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Avalon
  • Home
  • Spring 2025
    • Poetry
      • A Soulmate
      • All the Globe's a Stage
      • At The Water's Edge
      • Big Sisters
      • Cotton-Stuffed Heart
      • Doom, Sleep, Mastication, and My Godson Jeremiah
      • Foolish Lemons
      • I Know Icarus
      • nightstand as self-portrait
      • one thousand three hundred and eighty-eight days
      • Pasiphaë
      • Poem for a Stranger
      • Pilot of the Hollow Vessel
      • Rehoming; or, a habitat for creatures who seek darkness and cold
      • Sanctuary
      • The World Inside a Sidewalk Crack
      • Year of the Frog
      • you think it's easy opening doors in january?
      • Your Haiku
    • Fiction & Plays
      • Calculated Sympathy
      • Indigo
      • Maurice
      • The Cradle
      • The Hollow Room
    • Visual Art
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      • A Tobacco Farmer in Viñales, Cuba
      • Thank you, please come again
      • Self Reflective Self Portrait 5
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 Spring 2023     Poetry 

Black Spirit

Joshua Lewis

Black man
Innocuously named, eponymously framed life
Melanin pigment in my skin
Within the lenses of my glasses, I envision autonomy

Black spirit is colorful
For me, I was taught that it was black or
white
White as in this is how I talk, this is how I’m supposed to walk
“Rap, go to the league, or die trying”

I found that blending into a snowstorm
Was just as demoralizing as bending backwards to be “black”
Black spirit isn’t uniform, and I don’t need my insignia to be etched in it
To make a name for myself in light of it

Black is beautiful
Black spirit IS autonomy
Blackness means influence along with nuance
To evoke black spirit

Target on my back because I’m black, surely
But I aim for who I say I am first, foremost
Treacherous, troubling troupe of token
Takes a toll on individuality

I won’t let salt or black quilts
Make blanket statements about who I am
Because who I am, what I do, and how I think
Evokes black spirit

A Letter to my Parents

A Life of Fiction

Answers

Black Spirit

Giving In

I have a question!

I think of you

Light's Secret

Murky Middle

Once Upon a Push Pin Heart

Origami Horses

Road Trip

Shadow's Descent

She Gets to Live

Shenandoah Spring

Silver Linings

Something Within

spinning

SU

supernova

The Epitaph of Stolen Words

The Nightmare's Lullaby

The Society of Lost Fathers

To Be

Young Black Bunny

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