jr explains the immigrant hustle in the mode of rara

everyone know me as jrfrom in the streets. i’m just a lil nigga from the southside i grew up outta that shit. used to be tweakin. every day i get why you ain’t got no money? say that nigga don’t be putting in no work. shit. i got a daddy who out here struggling pay bills every day. young nigga like me was out here tryna check a bag woo woo. shiiiit. but everybody got their own ways to things. my daddy call me like big guy(he call me big guy) chicago got a problem. all them shorties that ain’t got no way damn but i never cried. my eyes mighta looked like it was glary but i never cried in my life. anyways daddy had that buzz, he had that click you know what i’m sayin? that nigga been selling insurance since fucking. .  . i don’t know when! workin in the office and shit rhe man really is what he is, you feel me? At the end of the day we all chicago and all trying to make a way to all eat and understand that you feel me? that’s how i look at it. chicago gon know food. we gon know food. We gon know food feel me?

micros for immigration & the Belizean flag OR how a name changes in transit

1.

mahung meant something bout some king in cantonese

n stopped meaning           nothing           at customs

                                                                                  british honduras

at the time           belize now           the flag just the same though

two men                                             one belong           to the other

n neither belong                               to the land           they stand on

2.

daddy say a man could cut grass with just machete

n                i know           cuz he showed me         chop

chop                    the sound of one blade              as it cleaves

another

3.

the game is called football where my people from

two Os open      like a field n all the air

                   above it

4.

everyone tell me bout daddy playing ball

lone kid on the national squad        boy

got whupped ‘gainst mexico            4-nil

n that was their b squad if even that

but he was good                                 almost

good as garrincha                              nobody can tell

what he would have been had he stayed

5.

i don’t know belize’s national anthem but i know its songs           bwai

stop           mek    noise                     you see grandma on the phone chuh!

                   when she speak              phone cards dem

                                                                                     like instrument dey

Something                             playing the sound of home

6.

daddy say home where family is at                      n i tell him

no              it be where my people gather             the cookout

cypher                   a pot of rice                a plate stacked with plantains

                   pickups at the park               wherever my name calls from

a mouth                dark as my own                         or darker

7.

daddy say the smell of grass cut fresh    the nicest he know

i say i agree                               n somebody say the smell is the plant

letting fear into surroundings                this is what it does survive

JR Mahung is a Belizean-American poet from the South Side of Chicago. He is an MFA Candidate at The University of Massachusetts Amherst and a 2017 Emerging Poet’s Incubator Fellow. His poetry is published or forthcoming in Cosmonauts Avenue, WusGood, Winter Tangerine and elsewhere. JR is also on the organizing teams for Louder than a Bomb MA youth poetry slam and The Plantain Collection, a poetry reading and conversation series for writers of diaspora. His second chapbook of poems “Since When He Have Wings” is forthcoming on Pizza Pi Press. JR’s mixtape is not for sale but he’ll ask you to buy it anyways. Tweet him about rice and beans @jr_mahung.

Nyuma: ” My favorite thing about being a Slytherin is that my problematic fave is Severus Snape. His last dying words are, ”Always,” which describes his intense love for Lily. I try to take that energy and apply it to my passions in my life and love what I do. At the end of my life, I want to know I invested my love, sweat, energy, and tears into the shit I loved/the people I loved and lived out my purpose while bettering myself and another’s spiritual growth. Also, we are the most badass (duh)!”

Victima Querella

My chest/my heart/my soul has expanded,

even my father couldn’t keep this

victim

down.

The ruptures in my heart have been filled with acceptio.

Baba, even Allah can’t save you from the wrath you imposed on me—

Pray for forgiveness,

pray to her,

pray to me.

                  You need it.

Rachel: “My Slytherin Girl Gang”

The Mother Riddle

Like finding a rogue shard from a long ago broken glass with the tender bottom of your foot

you realize that you haven’t talked to your mother in what must be months now

and you can only manage to feel sort of bad about not noticing sooner,

But still

you still reach out

you make the attempt

and 3 weeks go by with no response

there is a standoff of silence now,

her, armed to the teeth with self righteousness

and guilt trips

and you with only self preservation and her voice in your head

a moat of passive aggression widening between you that one of you must cross,

that you will cross.

Before you dive in you fill your lungs with the ways this is your fault

Did you not hide your dislike of the ill-fitting Christmas gifts well enough?

Was Christmas the last time you spoke?

