispered over it
etched on it like a mural.
I reach over to you
I part your lips,
gently at first
(you are surprised)
I put my fingers in
then my hand
I grip firmly on to your tongue
and rip my beautiful body from
your mouth
I understand:
my body has no home there –
there with its putrid lies.
I leave you tongue-less and bloody
grabbing at your throat
missing the way
my body used to sit in your mouth.
The Clit and the Ears
My clit doesn't function
and never will,
for it’s not down there it grows
but in my ears,
my alter vaginas, the real ones
who know better to take thousands of lovers.
Nothing needs coming in,
not even an earbud
brushes.
Good chords suffice
with the right beat.
Out, out, bloody mucus, bloody men.
Better fuck my Music
than fuck myself up yet again.
This poem has also been published in Tentacle Poetry Vol. 2, a quarterly poetry zine published by Peel Street Poetry, Hong Kong, in October 2021.
She is gone now
The sight of flour on skin, age spots form an archipelago across your arms. a clutter of dusty pictures and rosaries under your bed.
The sight
of flour on skin,
age spots
form an archipelago
across your arms.
a clutter
of dusty
pictures and
rosaries
under your bed.
Life, you’d sometimes think, hadn’t been that good to me.
Girdles that
squeezed
your fibroid
infested womb—
An old hallowed out
home to five
Barricaded
Against
Life.
You comb
your unruly
hair back;
look uncomfortable.
The look is not you.
I love it when you just
Let it be—
rather than tame it
And look like a scared
Old lady
Instead of the courageous
Heroine that you are.
You still store things
Away
In overflowing drawers
And cupboards
Afraid that one day
You will need
Something
& it will not be there:
What trauma
Gave birth to that?
You say,
I feel your mother
Is doing something
To me—
Like I can’t put my
Fingers on it –
Your hands, exasperated go up in the air
Only to slowly come down
And rest, at your side
Powerless.
We loved each other once.
The nights
I fell asleep
under the
symphony
of your snores:
Uncountable.
Sleeping,
side by side
A woman, and her grandchild.
You say,
Pointing to
A brand new
Press, you say,
Look at that
What my
daughter
Buy for me—
You know what she say?
She say,
when you die
I’m taking it back.
What kind of thing
Is that to say? And you
Schweups at the
callousness of your
Child.
You’ve got:
Two kitchens,
a Toilet
without a door,
social security
checks
deposited
In
Brooklyn.
We walk
down the street
and you smile at
a stranger,
and giggle like
a child...
But wait nah,
you say, stopping,
in a daze. I
thought that was
Nen-nen, but
nen-nen
die long
time now...
What is happening to me, you ask?
& no matter how
hard I try,
I can not answer:
Alzheimers.
being a girl is a wasteland
I like being a girl But sometimes at night I try to remember what it was like To breathe without weight on my chest
I like being a girl
But sometimes at night
I try to remember what it was like
To breathe without weight on my chest
The weight of imposed motherhood
Imposed like a visitor to a house
The kind of visitor you don’t want to come in
But if they force themself in
It’s your fault
Because your house is a provocative colour
So you were practically asking for it
So there’s blood running down your legs
Could be nature or nurture
Nature of my body that has pain built in
Nurture of boys
Boys who will be boys
But not all of them
But nearly all of us
Or nurture of beliefs
That what’s between my legs
Says anything about my purity
Fuck purity
Stop associating femininity with purity
Why do we act as if femininity is this soft delicate thing?
When we all know it’s not
It’s a war you didn’t enlist to
A bad dream you don’t wake up from
It’s a wasteland where flowers aren’t allowed to grow
It’s obligation to hypothetical men and hypothetical babies
It’s playing a rigged game
Where your chromosomes rolled a double
So you lost before you even got to play your hand
It’s your body being deemed public property
By people who don’t know you
And being given dead flowers
By a boy who forgot you had hay fever
So you’re crying and you’re sobbing
And you’re screaming and you’re shouting
And you’ve lost your voice
When you didn’t have one to begin with
And all you have left is flowers and no say
When all you wanted was a wasteland and stinging nettles
So you could breathe easy
by Denise
Gritos de la Vigilante
They say, ‘All Lives Matter,’ as they turn their backs on
Indigenous women who are being pulled into the shadows.
They say the overturning is about the sacredness of life, but say nothing
when Black bodies are being impaled by bullets.
‘Life starts at conception,' they lecture as
screaming mothers are being held back by the police.
They watch as children are blasted in the head by deranged AR-15s.
When the massacres are over, senators and governors
drop to their knees and kiss the barrel of the hot, blood-stained metal.
I speak out against it, claiming my autonomy.
They long to kill me.
To bind my hands behind my back while I slip on the kindling they’ve gathered.
They are skilled at ending women like this.
Their laws demand us to smoke upon the stake.
They don’t know there is already fire inside of me.
My heart burns with eternal sacred light—a testimony to the spirit that won’t die.
My ancestors scream ‘fight’ into my ears.
I must rain down on them the rage and heat of my people.
Vengeance for all the people they’ve destroyed.
I will never submit my body to their prodding.
Never will they decide the fate of my brown skin.
They say it’s ‘We the People,’ but they've never seen me as a person.
And I scream at the top of my lungs for all who are being crushed under this regime.
Swiftly— I strike with the sharpness of my pen
to combat this darkness closing in on us.
Letter to My Body
As I press my pen to the page—
Do I state my truth in shrewd elegance
or does one
Simply scribble their deranged
Thoughts until the blank paper
Transforms into an otherworldly colour?
