The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic
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The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2 - Jamila Woods
The BreakBeat Poets Volume 2
The BreakBeat Poets Volume 2
Edited by
Mahogany L. Browne
Idrissa Simmonds
Jamila Woods
© 2018 Mahogany L. Browne, Idrissa Simmonds, and Jamila Woods
Published in 2018 by
Haymarket Books
P.O. Box 180165
Chicago, IL 60618
773-583-7884
www.haymarketbooks.org
info@haymarketbooks.org
ISBN: 978-1-60846-870-6
Trade distribution:
In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com
In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca
In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com
All other countries, Ingram Publisher Services International, IPS_Intlsales@ingramcontent.com
This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
Cover art, Chocolate Lady
by Brianna McCarthy.
Cover design by Brett Neiman.
Contents
Index of Poets
Patricia Smith
Foreword
Introduction
Mahogany L. Browne
Idrissa Simmonds
Jamila Woods
COLLECTOR OF ME
I shall become a collector of me / And put meat on my soul
—Sonia Sanchez
Justice Ameer
My Beauty
Rio Cortez
SELF PORTRAIT IN A TANNING BED
Maya Washington
Texture
Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie
Homage to my Breasts (after Lucille Clifton)
Nikki Wallschlaeger
This Body Keeps the Keys
Elizabeth Acevedo
You Mean You Don’t Weep at the Nail Salon?
Alysia Nicole Harris
WHITE GODIVA MELTS IN A MOUTHFUL OF BLOOD: PRAYER FOR MY UNBORN DAUGHTER
Syreeta McFadden
ODE TO THE HYMEN
Jamila Woods
my afropuffs
Morgan Parker
Magical Negro #217: Diana Ross Finishing a Rib in Alabama, 1990s
Eve L. Ewing
why you cannot touch my hair
I’M BLACK
The first thing you do is to forget that I’m Black.
Second, you must never forget that I’m Black.
—Pat Parker
Bianca Lynne Spriggs
Big Black Bitch
Diamond Sharp
Exile
Roya Marsh
Ode to Fetty Wap (written after strip club)
Kemi Alabi
At H&M, When Another Black Girl Asks If I Work Here
Eboni Hogan
Cardi B Tells Me About Myself
Syreeta McFadden
Question and Answer. Or: Pirate Jenny Shit Talks With Her Employer
Camonghne Felix
Meat
Britteney Black Rose Kapri
micro
SHARPENING MY OYSTER KNIFE
I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
—Zora Neale Hurston
Idrissa Simmonds
Kingston, Jamaica. 3am. Passa Passa Dance Party.
Lauren Whitehead
Outside my Harlem Window
Crystal Valentine
A Brief History of Coconut Oil
Ariana Brown
Supremacy
Rio Cortez
THE END OF EATING EVERYTHING
Xandria Phillips
SARA BAARTMAN AND I NEGOTIATE VISIBILITY
Syreeta McFadden
OF THEE, MAGICAL NEGROES, I SING
Morgan Parker
Magical Negro #607: Gladys Knight on the 200th Episode of The Jeffersons
Britteney Black Rose Kapri
for Colored boys who considered gangbanging when being Black was too much
Eve L. Ewing
what I mean when I say I’m sharpening my oyster knife
DUTY TO FIGHT
It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.
—Assata Shakur
Ariana Brown
A Brief Life
Aja Monet
#SayHerName
Diamond Sharp
Purgatory Room
Venessa Marco
Patriarchy
Destiny O. Birdsong
All The Things That Have Not Happened Between Us
Kemi Alabi
Mr. Hotep Says #BlackLivesMatter and He’d Kill a Dyke
Ra Malika Imhotep
rememory
Mahogany L. Browne
If 2017 Was a Poem Title
Morgan Parker
Magical Negro #80: Brooklyn
ALL THE EVENTS THAT HAPPEN TO YOU
You may not control all the events that happen to you,
but you can decide not to be reduced by them.
—Maya Angelou
Natalie Rose Richardson
What do I tell the white boy who asks me of my heritage
Teri Ellen Cross Davis
Piece
Nikki Wallschlaeger
Sonnet (47)
Hiwot Adilow
No
Candice Iloh
alleged (erasure).
