by Aja Monet
mixed, magic, or myth—unless angela or malcolm,
maybe pop star or falling one, their beauty is their anger
be angry enuff and they’ll forget you are beautiful
be angry enuff and you’ll be too ugly to listen to
no one wants revolution or radical, be radical enuff
to make them listen but don’t make them think
create a metaphor only those who understand metaphors can understand
be a poet who is not a poet, what purpose do i have in Palestine
lest we forget june jordan or alice walker,
all the names we raise after the ridicule they faced,
privilege is a mask no one wants to take off
what about my face, this skin, this face
they attribute my living to?
i am the great-great-grandchild of fine line between love and rape
a fine line between black and love, bruise.
don’t fall in love while people are watchin,
they will envy the glow
privilege—instead of focusing on all that conspires
in the universe to gather us
a land without law, we argue the commercialism
of a phrase or which organization is represented,
it was never only about lives
it’s a matter of fact. we bicker
over titles, names, and brands
when they read this poem in their herstory books,
if it manages to survive, let them tell it—
this is where we went wrong,
this treasured secret small enuff
to fit the hole in our hearts,
we did not love our people more than we hated
our enemies, we pursued profit and notoriety,
visibility more than love, we hung
we went for the dangling biscuit, privilege
is choosing to walk through checkpoints
while your brother lowers his head in rehearsed formation
through barred turnstiles,
he has no choice in the matter,
privilege is knowing
there are parts of this earth occupied for your leisure,
your convenience, your entitlement, your tourism.
fighting never knowing you are becoming
a gaze, a way of seeing the world or not seeing your role in it,
privilege is writing a poem
a bulldozer of bodies crowds through
empty street in Ramallah, a mother holds a weeping
mutilated daughter, her home. Palestine
to feel, be closer to strangers than passports
my laughter, my dance, my curl,
my lovemaking, my red lipstick, my joy
resistance, how i fight when you are cold: I will give you
my jacket, my arms the clothes off my back, i will hold you
as we cry, i will pray with
your hand in mine, i will love you
naïve of your whispers because i am the sort of pain love is made of,
black and woman and never enuff
i take up too much space.
sentiments of the colored women
her eyes a voice
of verses in a
chapel songbook
where women sorry
stained sung of
the antiquated fight
to love and be loved
soft-hearted and peach-tea dark
humanity minded
lead forward
journeyed justice
beyond the misery
baring burdens
imposed by a nation
that does not know
it is white
enamored with us
a divine demand
in ourselves
to speak and listen
for the silent ones
breathing heavy
still a song sung
mad women were we
treated as strangers
among women
pale as the pages
we were written out of
she knows herself
to be real
in the heart of a child
handcuffed and kicked
bloody and bruised
except we were all women once
weren’t we?
as they worked out their salvation
we were saving ours
serene savvy sass
we busied our boys
with brilliance
ain’t i beautiful? we would say
and you, too
gathering sisters into a club
of purring panthers
we were never here
to sugar men or escort
their humanity
but we hadn’t the time
to fight them
while the mob
came for our skin
freedom was a woman in a train car
on a railroad in Memphis
who refused to give up her seat
71 years before Rosa Parks
freedom was Ida B. Wells
Maritcha Remond Lyons
Victoria Earle Matthews
Harriet Forten Purvis
Margaretta Forten
Mary Ann Shadd Cary
Mary Church Terrell
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin
Sojourner Truth
freedom was so many of us
and sometimes we fought beside white women
ready to march
only to find freedom was segregated
in a negro section of a women’s demonstration
as if we all weren’t shoved, spit at, and tripped
mocked movements
our gut stared fear in the face and fought
beautiful spectacles we were
feeling our way through
the right to rise luminous
shining in our shame
exalted midwives of courage
yearning to be housewives
we worked and mothered
the labor force
of this engine
for her
she who made a rally of the kitchen
protected the many mouths
earth-toned and foreign
frizzed
her enemy is not men
it is what can be found in them
who are we but a mention
of everything else unknown
the best-kept secret
in slave quarters
the emerald of ellipsis
we the women
who conjured and escaped
Nehanda taught me
for Nehanda Abiodun and Assata Shakur
the night before i had a dream
y’all were playing spades in a backyard
on a small table behind an old spanish home
in viñales sipping on bucaneros
assata was a thousand smiles set free
a face beaming in exile, secret messages
sent across dimples
and nehanda you said a cheer,
your head leaning back
i couldn’t tell if you were laughing or crying
all these years loving us from afar
umi meant business, focused on reading
the game, cards spread beneath moonlight,
mosquitoes on our calves, we smacked
our limbs awake
the day we first met
you offered rum in a juice-box carton
stale tobacco on your breath, your man
peeking out the window blinds
to the point, you hadn’t seen her in months.
