Featured Poems for the Feminist Future(s) Art Exhibit at MIT: https://www.ourfeministfutures.com/art-exhibition
H u m a n N a t u r e
winner of the Scholastic silver key
Featured at MIT's Feminist Futures
Somewhere
On the grand ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
God touches fingers with a black man
Don’t believe me? I
Well I saw it myself
Between the cracked concrete of pale blue paint and ceiling wax.
You see
what happened is that daddy
Pauli and me were going to aunt Lil’s birthday bash
There’s a game we like to play where we race each other to her house
Daddy always said that the first gift god ever bestowed on Negros was the ability to run
I is small and i is nimble
Our black purple backs raced rub each other under a pale blue sky
But then we get thirsty
Daddy says it’s a long way to Lils and looks around longingly
Sees one of those lukward trees that mom uses to make marmalade
He says “ain’t no harm. Ain’t no foul”
And puts his black hand on that yellow fruit
And then a whole chorus of little baby angles emerged from the sky
Then a finger
God himself reached out his hand
Completing the final 4th panel in Michelangelo’s iconographic
But then he was shot
Hit him first in his hand and second in the bottom of his head
And all the paint on the Sistine chapel melted away
The man who shot him came out and yelled at us
Told us we were on neighborhood property and says we were trespassing
Them trees looked like public trees to me
On the streets as plain as daylight
I tell that man that Daddy didn’t steal from nobody
But he said that “stealing is what a nigger do best”
I glance down at Michelangelo’s greatest creation
His blue black body lays helpless in the grass
I cry ceiling wax tears
And pray that one of those little baby angles could carry us all up to heaven with
frescos where man touches still black fingers with God
And He grants the faithful endless knowledge and understanding
If I were there
I would ask God Why
We s was born dirty
Why were born to be the scorned children of Ham
When we praise his name in the highest every muggy Sunday evening
And Why a God so fair and so beautiful make an ugly thing like me
Like us
And not take daddy up and away to heaven or at least tell him to run
Bc that’s all a Negro is ever good for
Circus
winner of the Scholastic gold key
Featured at MIT's Feminist Futures
Somewhere in the wild jungle
On his annual excursion down to the West Indies
The ring master found me
He wrapped me in his four
no
sixteen inch chain
And told me that he had never had the likes of me in his circus
A wild
African
Hippopotamus
I was amused
Wanted to go back to living my life
In my waterhole
Devoid of reminisce of stale peanuts
And popcorn kernels
But he lured me in there
Made eye contact to assert his dominance
Said he learned it from Animal planet
And when I got to the circus
I found that there were many animals like me
Wild horses from Equator, Bears from the Pacific
Doves from Polynesia
All lured with the same eyes
And the promise of international fame in the animal kingdom
And sometime around my 5th month of being there
He had gotten a habit of owning me
Marked prices of my skin as territory
And told me I was his favorite of his animals
And when he showed me off in my cage
And I’d hiss at the audience
The ringmaster would calmly say
“Oh don’t mind her. Plus it’s that time of the month”
But last I checked hippos never got their god damn periods. And hippos didn’t like the sound of a chains whipping against steal cages or the way the ring leader used circus show tunes to hypnotize our eyes
But maybe I liked being exotic
Maybe I liked be a thing to be played with and manipulated. And maybe I like feeling loved and looked for once.
Even if it meant becoming an animal
Our Butterfly Hearts
Honorable Mention at Scholastic
When we first entered the world from the safety of our cocoons
We were in sync
Our tender wings meshed together
at the center of our bodies
As we looked to find secrets nestled in the still buds of irises
But as we developed
Our pink pigment wore thin
Afterall,
The butterfly only lives to see 14 suns
I sensed it in the beatings of our wings
The way we would stretch our colored hands out into the sun
Hoping to see with the eyes of a thousand cocoons and chrysalises
When you rub the wings of a butterfly
The pigment falls onto your finger
How beautiful destruction can be when riveted to a butterfly heart
I Eve
winner of the Scholastic silver key
Featured at MIT's Feminist Futures
So I guess in a sense you deserve to be stolen from
After all you never asked to be tricked by a serpentine
Or to be built by the eyes of man
But still
you did it
After all
what is a rib?
if it only turns into weak flesh of sin in your left breast
And you
Who once lied in the Garden of Eden
Who once believed that you had the ability of deities
Was knocked out of Heaven
only to be reborn a woman
This time
it was my left rib that was stolen
A new genesis marked with the touching of breasts and genitals
sometimes
when I lie awake in the garden of Athens
I wonder what Eve would have done if she’d known
If the serpent had told her that she too would be cursed to walk the Earth with no legs
Dragged by the arms of man
Clad in snake skin and sins
If she knew that I would become like her too
Alone
Stolen from
Like the way Adam took the apple from her palm and ate it
But I guess she deserved
Because sin first entered the world through woman
Two and a half fish
1.
