Poetry
poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence ~ Audre Lorde
Dear Mom
Dear Mom, They keep me safe here It’s not worth knowing that They’ve chopped my hair I look like a boy, now But My flesh is fragile, still At night
Dear Mom,
They keep me safe here
It’s not worth knowing that
They’ve chopped my hair
I look like a boy, now
But
My flesh is fragile, still
At night
The cold water freezes my nerves
Do I have a choice of not washing their dishes?
Had not my bruises remained raw,
I’d have waited to write
Their ointments are
Guarded by grandeur
Even when my blood
Shrieks out of my skin
Even after all,
They keep me safe here
Blue tutus and pink cleats
A stranger stares back at me when I look at the mirror. A scar I don’t recognize. Yet I know very well. A stranger looks back at me as I was up and stare at the mirror.
A stranger stares back at me when I look at the mirror.
A scar I don’t recognize. Yet I know very well. A stranger looks back at me as I was up and stare at the mirror. Movements following mine, and somehow it’s different.
A frown in place of the smile I try to muster as I glance at them.
Their hair, cut shorter than what is deemed normal for someone like me. And I am jealous.
Jealous of the fact that I can’t stand mine to be long,
And yet, if it were cut,
It feels like something is ripped out of me.
I wake up sometimes, and the stranger is gone.
But I still don’t recognize the figure in front of me.
So familiar, yet so odd.
They smile when I forcefully smile.
Which is a plus. I think.
And they have that aggravating hair.
It’s bearable to look at.
I don’t throw up.
Which is a plus.
I wake up in panic.
And I can’t breathe.
I can’t see the stranger or the familiar figure.
And I feel like my insides are being turned.
Where are they?
It’s terrifying. The idea of them being gone.
Why are they gone?
When I can’t find either of them, I feel like vomiting.
A sense of despair clings to me as I stare at the blank mirror.
No one is staring back at me.
It feels like my lungs are filling with water, and I am drowning. Drowning in this nonexistent sea.
Trying to float, and yet I can’t.
Because the more I try, the more I feel like I am sinking.
Sinking with a heavy nonexistent ship.
And all I can hear is static.
Numbness all around me .
Making me wish I had drowned.
These are the days I avoid mirrors.
I avoid the color blue and the color pink.
Which makes me feel like I’ve been hit by a train.
Except sometimes it feels like a train is a lighter punishment, Compared to what I feel.
It lasts days, before the stranger comes back.
And I don’t know whether to be elated or enraged.
Excited that they’re back, that they are there,
That I don’t have to do this alone, or angry.
Angry for not being normal.
Despite feeling relief that they are back, I avoid the mirror for days. Before I can get comfortable with who’s staring back at me. Features different from what people call the norm.
Yet blinking when I do.
Brushing their teeth when I do.
And it takes days for me to get accustomed to it.
Days to not look at him and shout in anger and frustration.
Because why do they get to be like that and I can’t.
Yet when I do get accustomed, he is gone.
Gone like he was never there, and is replaced with her
The ‘normal’, yet unfamiliar face staring back at me.
Dead, soulless eyes.
Eyebags for days.
Sporting the same defeated look I do.
And I don’t know whether I should burst into tears,
Because finally, it’s kinda normal.
And yet, the look she gives me makes me feel disgusted.
I don’t like her. And yet I am glad.
Glad she’s back, and I’m normal.
But I’m still in that void, a dark void.
Filled with unopened Barbie dolls and new soccer balls.
I’m still chained to that void. Unable to move.
The strangers pulls me to him, but I am tired, tired.
Too tired to move, or eve breathe by the time he gets close to me. She drags me back, but I claw away, or at least try to.
I can never put up a good fight.
The days I get pulled like a game of tug of war,
Are days I fee like I will vomit.
Yet I don’t despise them, no matter how much it hurts. At least they are there in the mirror and I am not alone.
It’s the days I am left in the middle, all alone, that it feels like
I am sinking and that mud is filling my lungs.
It gets hard to breathe, and I feel like every inch of my strength is zapped.
As I try to look for him and her.
I’d rather vomit, than be alone.
Being alone is scary,
Not seeing them staring back at me in the mirror.
It’s terrifying.
There are days when it becomes too much and all I can do is cry.
Because the stranger is there when I wanted her to be there.
Or she’s there but I wanted him there.
And I can’t do anything about it. I can’t do anything about the sensation I feel
Of wanting to shed my own skin, because it doesn’t look right.
The parts are different.
No matter how much I cry, I can’t do anything about it.
Because it’s not ‘normal’.
But what exactly is normal?
I don’t know.
All I know I is that often times I wake up with a stranger in the mirror, and other times with a
familiar, yet odd figure.
But nothing is more terrifying than waking up and neither is there.
Because if they’re not there, what am I?
I would rather feel like vomiting when I stare at the mirror,
Than feel like I am being drowned by mud.