she went underground after the bid on her head
you rather not know where she was hiding
i felt silly then that we had even asked
we shut the cameras off, hip hop and r&b on the lobby radio
discussed movement lessons, reappropriated funds,
and made plans to
go dancing
we met again across the street from el capitolio,
your eye was a knot, a bug bite gone domestic violent
okay, we said. if you say so, okay.
we took a cab to the club and “survivor” played on the disco speakers
destiny’s child never seemed more timely than then
you shook your hips, words slurred, and we lingered
in each other’s arms, tears streaming down your face
i hadn’t a clue about revolution or what it cost
but i wanted to unblue you home in a hug
i don’t wish a million t-shirt slogans for you
or chants outside of courthouses
or even a best-selling radical text
i wish you more freedom and less fighting
i wish you free
i wish you love
i wish you joy
i wish your daughter’s arms around you
and your favorite meal every day of the week
i wish you a lover who runs your bathwater,
kisses your scars and fights for, not with, you
i wish you liberation in this life and the next
an ancestral champagne socialist boogie down house party
i wish you comrades in a living room of laughter
assata, elaine, angela, kathleen, ericka
all there, a well-rolled joint, fannie lou in rotation
a storytelling cypher sparked by afeni while ella
plays a renegade record we all know the words,
i wish you
i wish you
i wish you
less alone
my mother was a freedom fighter
she testifies a night song on the wooly back of a mammoth,
shadowboxing rivulets, a mother’s cowl falls to her feet,
a fist in the pouch of a honey-hipped negra hill towering
over the country. the farmers of plantations, maid of motels
and mansions, nurse of hospitals and camps, shamans
in huts walking to work in dawn-fog. with heretic hands
a chupacabra suffering in solos, or a black unicorn refugee
panhandling at the border of an upside-down dimension.
beguiled by bars bearing the burden of crimes of love,
cold sweat, gloom, despair, omens. denied a passport
to mercy, a citadel of judgment. she was born in the bulwark
of bordellos and brothels. poor women lease love
in pawnshops shaped as men, traversing the sins of them,
unyielding wind blows her back into dirt roads and waves,
dimly seen. singed at the stakes or drowned at sea,
she studies the way of water and gills: a mermaid.
she is an archipelago of shanty towns, she is invention and
necessity. found scraps, a bouquet of bloody music in her
hands. cane of sugar, leaves of tobacco, a cluster of bananas,
coffee beans, the husk of corn, a poppy seed, tea shrub, spikelet
of wheat, rice flower, gold nuggets, diamonds & coltan—she is
an incantation bellowing from the fields and mines. look for her
in the ruins, at the funeral procession, drunk off palm wine,
screaming in a traffic of arms. lonely, but not alone.
on the shores of goree, she pinched yam and okra seeds
in her baby’s hair, carrying the wrath of their stories.
for when the fowls come home to roost. enduring tides
of licks and whips, she wept by a mangrove and carved a spear
from her lover’s bones. spitting on her thumb, she smeared
shame from her children’s cheeks, blessed in esteem. blighted
dreams born of zealous sires laying with her in a stretch
of orchids, honeysuckles, daffodils, cotton blooming,
or splayed on a cot during a conjugal visit. switchblade in her
boot, straw hat sitting on her braids, she touches herself
moaning, pleasure pours gently on her. she was captured,
the middle of a gunfight in broad daylight, muzzled
by averted ears, smarmy smiles, and what befell
their humanity. if ever a drought, gray clouds
gather on one accord and rally above her, for seasons.
further than the choice of children, she is beyond what names
her courage, she arrived quarreled by instinct, a petition
for presence. it was a woman who nanny’d neglect in maroon
parishes. hooting and hollering, she midwifed revolutions in rain
forests, amazons, and cities. sediments of her sorrow
beseeching. because the eye of the storm within her,
they called her magic. merely more, she was
a freedom fighter and she taught us how to fight.
