Poems on Change by Women Writers in Bloom participants, curated by J.P. Howard.
You, little movie theatre in Harlem, two blocks from my home, Do you remember how you took Mama and me in on weekends? Like magic on that big screen, you kept Mama sober. A huge tub of popcorn on our…
for Beckett Rose before they took you from your bed inside me, before they made that exploratory sleuce through exoderm, endoderm, abdomen before your pale soft skin and hair like a tawny cat’s were presented to me disconcertingly already-clean and…
The women of my grandmother’s line are cloaked in polished oak. Their nipples bare, silk of budding blooms. I know my father by the cacti growing atop my lungs. The areolas pullulating from my desert chest sprout needles that prick…
My Nephew’s teeth are straight like swans in a row better than ducks pretty target for foe I worry about his beauty is his grace what they seek to destroy? does he have Emmett’s eyes? Trayvon’s smile? No child’s nightmare…
My mother died last May. She lived to sew her own designs dressed her only daughter like a baby doll contrived in custom made pink and lace, a traumatic misplace for a non-femme. My mother died last May. At home,…
My daughter has blossomed into a beautiful butterfly, She has learned to stop and smell the roses while avoiding bee stings, but She cannot avoid the pain that life brings. She still cries for little lost things, like Math books,…
Sometimes I raise my hand to brush the curl from the left side of my face but it is only a new squiggle of blood floating in the vitreous of my remaining eye. Sometimes I remember you saying Mama, I…
“It’s Time”… Perhaps the phrase You whispered in my Father’s ear When you were Ready to conceive me. “It’s Time” Your water breaks, I was born. “It’s Time” You let my hand go And I walked my first steps. “It’s…
To Mom She slouches in the chair whose alarm will screech when she gets up. “What is this?” she shouts indignant that this has happened- the chair, the bad food, the hospital bed, eighty-nine years of living and now her…
No matter when you’re born you will be whipped in the sand storm of seismic colonies colliding by their dividing and parching the earth to bury life denying any evidence of our presence And there is nothing to do but…