You have to do it with intention
or not do it at all;
practicing joy with only half your heart
is as good as daring darkness.
-
Please have the audacity to love yourself a little harder.
A Love Poem for a Tryer
You’re as much magic as you were yesterday,
Even if today is filled with shaking the misery,
Dancing off the tired,
Deeply wanting an out.
You’re as much magic as you were yesterday.
I Like My Black Joy Full-Fat and Unrepentent
Given all the tragedy, the harsh parts and addictions,
The room was black and still every bit holy.
A magic was loose here.
We took it,
laughed from the belly,
and decided on full lives.
A Story and Another
You’ll meet yourself one day
And it may terrify you to know that there’s more
And it’s magnificent.
Poetry Won’t Suffer if You Smile Now
“Be a dear
Hurt for us here
Forget the wound
Knit the words together
Hurt for us here,
“We’ll pay good money
We’ll cry those tears
We’ll go back to our homes
And forget we left yours shaking,” they say.
Honestly,
I can’t keep pulling from the ruin. I can’t keep returning to the ruin. I can’t keep being the ruin.
You would like my trauma, hot and heavy and at the snap of your fingers. I know myself to give it, to pull it from somewhere and pour it where you please. This is a story you know, but I tell it over and over, because it’s easier to tell than the story that scares you. The one of joy, the one of how I’ve learned to listen to my sadness, to hold room for it without handing it the house. The one where I accept only good things and revel in them. I have spent what feels like a thousand lifetimes living in hurt and thinking it the only life I was worthy of. But now, having made it to other side, the side black girls are often told they’ll never find, I know that this is a vicious lie and real life is waiting for us to begin it.
The Hunger
Dancing hand in hand with her desire,
She is the love she waited for living.
Someone ought to tell it right and straight,
We were always meant for ourselves.
-
Excuse me while I shake the table
And make myself the proudest.
Maybe I am not always the daughter you clap for
But I am mine for the choosing, and in that is a peace.
Be Still and Know I Am God
Gogo, you told me that was one of your favorite songs. I’m sorry I’m still not good at being still and I’ve never quite got round to knowing God.
But even if I don’t cross my legs like you asked, and I pick fights with Jesus like you asked me not to, I am still many things you can be glad in. Just trust and know that I am still many things you can be glad in.
-
You offer up forgiveness as if it were your name
And in the end
Whose peace are you really keeping?
Remember Kindness
Please remember, if no part of you is yourself, every part of you suffers.
A Promise to Mama Maya
Maybe I won’t learn right away.
And I’ll make the same mistake twice.
But this I can promise.
I’ll dance each time I rise.
-
Expect love
and change
and growth
and failure
and goodness
and all the other symptoms of a life lived to its fullest.
-
It might surprise you
That I still walk in love
And count myself blessed
It might surprise you
But it doesn’t surprise me
I have always known myself to be a fire.
Living Is Trying and Trying and We Are Beautiful for It
Yes, I’ve got all kinds of misery;
I’ve got it and it’s got me.
But I’ve been growing the language to cast it out,
And the feet to dance it gone,
And the bravery to let something kinder take its place.
I can’t help but think of myself as some kind of beautiful for bothering.
Swoon
Fruit
Faced with a love like this,
I now know how the thing that craves goodness in the deepest parts of us wins in the end.
The Sixth Day of December
Love can be sudden but still certain.
You could be folding clothes in the swelter
In a small town known only for its smallness
And look up and see his heart for what it is
And that’s enough to say “I love you”
And that’s enough to mean it.
-
I come home to you in a hurry
Always a hurry.
I dragged my feet as a child.
It drove everyone mad.
I couldn’t drag my feet any slower.
Home wasn’t too bad, it was just hard.
Hard enough not to miss it as much.
Hard enough not to hurry to.
-
It is more amazement than doubt.
I’m used to people loving me
or saying they do
or at least acting it.
But you,
more than in love,
are in care with me,
and it’s all the right kinds of overwhelming.
Your Coat and Your Heart Too
You say the sweetest things without even trying.
They just slip out of you, easy and free.
You hold all the right words
And wrap them around me, and they fit.
I Think the Furniture Knows
What we make is magic.
We crawl under and over and into each other.
We make the sheets blush.
The walls have never seen an act quite like us.
-
When good love dares to hold you,
and you are caught between accepting the heat of it all
or running,
choose the fire.
After the Shock
I have enough pride in my heart to feign indifference.
Be around when you’re around, smile but sigh in my bones.
I am troubled in this way.
But if it broke me once, it could break me again.
And I’d rather not dare it.
All I Know of Astronomy
When you swim my thighs with your fingers,
We look like two galaxies touching.
Black body over black body.
And in my bed we’re a Binary Star.
Orbiting so close to each other,
Your light and mine are convincingly one.
-
Love’s a funny thing;
You have to keep risking and hoping
And hoping and risking
If you ever want any.
Some Wars Are Fought Under the Skin
I am the grand saboteur.
I am the creature that fights joy,
The thing that struggles to loosen itself from lonely.
I’ve got fear the size of a house.
And pain that likes to pester.
I am holding grudges in both hands.
Darling, my anxiety is brutal
And my doubts are persistent.
&n
bsp; But your staying has always been true
And your love is tender.
And I’ll fight myself to keep you.
After Everything
Honest to God,
I don’t think I have enough teeth or tongue or mouth
To carry your name in conversation.
What was between us, cut clean and cruel.
And fell graceless.
Love that grows from a wound
Needs more tenderness than we gave it.
Because when it shakes the house,
Nothing survives.
Not a friendship, not a sweetness, not a mouth to carry a name.
-
We end things how they started.
Over Frank Ocean and sex.
Kind water.
We end things without bruise.
Love, this time, was far from a danger.