Burnt orange corduroy
and a
picket fence
Trace out the boarders of words
She still can’t find in Ms.Belter’s
Tuesday Word Search
Do you see this too
She practices the enunciation of the words before she goes inside
Writes them in purple crayon
On a crisp peal page
With those blue lines she likes
that stretch across
The pure Long Island sky
2.
Hello Kitty underwear
Betty Crocker’s fudge brownie mix
Duoplo legos
the shape of the letter B
Sitting
Still sitting
Quiet
Still Counting the syllables of the alphabet
3.
Outside his yellow school bus
She watches the LEGO houses
Melt back into multi-colored plastic
Forming and welding into
A thick ball of petroleum that now sits
In her throat
I swallowed it
She thinks
All of it
And now I’m nothing more than a tower
3.
Before she was anything
She was two
Swimming in the residue
Of a gold fish bowl
Polluted by her scales
failing to form the letters of
The alphabet
She always belong to someone
Or at least
She wanted too
Do they see me now
Does they even feel anything
She repeats this to herself
Inside her mind
Until
She is only half a fish
You the Sun and I
I remind myself of the sun
I let my eyes gaze at the golden hairs of your arm
as your right shoulder blade enters an new equinox
When my rays touch you
I am afraid
Afraid that my radiation will turn your beautiful green soul to dust
A demolition in the form of pale violet rays
I wanted you to revolve around me
I wanted you to tilt your axis into my burning palms
I wanted Summer solstices all at once
I wanted to look you in the eye and tell you I needed you
I wanted you the same way the Earth longs for a demon sun
Knowing that it will bring about the days of Biblical Revelation
But still
the Earth needs the sun to make golden tea roses bloom in winter
The same ones that bring out your pale eyes
yet turn the peachy flesh on your neck as red as blood
This is us
You the sun and I
Stuck between the pain of needing and the pain of knowing
And when you turn away from my rays as if God himself had forsaken you
I ask the question whether you can love like me
Whether a sun
A planet
Or a rotation of a star
Believes it holds power because it belongs to an isolated world
Paintbrush
Featured at MIT's Feminist Futures
Who told you that Black is the color of scars?
A universal symbol of all that is dark and evil
Is that what they told you when they took our land and sold our bodies?
You see
If you cut open the Earth
The Black obsidian would condense on the skin of your right hand
Showing you that we are both raw and beautiful
Was the first man not made from the Black Earth itself?
When the Great White God first made Adam from the dirt
He saw his Blue Black body
And marveled at it’s god-like image
The Black ink unto which the very stars are made of
This is why they told us we meant nothing
Because they knew that gold runs through our blood
This is why the told you that Black is the death of color
When all of life itself begins in our veins
We were life before they knew what life was
Was Adam not formed from the very Blackness of my skin?
We were beauty before they knew what beauty was
Which is why they taught us exactly how to hate ourselves
When it’s their white bodies that come from our continent
So here I am standing where an ocean meets the horizon
So here I am standing where a planet meets a universe
Where my breasts meet my ribcage
Matter itself comes from my left finger
I create whole Earths and planets anew
from my Black nothingness
The parting of my thighs created the birth of Deities
I am the blueprint
Sacrilegious in all my right
I am the blueprint
I hold the paintbrush
So how can I believe I am not a god
When life itself begins from my Blue Black Body
Prayer in C Minor
Teach me how to be free O Lord
Rid me of this chaos that comes with a body
See this one over here
She knows no other life
Two Hands black as the universe itself
Two halves of consciousness
Still waiting to be born into this world
I see your sonnets
Prayers in A flat and C minor
Reminding me that I am neither human nor body
But just this
A note
A story
Used to tell lies about why my people deserve nothing
Show me how to find the promise land
Lead me like you lead Moses
And the prophets before me
Teach me how to count in twos
And see myself the way you see me
All these words that I have love
Turn into my cage
My downfall
Rhapsody in blue
My life in Black
Please good lord
Teach me how to breathe