Destiny Hemphill
shadowboxin, session one
Simone Savannah
beautiful black queen
Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton
Divination
Noname
Bye Bye Baby
Venessa Marco
offwhite
Alexis Smithers
The Holy Theatre
Ajanae Dawkins
Pulling Teeth and Answers Before Dying
Idrissa Simmonds
Dawn Prayer Call
Whitney Greenaway
Carnival Fire of ’63
WRONG IS NOT MY NAME
I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
—June Jordan
Jamila Woods
N
Justice Ameer
(After God Herself)
Elizabeth Acevedo
Cuero
Safia Elhillo
self-portrait with the question of race
Elizabeth Acevedo
La Negra Takes Medusa to the Hair Salon
Yesenia Montilla
Confession #1
Angel Nafis
Love On Flatbush Avenue
Thiahera Nurse
Love and Water
Simone Savannah
Look:
Thabisile Griffin
destiny, chile
Brittany Rogers
My daughter prays for a brother, and gets one
A NEW PERSON
I was a new person then,
I knew things I had not known before,
I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through.
—Jamaica Kincaid
Aracelis Girmay
sister was the wolf
Elizabeth Acevedo
Mami Came to this Country as a Nanny
Aja Monet
Birth, mark
Niki Herd
Blue Magic
Athena Dixon
Chick
Safia Elhillo
self-portrait with dirty hair
Raych Jackson
A sestina for a black girl who does not know how to braid hair
Alexa Patrick
Wading (Ode to an Almost First Kiss)
Ciara Miller
Poet Imagines Creating Full House in Rockwell Gardens
Athena Dixon
Boxes of Andromeda
Toluwanimi Obiwole
Amerikkkana
Kiandra Jimenez
Halcyon Kitchen
Naomi Extra
Girdle
Naomi Extra
My Favorite Things
Lin-Z
Roseart
Kz
I beat my sistas ass foreal this time
JP Howard
This Poem for Sugar Hill, Harlem
Rachelle M. Parker
Ode to Walt Whitman … The Housing Project
FOREVER TRYING
All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
—Toni Morrison
Idrissa Simmonds
Flight
Bianca Lynne Spriggs
What Women Are Made Of
Toluwanimi Obiwole
french guiana/enigmatic womyn blues
Safia Elhillo
old wives’ tales
Idrissa Simmonds
Vespers
Marwa Helal
poem that wrote me into beast in order to be read
Hiwot Adilow
Abandon
Candace G. Wiley
Parcel Map for the County Assessor
Destiny O. Birdsong
400 Heat
Fayise Abrahim
BLACK PRODUCE
Mahogany L. Browne
Built for Disaster
Nina Angela Mercer
Root Song for Daughter
SOMETHING HAS TRIED TO KILL ME AND HAS FAILED
come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
—Lucille Clifton
Rio Cortez
WHAT BEGETS WHAT BEGETS
Nabila Lovelace
For Songs and Contests
Porsha O.
SERENA
Angel Nafis
Ghazal for Becoming Your Own Country
E’mon Lauren
79th be the catwalk.
Thiahera Nurse
Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone
Yesenia Montilla
It’s a Miracle
nonae
creation story after Safia Elhillo
JUBILEE
I want to look happily forward. I want to be optimistic. I want to have a dream. I want to live in jubilee. I want my daughters to feel that they have the power to at least try to change things, even in a world that resists change with more strength than they have.
—Edwidge Danticat
Mahogany L. Browne
We Are All God’s
Jamila Woods
waves
Ebony Stewart
Sway
Ariana Brown
Invocation
E’mon Lauren
The Etymology of CHUUCH!
Candace G. Wiley
The Cut Up
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Index of Poets
Fayise Abrahim, 176
Elizabeth Acevedo, 11, 115, 117, 132
Hiwot Adilow, 85, 172
Kemi Alabi, 29, 70
Justice Ameer, 2, 112
Destiny O. Birdsong, 69, 174
Ariana Brown, 46, 60, 209
Mahogany L. Browne, xxi–xxiii, 75, 178, 204
Rio Cortez, 4, 48, 188
Teri Ellen Cross Davis, 83
Ajanae Dawkins, 100
Athena Dixon, 137, 145
Safia Elhillo, 116, 138, 168
Eve L. Ewing, 19, 57
Naomi Extra, 151, 152
Camonghne Felix, 36
Aracelis Girmay, 130
Whitney Greenaway, 104
Thabisile Griffin, 124
Alysia Nicole Harris, 12
Marwa Helal, 171
Destiny Hemphill, 88
Niki Herd, 135
Eboni Hogan, 31
JP Howard, 158
Candice Iloh, 87
Ra Malika Imhotep, 73
Raych Jackson, 139
Britteney Black Rose Kapri, 39, 56
Kiandra Jimenez, 149
Kz, 156
E’mon Lauren, 195, 210
Lin-Z, 154
Nabila Lovelace, 121, 190
Venessa Marco, 66, 96
Roya Marsh, 25
Syreeta McFadden, 14, 34, 50
Nina Angela Mercer, 180
Ciara Miller, 144
Aja Monet, 62, 133
Yesenia Montilla, 118, 198
Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, 91
Angel Nafis, 119, 194
nonae, 200
Noname, 94
Thiahera Nurse, 121, 196
Porsha O., 192
Toluwanimi Obiwole, 147, 167
Morgan Parker, 18, 54, 79
Rachelle M. Parker, 160
Alexa Patrick, 141
Xandria Phillips, 49
Natalie Rose Richardson, 82
Brittany Rogers, 126
Simone Savannah, 90, 122
Diamond Sharp, 24, 65
Idrissa Simmonds, xxiv–xxvi, 42, 102, 164, 169
Patricia Smith, xvii–xx
Alexis Smithers, 99
Bianca Lynne Spriggs, 22, 165
Ebony Stewart, 207
Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie, 8
Crystal Valentine, 45
Nikki Wallschlaeger, 9, 84
Maya Washington, 5
Lauren Whitehead, 43
Candace G. Wiley, 173, 211
Jamila Woods, xxvii–xxviii, 17, 110, 205
Foreword
Patricia Smith
Almost thirty years ago, I wrote a poem that stumbled toward explaining my unsteady root in the world. I was weary of scratching out life under a microscope, of having that life dissected, defined, and ultimately dismissed by others. When I sat down to scrawl this thick stanza, with its single capital letter and breathless progression, I was both fed up with explaining and desperately craving an explanation.