Or is this your fault the way everything is/has always been/ will always be

your fault

Is your mother more upset that you aren’t talking

or that you aren’t hearing her talk?

Should you call this time

rather than text?

And then, before you can reach for the phone

A sphinx pads gracefully in

and stands guard at your throat

a massive regalfeline with the face of June Cleaver

and a hint of your therapist’s kind eyes

She says you must answer her riddles before you can reach out to the woman who birthed you.

1. If a daughter stops looking for her mother’s approval does it matter if it was never there?
2. If a mother disowns her own mother and a daughter then disowns her is this a grudge or a genetic trait?
3. If a mother hears her daughter being beaten by an angry son in another room of the house, perhaps even the room right next to her own, and pretends she does not-is she still a mother?

3a. If this angry son moves 6 states away and never speaks to the mother again

is that some sick and righteous karma or an inheritance?

3b. If the beaten daughter waits 15 years to ask for an apology

and still does not receive one

and instead receives fault

and only then begins to pull away

is she holding a grudge?

or is the grudge holding her

like her mother should have?

4. If a daughter forgives her mother again  

will it hurt more or less when the mother is careless with her again?

10 & 2/3rd’

Unknown Driftwood with a Mermaid Hair Core

Driftwood enters the ocean as one thing,

a tree or part of a tree swept into the water during a storm,

part of a beachfront house dismantled by natural disaster,

a slave ship tide-wrecked against the jagged rocks by an angry ocean,

and comes out another,

its sins not washed from it but ground in and belonging wholly to it now.

What could hold my magic better than a thing rough born

and smoothed by the ocean’s salt thick mother tongue

baptized in coarseness

Am I not just an ocean too?

water phoenix

full of heavy magic

ship swallower on my worst days

gentle rocking sun catcher on my best

temper like an undertow

Do you hear the waves in me?

Do you see how I push and pull with the moon?

Aren’t I feared for the size of me? Aren’t my depths unreachable?

Do I not also have some mystical siren song thrumming within?

Pulling you close?

Something like love

Something that might just hold you under

Until you cannot breathe

Safety Spells for Sea Monsters

Steal away to our altar  

our clubhouse, the ocean.

Drape the waves above our heads,

a blanket fort against land dwellers who name us monsters

water might be the only thing could ever hold us gentle,

my arms and yours are also water.

Banish the ones who scavenge for blood in this water

who search the sand for our teeth to lay at a hateful altar

who decry the water’s crash and churn but never praises its gentle

the ones who come only to poach treasure despite fearing the ocean

that made it. Who exploit the sea and tell all who will hear that it is full of monsters

and then set a reward for our heads.

Scatter the meddling fish nibbling our weary heads

we are as necessary to life as this water

we have heart caves sized for monsters

slow the riptides running thru them to quiet hymns , heart caves be the most sacred altar

we are not too much but rather so much, like our ocean

here we may float deservedly gentle

The bedside manner of the sea is gentle

we come to heal our busted knuckles and our rattled heads

in this infirmary named ocean

there’s nothing that can’t be fixed in water

in this ward named altar,

Here we can lay down all our power despite being monsters

There is loneliness in being monsters

the assumption that we are not gentle

our bond that we know better be an altar

keep water above our heads

not heads above water

Whisper my name and I will meet you in our ocean

Howl the blood scavenger’s names and I will weaponize our ocean

remind them they created us monsters

take from them any comfort, any prize they found in the water,

scrape from them anything they ever knew to be gentle

a parching curse laid upon their heads

until they build our humanity it’s proper altar

Steal away to our altar

where the light and water dances a crown around our holy heads

here, even the rigid wood of shipwrecks eventually goes gentle.

Rachel Wiley is a queer, biracial poet and performer from Columbus, Ohio where she somehow holds down a rather boring day job.  She is a feminist and a fat positive activist. Rachel is a fellow and faculty member of the Pink Door Writing Retreat held each year in Rochester, New York for women and nonbinary writers of color. She has toured nationally performing at slam venues, colleges, and festivals. Her work has appeared on Upworthy, The Huffington Post, The Militant Baker, Everyday Feminism and PBS News Hour. Her first poetry collection, Fat Girl Finishing School, was published in 2014 by Timber Mouse Publishing. Her second collection, Nothing is Okay, was published in March 2018 by Button Poetryand spent some time as Amazon’s #1 Gay & Lesbian Poetry Collection.