III. (un)dressing a wound
radically loving each other
is the only everything
worth anything
when in doubt
a little girl on a corner
by a building, in a house,
on a rooftop or a fire escape,
a balcony of imagination
who sprouts into a woman
like a tiger lily
defies the soil
some days when i forget
my own backbone
i can feel her flailing in me
barely being,
a body smiling
what a marvelous view
arms of roads and rivers
a tender mouth of treasure
swoon wind
cuss a storm.
if ever we lose sight
may there be a lamppost
a moon, a star
a guiding light
house, some reservoir
of echo and song within.
peel me into that little girl
again, into a dreamer
still developing her country
moving mountains
merging neighborhoods and cities
of skin and bone
fascinated by the sensational
happiness of low living lovers
let there be a hand to hold
and cheek to kiss
a moment to savor
and reminisce
here’s to the deep
moments of sadness
that hurl us into natural
cabarets of joy
billie’s flower
a gardenia of gauze
on stage without goodbye
the changing of hands
album credits should include all the bed maidens
prophets panhandling God in the pyramid of a pussy
they pilgrimage the portal for poems
ponderous of the pinnacle
merely mortal
compass of hieroglyphs across her hips
the ceremonious sea of calligraphy
cesarean children chant of her chamber
aimlessly desperate for depth
the doulas of dopeness
ghostwrite greatness
goddess of gold
wordsmiths worship the eternal well
the lyrical labyrinth of labia
multitude verses/solitude
alternate reality alliteration
mocking the dawn of a dancing deity
a man is only as great as the altar
he kneels toward
niggas in paris
after kimberly
yannick wants to devour me. he searches my last name for a bloodline.
oversees my jerk. his eyes claim me. he reaches for toulouse in the dent of
a curl. the bend over. my great-grandmother fights for her conquered body
in a twirled strand, or maybe she wanted the blanched animal thrusting
atop her. my ringlets, the frizz, tangled genes.
l’homme brings me to le gibus in republique, wears hip hop. a costume. he
> imposes a hand on my lower back, whispers you’re my little tenderoni in my ear.
fall back. lonely. we feed on whiskey, taste each other on a dance
floor.
in his bed. i want to belong. somewhere. we wrestle in the heat, howl, halt.
he tours the fields of skin, fixated on the hull. black as art. nothing more. a
fetish, i am a statue. he doesn’t call. i’ll forget his name.
nobody’s fault but hers
their love was the collapsing kind
two people they cannot name
falling into one another
words thrown at bare chests
he threw poverty at her head so fast one day
had she no heart without which
no love could overlook
she would’ve said things
he was not prepared to hear
he was a series of small
disappointments.
the body remembers
she lives in an apartment made of bricks
with a bathroom that sings of a fleeting heart,
her kitchen faucet has a sore throat,
ends up in conversations with the skin of her eardrums
at night, she loves in silence
dreams of a voice for making love
on white linen, stained with well-worn human.
in Octobers, she imagines windows like the ones
along her new lover’s spine.
tired of shoveling dirt over the graveyards
on her mother’s wrists, a daughter remembers
the switchblades tripping off the ledge of her mother’s
tongue, chicken-scratches her insecurities
on the mirrors of her eyelids,
licks suicide off the plate clean like a bulimic torn
between the God that promises heaven
in her stomach, women are tired
of being hungry,
of gritty knees and calloused palms,
tear-stained cheeks and retired songs,
she hums prayers between the fingers of clenched fists
amidst whirlwinds, i wish i could tell this story like a lucid dream,
could stitch heartache like loose strings at the seam
but i am tired of spiraling,
boiling blood
love doesn’t like to be fucked
from behind, lest i need to remind you of the missing artery
in your ribcage
boy, ain’t make no mistake
when putting a woman into your life.
this is for every man that has ever laid a hand on a woman—
may the wind blow against your skin and you will
feel me, may she smack you the way
i never could
you will die an old man with your hand balled in a fist