how to:
mend
and burn
and bend
and shape.
I know how to make myself something new,
so don’t stay around out of pity,
leave me broken
and I will find my way back to wholeness.
tell me
all the stories that start in your smile
and
end in your eyes.
honey, you need to say the thing before it forms a storm in your chest. you can’t keep carrying anger in your bones because you are too afraid of letting poison out. freeing yourself from the thing won’t make you serpentine. you mustn’t keep anger tucked in your skin like that. please darling, say the thing you mean to say. say the thing before it builds a home in your blood. say the thing before you become the thing itself.
choose happiness every morning like you would an outfit.
if someone hasn’t called you brave lately, I will.
you are fighting sadness with everything you’ve got
and for that you are mighty.
To the men who loved me inconsistently,
I survived you.
feeling deeply does not make you weak.
showing that you feel deeply does not make you weak.
admitting that there are parts of you that still smell like men who walked into your life
and laid their sadness on your palms
and drove their empty fingers through your hair
and kissed you with their mistakes
and wrote you poems about nothing
and snuggled up to you with their insecurities,
does not make you weak.
they weren’t the easiest to love, these men,
they tried to comb out their problems
over the sink of your happiness.
some folks are just cruel for nothing.
my darling,
you are the color of the earth
you inherited holy,
let no one silence the glory in your bones
let no one make you doubt
that you
are
indeed
important.
how wild it would be if
we could actually make each other happy !
don’t cheat yourself out of happiness
you deserve all the damned chances
all the damned tries,
so darling please stop thinking of new ways to die.
darling,
my blush alone
my blush!
my blush in itself is a hundred poems.
imagine
how much my body would write
if you loved me.
you will find that I have my grandmother’s coloring
and my mother’s heart.
honey,
I am inhabited by praying women.
you were the first thing outside of myself that I looked at and felt connected to,
do you understand this?
He has found galaxies
in between the thighs of other girls
and suddenly the world
I was planning to offer him
just isn’t enough.
she said:
“You deserve a full meal of love. Stop snacking”
you
and I
and all our vices.
what we give the gods in prayer we get back in people.
your mother was a myth
your father was a story
but that never kept you from
loving mightily.
even absence is a teacher.
I now know that you’re a wild thing,
I am sorry I tried to love the forests out of you.
darling,
your body is not a burial ground for the insecurities of others.
Find a lovely thing and respect it.
poems,
like bodies,
carry blood
and water
and bits of
everyone who’s ever loved us.
love,
you wouldn’t believe all the places
I thought I would find you.
he said:
are you sure you don’t carry the ocean in your chest?
mountains in your eyes?
the sky in your hips?
because
you are starting to feel like the whole
world to me.
being this ebony.
having this name.
carrying this language in my mouth.
there were times when I only wanted
to blend in
to sit unnoticed,
un-special,
but blending in is fading out.
sometimes I won’t be honey-sweet
or love you with my softness
but please remember that
these bones have crossed oceans to find you
and they’d do it again.
Why are you so afraid of loving a strong woman?
maybe we carry our mothers’ faults
in our bones too,
maybe our fathers’ sins
are stifled in the blood.
I am sorry,
maybe we inherited some of their pain.
(what they carelessly gave us. what they’ve been trying to take back)
kiss me all ways.
kiss me always.
when your quiet starts clashing with your lover’s loud
and all their patient love is spent
and you’re as much stay as you are go,
hold your tongue.
take a breath instead,
stop.
read your favorite book again
or
go for a walk
or a run
or a smoke
or eat something sweet,
rest your heart a bit,
and for a moment
let love worry about love.
I don’t want to be less of me if that’s the only way I’ll get more of you.
darling,
I am a country you shouldn’t go near.
I am at war with myself.
a thousand poems have been dancing in my chest
since the first time you
kissed me.
he says that
I add distance to distance
and am the reason why the ocean feels infinitely wide.
time differences and seasons are all contraptions of my hands,
because I am trying to prove
that I can break his heart again and again
from thousands of miles away
and still be the girl of his dreams.
my mother’s hands are tired,
you can almost tell when she hugs you,
she leans in and rests her fingers on your back
sharing a tiny weight in secret,
unburdening, almost.
I am still learning to make language
out of pain,
to write out all the ache.
I am still teaching my fragile
and my strong
that they can co-exist.
when he offers you thin love,
don’t take it just because you have thick skin.
say no to loving a person more
than they love themselves.
I am still learning
the art of
give
&
take
&
rejoice.
lover,
we dug each other out of lonely places
tell me that isn’t magic!
sometimes it feels like I dreamt you up
darling,
like I closed my eyes and created you.
Denial, it walks in the family.
be careful with how you choose to love people,
don’t destroy them,
don’t destroy yourself.
current hobbies:
<
br /> 1. Loving the wrong men rightly.
2. Loving the right men wrongly.
bwenzi,
I know depression kicks you hard sometimes,
keep rising up from it,
you surviving thing you
you thriving thing you.
too many of us are oceans
with lovers that never learnt to swim.
the first time you saw him
you lost your language,
you swallowed your name,
and couldn’t remember a damn thing about yourself,
this is when you should’ve ran.
you should’ve made for home
before you spent
what felt like lifetimes
forgetting yourself in a man.
here we are,
black and in love with ourselves
and they spite us for it.
A final note
dear sisters in melanin,
we need each other.
Upile is Malawian. She was born in 1994 and grew up in Zomba. She lives in Baltimore where she takes pretty pictures, listens to music and plans little adventures over tea.
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