Hopefully one day I can muster up a real smile to whoever is staring back at me.
And we become friends.
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.
The tears you cry to control me
The privilege that comes with your identity or absence of melanin is the same shade as the tears you cry to control me
The privilege that comes
with your identity
or absence of melanin
is the same shade
as the tears you cry
to control me
the struggle you claim
to comprehend
fails to acknowledge
our experience
robbing us of
our space to heal
when you ask
if I need help
you are doing so
to absolve your guilt
of your ancestors
ask me instead
if you may begin to listen
to my stories
not from the written word
of those who claim to know it
better than those of us
who have lived it
but by delivering yourself
to the lion’s mouth
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
Miles in my skin
These are mine – they are the breadth of the world and the length of my life.
These are mine – they are the breadth of the world and the length of my life.
It is the arcade tickets in blue that now look brown,
And the movie stubs, creased and torn in two
That let me know I was ever there with you.
I have created space in every wallet, every room
To make sure your things were never absent
To cherish our time spent.
Until ‘you’ meant someone new
And I would cry when I found I could create new spaces to fill,
Reminding me of the strength my hands had
To build new drawers and keep moving forward.
Some things I lost on my travels and I am even glad,
(Not having them makes me remember more)
To not carry much with me when I explore.
But tucked away, under thorns and brambles, as often as I can,
I look under them to see if I can find anything more to know about you.
Though you are galaxies away and I no longer see them in your eyes,
It is the moon that recalls our last goodbyes.
And it is a pity I have nothing else to remember that by.
by Hannah
“we’re not alone”
4.10.22
[ i experience ]
a restless synesthesia of sensations
my soul its own dimension
of loosely woven associations
And
nuance
sometimes i think i pay a little too much attention
my jaw perpetually clenched
strained by the daily omission
of ineffable prose
so today i embrace my sensitive observations
indulging in the union of all things
i notice what’s not necessarily there
i talk around and not through
i challenge claims of irrelevance
and forever hold
that “far-fetched” is a cowards favorite word
because yesterday i felt seafoam green
And
this room smells like winter
And
my skin squirms like earthworms
when i see bumpy trees
and that’s the only way i know how to put it
my love language is longform
i let my teeth tear away at the succulent flesh of a cherry
and savor it as i would a lover
picking their brain before reaching their core
the juice dripping down my lips as it fountains from their hips
a delicious mess
i don’t just take note
i see the universe in you
i think in words
i speak in pictures
i feel sounds like textures rippling through my veins
i walk backwards and run forwards
And
i am never satisfied
i am the consequence of an infatuation
prolonged
by a silver tongue
and resulting miscommunications
so it is in my nature not to be straightforward
pheromones released and a love drunk mistake
bore me:
a curse from the cosmos
an /enigma/
to the masses ;
[ [ a living, breathing retrograde
] ]
- A.
Making Up With the Sun
We need to make up with the sun,
Did I do something wrong?
When we talk about the daylight hours that we are robbed of
on our commute home
Is that why I feel so alone?
The coloured houses share in my sympathy.
They look back at me
They know how I want to go so desperately
To see them
To be filled with the same energy
When life is in grayscale
I come back in Picasso’s colour
(Sharp yet soft
A blend of sorts)
Bright and lovely.
Paintings and you always go together.
Merging like oil paints in the caveats of my memory
How I want to be there so desperately
On top of the molar hills of sickly-sweet greenery
How life felt like a 1920’s Weimar movie
A golden era
I think, as I walk back from the station.
Unable to mention how I feel.
Lips tightened; sealed.
Just like your grasp
Loosely tight
Supposedly comforting in the speckled evening light.
Where was I?
Back to this conversation which reminds me of you.
How I predict that you would agree
That the phrase sounds interesting
‘Making up with the sun’
Making up with you
How desperately I wish things didn’t end
When they had just begun.
by Pippa Hill
Midnight Morsel
Picking off the strawberries
From the chocolate cake
Eat them individually
Chewing up small bits of health
Throughout the entire week
The water jugs judge me
Sitting in the dark
When the light switch
Stands next to me
An arm’s reach away
Next to the jug
My body longs for water
Dragging my finger across
The rim of frosting
Rectangular slice
Licking my fingertip
Taking a deep breath
For the rich sweetness
Before closing the box for the night
Alone and Free.
Do not pay me any mind.
Do not be kind to me.
Do not ask about me.
Do not talk to me.
Just leave me alone, why don't you?
Alone and free.
I do not need your attention.
For it always comes with a price.
And I'd rather starve, be lonely, and sad.
Please.
Just Leave.
Do not force me to pay for something I never bought.
Please.
Just leave.
Do not act like you've done something great.
When all you do is rob,
and rob,
and rob.
by MG
A Godless Girl
I say my name in a whisper
As I see no point in proclaiming it loudly.
There is not a ring of pride doused in my tone.
For I am far from the woman I was named after.