Otherworldly.
Such a word graces the page boldly.
As I peer into the mirror,
It is what I see
when I place judgment
upon my shape.
I find it peculiar.
Unlike anything on earth.
Undesirable.
I’m not plump in the right places.
Not the body one would see
On the cover of a magazine.
Not the girl everyone longs to be.
Unless she is between worlds
Of slim and thick.
I’ve prayed by the bedside.
Hoping someday,
I would not be overlooked
But perhaps treasured in a gallery.
The ideal piece of art
Gawked at thoughtlessly
To be admired by all.
Studied for centuries
As the highest regard of beauty.
If this mirror were a book
It would tell you in sheer honesty—
I am mismatched.
They forgotten to create
A category for me.
If I smash the glass in a fit of rage
Does my blood reject my point of view
To spell the word beautiful?
Because what would moving
my body into a box do for me
If it only suffocated to exist as I am?
a woman (first) & a writer (last)
he puts pretty stones in my pockets
the ones to make me smile
they pull me to the earth
i am low
i am heavy
i can no longer be beautiful
when i want to be listened to
i can no longer have pretty lips
when i want to make them move
by Sariah Lake
Nina Simone Was a Force of Nature
Maybe that’s why everything she did
canceled out
the divine feminine
her call remained on silent
fans handed her
nature to pay her after shows
as if it showered her
in love, summer rain some-
thing she never experienced at home growing up, the mark of a true artist is they never intended
to be famous and then they get labeled crazy for loving
what they do, some do end
up, but she will never
not be crazy
talented in my charcoal eyes
bouquets and
cricket
claps
that sprinkled
incremented nourishment. Yes, seeds & overcrowding weeds her hands slaved in soil, black
on the surface and even further
down
the road her parents paved
for a family tree of burned bark, brown
wading through the saffron
dandelion fields, eating
sour fruits
of their labor, sickening
howls for money to hold
a love she never was around
growing
up to keep her
apartment from crumbling,
this is the ugly part offstage
where an audience partitions
artist from Art is the starving,
the daily news
feed, sees a person as purely an image
Venus fly trap she was predestined to
nurture the feminine thirst, undeniable
will to feed to quench, indeed,
she had the mother
load, pockets full of
blaring blackness glaring back at her
tar-coated trust almost so dark
becomes invisible paper
bag over face, cover like Claudia
Rankine’s black hoodie
figure against a stark
white background, back again
mistaken for a creature
no choice, Mississippi
Goddam, kick cans in
a crumbling city until it’s
rebuilt with revolution, footfalls
eery echoes the immaterial
that sustains
trashed pothole
streets, riddled with plastic
people, washed-out, watch out
she will point trigger fingers if you stand
in the way of her
first love, Bach
weathered concrete, vermon was the man
-made ever two-way in giving, supporting
the soles? She asked no
one in particular.
No cents at her feet, not even a dirty penny. We could waste time
by listing the basic living swept cunningly from her soles, those rich roots
command
to be secure, an Earth Song 2.0
instead of their strength ravaged
all she wanted was love from the ground
up.
by Maria
Monkey Parts
I enter the room
Ten toes on sterile floors
The doctor is ready to examine me
I wrap my indecent parts in tissue
Hop on board the sailor’s ship
ready to go with the wind
He takes a part of my leg
From the knee to the ankle
“It’s got to go” he says
What “It’s all rotten.”
They’ve been experimenting with monkey parts
“I’ve got one just right for you”
What “skin tone… and all”
I don't want to be different, or more so in this society
He’s hunched over watching me twitch in fascination
I won’t feel the pain of his grip on my leg soon.
It will fade
I hold the catalogue above my head
“They are sacrificed for you”
He’s talking about the monkey parts again
“Pick one with a pretty name”
The man, the doctor, the one with the masked face
is out of my sight now
Standing behind my head
I’ve heard from my sisters the process is painless
I’ve listened to them howl in their sleep at night
It’s time for me to go now, and
when I awaken, I’ll have my monkey parts
And he will have profited
by Fowsia
Fearfully and Wonderfully... Dysphoric
I look in the mirror
And see the buzzcut of a lost daughter
Stubble gripping her chin
That sinful fruit wedged in her throat
Choking her
She gasps
Each uttered syllable cracking and aching
Escaping her lips
Shoulders broadening with repugnance
Tear-soaked calloused hands
Gripping a chest that never grew
Skin hardening
Atop the development of bones
A structure that can never be undone
Becoming an abomination before her eyes
Stiffening of her genitals
She desperately hides them away
Dark and thick hair grows down her once
smooth legs
Encasing them in shame
A body matures and morphs before her
Swelling of confusion and bitterness within
her
I gaze in the mirror
I’m empowered as
I see the most recent incarnation of a story
with no ending
He begins to slip away
Each day she becomes
More visible
More real
More tangible
I’m empowered by her will
Not to live
But to thrive
She is alive
by Rae Lee
Blue Beyond
we cry for our mothers
as we one day learn
that being confined is luxury
that there is beauty in training bras and peel off polish
in sidewalk chalk and dollhouses
in visiting womanhood as one visits the beach
something to dip your toes in
to swim in,
let cool the rushing heat of your preteen hunger
of your thirst to be grown and taken serious
to sip of, and decide that blue is pretty enough to stomach the salt
but there was always something to reach for
your age, your youth
a dock behind you
when your small light limbs grew tired of fighting current and making desperate waves
there was always land
until one day you reach back
and you find splinters
and blue
and blue
and blue
by Sariah Lake