Tag: poetry

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This is a poem about healing, reaching out, and the path to recovery. This poem contains depictions of depression via the speaker’s environment.

 

  1. The floor is invisible beneath the piles and piles of clothes forming a moat around your bed, on which you haven’t moved. Your arms, your legs, your body is a thousand tons, the weight of a herd of elephants, you won’t be getting up any time soon. The used-to-be-purple-now-gray t-shirt clings to you, it’s gross, terrible, you haven’t changed for a new one, but you know it’s nothing compared to the rats living in your fridge that hasn’t been cleaned out since September. (You’ll just let them have the food.) Your phone buzzes. You don’t look. No one needs to worry about you right now or hear from you. You’re fine. The room is fine. You’ll deal with it tomorrow.

  2. Today, you left your room. Not a lot. It was just the fridge. It hasn’t started to smell (yet) but you don’t remove the food inside. In the back of your head, you know it will spoil, but the hand stays right where you left it. As you mull over this, a bug crawls under the space between the floors. (You close the fridge.)

  3. The TV hums in the back of your ears, on it there’s a man named Jim and his girlfriend “Pam,” and a Schroot or whatever. You just needed something quiet. Tonight, you’ll have a TV dinner because there’s else to eat. Tomorrow you’ll Doordash. (Or not.) It’s going to be the most depressing thing you’ve eaten in months.

  4. Someone knocked on your door today. Whoever they were didn’t stay; but they left a care package. Inside, there’s a bag of fruit, a blanket, a bottle of bubble bath, and a green shirt with the tag still on.
    “I hope you’re doing okay.”

  5. You took a bubble bath that night.

  6. There’s still not enough energy in you to go outside, but Doordashing is too expensive. You take a fruit from the basket. Tomorrow you’ll clean out the fridge.

  7. It’s a disgusting and tedious process, exactly how you expected. You don’t do it in one go: not everything’s gone. But it’s a start. You’ll watch The Office that afternoon. (His name is Schrute.)

  8. Your phone buzzes.
    “Hope you’re doing better.”
    It buzzes again.
    “We miss you.”
    You mark it as important.

  9. The green shirt you’re wearing feels better than the used-to-be-purple shirt. You feel clean. It’s nice.

  10. You load your laundry into baskets. You’ll take it to the laundromat in time. Right now, you’ll sweep the floor. Put trash in bags. Mop.
    Have you seen your floor since August?

  11. You take a bubble bath that night with the leftover solution.
    Tomorrow, you’ll go grocery shopping.

Our Voice Matters (a poetry review)

During writing time for class, I tend to strictly listen to music as a way to focus and extract new ideas or perspectives on a piece. So far, it has proven as a gateway to writing some of my favorite works. Recently, I have begun to dive into my love for slam poetry once again instead of the usual playlists. It is a theme that I intend to achieve in my senior showcase, so I thought that maybe I should look at some examples of what I would like for it to look like. There, I found some of my favorite performances and impactful pieces that correlates to the black experience and the beauty of intersectionality. I would like to share with you some of my favorite pieces and dissect them a little…

Kai Davis- Ain’t I A Woman

Kai prefaces a story in the beginning of the video that really brought the poem together. She says that in her class that there was a discussion about the separation of blackness and gender and how her professor believed that you were “black” before you are a “woman”. Well Kai rightfully disagrees stating that the two coincide and that you cannot be one without the other. To which said statement receives backlash from her male peers and even her professor. However she took notice to the complicity and silence of her female peers. It affected her so much so that she wrote this beautiful piece. Throughout reading I felt all the boxes being checked of what kind of poetry that I aspire to write and the message that I wish to spread. “Too black to be a woman, not man enough to be black”, or “Ask him to stop calling my scars sacrifices, calling my suffering an inconvenience” were just some of the lines that really stood out to me. It was both a new and fresh telling of the life of a black woman and yet it felt familiar as if I already knew the words.  The poem felt like a warm hug, like my experiences were not isolated. It made me want to write pieces where people could see themselves in it just like Kia’s. I could feel her anger, her frustration, her eagerness for understanding, and her hope through the changes in her voice. Her performance was a reflection of what it poem achieved and I thought that it was so beautiful to see an active comparison between the two. This was one poem out of a set so I highly recommend that you listen to the others.

Tolu Obiwole and Ashia Ajani- Black College

I really love to see performances where there is more than one person, especially in the back and forth format, I feel like it work perfectly with this piece. I especially like the parts where they would speak together, it added perfect emphases on the lines I felt were most impactful. I really liked this piece because of how widely relatable it was. It is about the nuances of adjusting to PWI’s and the isolation you feel when being the only black person. It is something that I could relate to as the nervousness and awkwardness expressed in the piece were a reflection of mine. There were a lot of points made throughout the performance of which I felt were the perfect balance of explanation and the giving a non-black listener the task of figuring out. The rhythm added such a impactful punch to the noteworthy themes in this poem. Like always I highly recommend that you give it a listen.

Steven Willis- How the Hood Loves You Back

This performance has to be my favorite of the three. It had the love, the sorrow, and the anger balanced so brilliantly. It brought literal tears to my eyes because of the frustration I felt in his voice and in his movements it was hypnotic to witness. I got chills when he began to describe the way in which the hood can show love in the most violent of ways. He did so in a way that wasn’t historically dehumanizing  or critical and I really appreciated it. Lines like “This is no longer Jefferson’s Avenue, but where Twig got shot” or “If the Hood Loves you, she’ll write it in tombstone tats” felt so heart-wrenching to hear but so beautifully spoken. Once again the bass in his voice really added to the urgency of this topic and how uniquely painful this niche form of love is. I beg with the utmost urgency to give this piece a listen.

Blog Haibun

The writing of blogs grows dull when confined to the chains of common form. The writer traps themselves in a cage with the door open wide. It is no sin to write in common forms, if that is what you prefer. Oh, but for me! A blog is a format that allows for anything! Histories and futures are created through these. People are informed of the world, of other opinions, of anything imaginable through these. Truly, there is nothing more freeing than a blog written how you want to write it.

Blogs gift to writers

Absolute freedom of choice

The river flows free