The first taste of church in my mouth turned sour
When I was taught into submission.
The Sunday school teachers
Claim God’s existence as
if they personally had tea with him.
They felt his presence spiritually
and were left spellbound
by his love.
I searched frantically
for the feeling
to overcome me
in salvation.
I dig in the deepest
part of myself
But not a single piece
of that quartz
could be found.
I was taught our hearts
were destined to be cursed into stone
If we didn’t rent out a space
for him to live inside it.
I know nothing of this
“miraculous” stranger
For we have never
been truly acquainted.
How can he truly love me unconditionally
If I must follow a list of rules almost precisely—
while placing my true self through
the process of extinction?
It sounds rather conditional to me.
Is anyone a true believer
if they pick
what applies as truth?
Hypocrisy at its finest.
Slather it in that one verse
from Revelations
And call it a night.
I can clarify I am not participating
In the immoral.
My guilt is in the form
of maggots swarming
an apple.
It ate me alive
as I starved for the approval
of my peers.
Is favouritism worth a single
ounce of mental torture
If I can no longer relish in what brings
the light to my eyes?
I’ve severed my ties with a man
I will never meet.
For I choose myself
to believe in.
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.
Knotted
yet, moving with my left foot forward
images that scream magenta tints
this page, this page, may crumble,
fade,
catch fire!
something’s getting too close to the flame
the hairs on my skin are in a quarrel
debating on direction
I am chaotic when the sun floods
…think I’ve told you this before
disheveled when the moonlight ricochets
rather than, dissolve my fleshy membranes
i am a moon sucking, pine backbone, lightning cavity
thing
it, me, I, we
all at once, so much, out of so little…
if I were to ask it to go away
what if I were
by Paris Jessie
Recuperación
Do keep in mind,
you will never get to speak about
what you burned into me.
Like a spell, when you
cry out my name,
It will scorch your tongue.
and I will hear it.
I made it painfully clear
that I no longer wanted
to let you invade my skin.
The darkness you left inside me,
whispers softly in my head,
begging me to answer your call.
I will never wander so willingly
into your poisoned traps again.
And I vow never to let your eyes
fall on my face.
Remember when you breathe,
it’s because it’s my air you stole.
Yet, notice after everything you’ve done,
how effortlessly I move.
As if,
you were never there.
Slip back and hide into that
night when you tried to ruin me.
The shame will never hold me back.
And forever you will
only get silence from me.
The Maestro's Whims
Let’s just be friends instead, we said
As if we might simply
Pause our dance–
Before the strings could swell
And the lights were dimmed
(After which time we’d be too far in
To stop)
And we’d be stuck with each other.
Like all of them.
Two more struck by the Maestro’s whims.
by Navi
this will only take a moment
there are times I hope I am like
no one else,
but myself.
Soak absorb and summit
prefer to devour the
shades that make me
leave me to it: crawl outside this
lukewarm body wall
and
nibble resuscitated melanin
for the record, my inner being seems
seldom inundated
leave me to it: drift back inside and caress
my own tenderness
with symphonies of honeysuckle,
moonlight, breached discovery
maybe, somersault on the bridge
of my nose
smell what I am made of
feel what I got going on
by Paris Jessie
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?
Memory Among Flowers
I still see those wildflowers
With stippled white powdered petals
On nimble stems branching off the stalk
They stand tall, resting under my chin
In that large field with the ombre sunset
Layered behind blooming stems
My mother scooped me up in her arms
Before taking me back home
Leaving behind the wildflowers
I was only two years old yet
I can see them clear as day
I still see those young dandelions
With their strands of yellow that have yet
To turn into seedful fluff blown across spring air
I used to give these flowers to my teachers
Who scolded me for giving them weeds
I did not know any better
I still thought they were beautiful
I was only six years old yet
I can see them clear as day
I still see those little daisies
With their pollen deep centers
The same flowers my best friend used
To decorate my braids of hair
During recesses in spring
She was moving to a new school
One where her mother found a job
I still have one of her hair clips
That she gave on the last day of school
I wish I could give it back to her
I wonder if she would recognize me
Without daisies in my braids
I was only nine years old yet
I can see them clear as day
I still see those lush blue bonnets
With their crowded velvet petals
That grew in the field close to my house
Where girls from the local high school
Doll up for prom pictures in the field
With a new beginning nearby
Her parents can’t help but wonder
Where all the time went when they see
Their daughter is a woman now
Posing perfectly amongst the blue bonnets
I was only eighteen years old yet
I can see them clear as day
I still see that pink perennial
With its vibrant blooming petals
That my best friend gave to me
Before I graduated college
From the garden near the science building
We walked past the graduation court
Knowing what was about to come next
The last time we saw each other
Dressed in our black gowns and covered
In colored cords and stoles
The pink perennials never left
I was only twenty-two years old yet
I can see them clear as day
I only wish my memory of yesterday
Remained so clear