What It’s Like to Be a Black Girl (For Those Of You Who Aren’t)
First of all, it’s being 9 years old and
feeling like you’re not finished, like your
edges are wild, like there’s something,
everything, wrong. it’s dropping food
coloring in your eyes to make them blue and suffering
their burn in silence. it’s popping a bleached
white mop head over the kinks of your hair and
priming in front of the mirrors that deny your
reflection. it’s finding a space between your
legs, a disturbance in your chest, and not knowing
what to do with the whistles. it’s jumping
double dutch until your legs pop, it’s sweat
and vaseline and bullets, it’s growing tall and
wearing a lot of white, it’s smelling blood in
your breakfast, it’s learning to say fuck with
grace but learning to fuck without it, it’s
flame and fists and life according to motown,
it’s finally having a man reach out for you
then caving in
around his fingers.
At nine, all I craved to be was other.
I prayed that blue-black, nappy and female was a temporary malady, that the West Side of Chicago was just a training ground for the wider world—the world presented as a dreamily whitewashed dreamscape that I never doubted represented a reality just outside my reach.
Even my mother, my guidance, urged me to crave who I wasn’t. As an answer to Who am I, really?
I was plopped down in front of our big floor model Philco to watch a succession of television shows featuring several hundred carefully framed lives I was urged to aspire to. When my mother was done cackling at the goofiness of Lucille Ball or professing Walter Cronkite a god of sorts, I flipped channels. I flipped channels, searching American faces, listening to American conversations, peeking into American homes. Of course, I never found a Black girl.
No voices sounded like mine, so every plummet and rise in my song was wrong somehow. No faces looked like mine, and I despised the mirror for its inability to utter the lies I needed to hear. In the world I was being taught was the right one, no streets, no neighborhoods, no schools, no mothers looked anything like mine.
So I turned away from the babbling broadcasts and began to wait. I waited patiently for a peculiar and impossible magic, that sweep of the wand that would lift me from the baffling throes of little Black girl-dom and into the righteous, much easier existence awaiting me.
Meanwhile, my nose was too broad, my hair too crinkled. I clutched shameful stories of a mother from Alabama, a daddy from Arkansas, and their loud way with double negatives. I lived in a tenement hovel where roaches dropped from the ceiling into my bed and mice got trapped inside the stove. That hovel happened to be on the West Side of Chicago, the side of town everybody warned you to stay away from. And the school was one of the worst in the city. And, from the woman purporting to be my rock: For Jesus’ sake, girl, talk right like you got some sense. If you ever want to get out of this neighborhood, ever, you got to fix your tongue and talk right, like white people, you got to talk about stuff white folks talk about, you got to say things white folks want to hear. And Lord, I don’t know why your nose so wide, none of my people got noses like that. And I can’t even drag a comb through that nappy hair.
What I was was not enough. I was wrong, I needed correction. I was to become a scrubbed slate, detached from my own history. If I was to have any story at all, I had to grant anyone and everyone else permission to write it—any beginning, any middle, any outcome.
I was Black and female. As such, I was taught that the world would tell me what and who I was. What we are.
We are the color pulsing beneath the closed eye, the tinge of a room at moonfall, we are steady suspect since we share our hue with the night. Because we are never seen clearly—consistently spied-upon through a safely-distanced shroud—we are diminished, trivialized, spoken of as stain. We are the rollicking hips and the curious hair, the bristling oddity, the tangled waft of shea and spiced oil, the throats that refuse