well I wanted to braid my hair
bathe and bedeck my
self so fine
so fully aforethought for
your pleasure
see:
I wanted to travel and read
and runaround fantastic…
…But I had to remember to write down
margarine on the list
and shoepolish and a can of
sliced pineapple in casea company
–The Talking Back of Miss Valentine Jones: Poem # one, June Jordan
lady in red
i waz missin somethin
lady in purple
somethin so important
lady in brown
somethin promised
lady in blue
a layin on of hands…
-from for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange
I’m now throwing away most of the things people have tried to teach me about art and writing and story structure and how things must be done. There is too much grief and too much death, too much misery for me to continue to use writing as another way to punish myself for my shortcomings; to hyper-fixate on the use or utility of my work to the point of inaction; to point out all the areas of failure, all the evidence that these words have no transformative or radical potential; or, how nobody cares to hear from another African international-school-to-abroad pipeline person who thinks their third eye has…
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