It was just unsettled and thin.
But it died laughing.
-
Only a thing as kind as love
Can touch you
And make every bit of you feel blessed.
Your Joy Makes Up for Your Two Left Feet
I watch you dance in the home we’ve made despite or because, with or without
I can’t help but smile at the thought of all that
joy in one body
A body I am blessed to know rests beside mine every night.
-
This once, you mean to stay. After all, this lover is warm, and as much as you’ve tried, you cannot find your father in his mouth. This once, you mean to love him back.
-
The wisest beast within me says “Leave,” and I obey.
Oh Sthandwa
Your love dances,
Is a radiant thing,
Warms any space,
Is loud and intentional,
And uncommonly kind.
Your love gets to the very soul of it.
Swoon
You came, and the poems gathered
and the walls fell
and my love was let loose
It Was Best Before
When love comes undone,
it isn’t always life being brutal.
Some things are good until they are not.
-
I want to take you out of the city
To the vastness
To less smother
To watch the sky with new eyes
And see life as it was meant.
-
I have decided to never again put myself through hell for love.
This life is far too delicious to be spent burning
for men.
-
You like to gather at my thighs
And want me,
Want me badly but not entirely.
You promise things you’re not set on giving.
You lie and moan through the teeth.
“Endure” Is a Filthy Word
Love doesn’t mean to make light out of all the darkness, meal out of bone, enough out of too little.
Milk
I have seen so many loves thrown out.
I am sorry that I keep asking if you’ll stay.
I can’t seem to shake the fear that we’ll sour each other.
Where All Loves Ought to Start
I am sorry in a thousand languages for ever giving myself up for you.
I fooled us both.
I was the lover I needed most.
Sister
Nectar
One day our mothers may ask
“Who do you love completely?”
May we grow to respond
“Ourselves. Ourselves. Our lovely selves.”
Anaiah’s Poem
I was in the room when you first graced the world with your breath,
Yelling and crying,
We heard you then, and we have heard you now.
Make us hear you always.
Learning to Friendship
I am learning to be more thoughtful in my healing.
Please stop me if all I put on your plate is in my pain.
Real love is a full meal,
And friends don’t let friends starve.
Deliverance
If you find yourself very black and very tired,
Very tired and very black,
Very woman and very black and very tired,
Rest and mean it.
Ambushing Goodness
You are stubborn in your sorrow. Adamant on being unkind to yourself.
I could shake you for it.
When I’ve found you again dancing in the drink,
acting joy, poorly,
I want to pull you out from under it all.
Clean you.
Give you what love I can.
Wait with you on the corner for good things to come.
The Loveliest of Loves
You always calm the broken things in me.
You lift me above myself.
You are a sister and a home.
You are a kingdom of forgiving.
I am sorry if you’ve ever had to stretch your life
for me.
All bonds bend, but if this life has given me anything,
it’s the blessing of being loved by you.
-
Sis wam,
Share some of your peace.
Teach me how to wrap myself around myself
May This Poem Meet You In Your Language
Mothers who crossed oceans for their children’s joy
To live in forms
And lines
And checks
In hand-me-downs and stare-me-downs
In a language you may never sit in comfortably.
A language with no back to carry your meaning.
In missing home
While making your children a new one.
You deserve adoration.
Your stories are the ones we are waiting for.
Let Black Girls Be
I was born on a Wednesday.
Raised a good black child with bubbles in her hair.
Quiet and curious, at first,
quieter and less curious, later.
Where does it go, this fearlessness and hunger for the world?
Who kills it in black girls?
To be a black girl is a thing of grace.
If I am ever a mother to one,
I hope she never falls into doubt with herself.
I hope she doesn’t hesitate
to eat the room and everyone in it.
I hope she is loud and certain of herself.
Existing can be done in the quiet,
but black girls,
black girls weren’t meant for that kind of thing.
Black girls were made for boldness and boundlessness.
-
When you are ready,
come up for air,
beloved,
we are waiting for you with tenderness.
Window
In my mother’s living room, I sit in my grief.
And she stirs so much, you’d think she was dancing.
She’s not used to seeing the insides out.
In me, she is seeing a sadness she keeps quiet
in herself.
Imagine that,
never having the privilege to listen to your pain?
Imagine that,
never knowing you had the right to fall apart?
How many women’s stories go untold?
How many parts of our mothers have never seen the light?
-
Mum,
When you tell me your story, you don’t have to cut off the crusts.
You can’t mother your way out of the truth.
Each of You
Sis wam,
Home is going mad.
Home is a wound.
We are always looking for you.
Sis wam,
We are missing in our own lives.
Our lives are filled with missing you.
Sis wam,
We are lost too.
*Every day, more missing girls. Every day, stories cut short.
This Too Is a Love Poem
Mama,
I know you never meant to teach me fear
or how to look danger in the eye and crave it,
but here we are.
Here we are,
alive and willing,
and that’s all you need to be to learn something new.
-
You owe yourself a warm life,
peopled with only those who feed that fire.
Now You Know
All along,
since the beginning of the beginning,
you’ve been worthy.
So,
you’ve got to start giving a damn about yourself.
Sister
Come and bask in this joy with me;
I am here because you held my hand.
Your sisterhood has made this terror of a life
light and breathable.
A Note on the Illustrations
Thank you dearly to Lulama Wolf (@lulamawolf) and Neo Phage (@n_phage) for the beautiful illustrations. It is an honor to bring my work to life with the support and guidance of other African women artists.
Acknowledgments
To my literary agents at Folio Literary Management, Katherine Latshaw and Erin Harris, I am deeply indebted. Thank you for believing in me.
To my editor Melissa Zahorsky, Kirsty Melville, Kathy Hilliard, and everyone at Andrews McMeel, thank you for giving my words and me a home.