Arla: “(My) housemates’ and instructor’s IDGAF attitudes.” 

Cousins:

scratchy field wielding wet

heat — blank sky, brown faces snagged

near a thick gash in the dry

Earth: a creek, syrup of chemical

stench. it’s December, but swamp sweat

snakes, incremental, down walls

of the Manila hotel, curled eels

around us,       and here unchaperoned       in the open, tick of hours

toward their home, or something

like it — family found, my people, forgotten

stitches. inside, unseeing: empty

room for seven souls to eat and bathe

and sleep, perhaps. shushed. there’s more

behind a printed wall. what’s the opposite

of naked? cacophony of colors,

stuffedspaceforfourbabes,andtoys(your)toyscorralled

everywhere — your younger self, beloved,

evidence of your spoil. nobreathing. have you ever

seen a graveyard

of your childhood?

Familial:

whisper twice, aviam ortum, in the dark, prayer

for the absent conversations shushed

out by disease and time and unchaperoned

guilt. dear grandmother, there’s a fissure

lying before us, starlit canyon of trembling

syllables unspoken. can you hear me breathing?

praise the Gods for bonds created, breathing

jagged for this spell — localibus, ama: prayer

for the almost souls who climbed, trembling

from this life before it could begin. shushed,

they leave us grasping blankly at the fissure

that remains, precious chasm still, unchaperoned.

inhale until your lungs demand unchaperoned

air, and hold this promise, barely breathing:

joyous memories do reside beneath the fissure

of forgotten family. we shout this prayer —

i await a patron, dun stallion protector, shushed

by the quiet solitude of secrets, trembling.

ask the ancestors for help to tie the trembling

fathers and their children together, unchaperoned

in the wake of their wrongdoing. here, shushed

we’ll stay and curse their steady breathing,

ignorance of the holy gift of bonds. prayer

murmured softly: percuro, heal the fissure.

drink shallow plaintive sips to mend the fissure

of split motherhood: she held you trembling,

crying and in love, lonely answer to her prayer,

decade in the making; she stayed unchaperoned

and still, for hours just to watch you breathing —

between the swigs, repeat, patawarin ko. shushed.

yield to the planetary motions that bring us, shushed,

to the brink of comprehension that a fissure

interrupted does more good than borrowed breathing.

we’ll move toward a tower, cracked and trembling

to hear these gasps: kata-la-vaino, an unchaperoned

request for understanding, a loaded, hopeful prayer.

now we rest. shushed gratitude and trembling

knowledge of our fissures wake us, unchaperoned

to the breathing loves that link us in this tender prayer.

Arla Shephard Bull writes creative nonfiction and poetry in the Pacific Northwest, while also working as a freelance reporter. Her creative nonfiction essays have appeared in Reservoir Journal and Maganda Magazine. She is a fellow of the VONA/Voices writer’s workshop for writers of color and is a University of Washington graduate. When not writing, she spends time eating with her husband, playing with her Dachshund Scottish terrier puppy and daydreaming of her next adventure.

LaShawn: “Everyone expects bad from us so when we do something good it puts people on edge…makes them question their morals and prejudice. You can drive someone mad without doing anything wrong – make them more susceptible to manipulation”

Janelle Monae Writes Shuri a Love Letter

Oh Black queen,

Of technological birth

You give me all the magic

Your country has lost

Call me foreigner

As I drink in the nectar

Of your pristine sweat

Oh sweet birthplace

Of chocolate

Divine queen of progress

Progressively come up on me

You Wakandan warrior

Give me all the salvation I need

Vibrate my soul

And make me something mythical

You be mythical

Black girl

Urban legend

Yo curves be enlightenment

I keep catching myself in

Natural roots a tangled mess

Of freedom

Black woman

You be intellect

Every woman done basked in

Done taken from

Done made a home in

Mouth snap

With clever, academic preciseness

That can only come from

A creator

Baby yous a creator

You built a whole country on your brain

Litly rose up a race

Melanized a “colonizer”  

You innovator

You did more than make a hero

You were one

You creatively saved the Wakandian race

With class

That demanded envy

And girl am I envious

Of anyone who gets to know you

An Unhealthy Bond

I never give them any clothes

I notice this

Always ask for more than I give

Realize this is a choice

I’m not comfortable saying no to

Maybe I just don’t know how to refuse myself things

It’s so easy to take for granted

Those who don’t fight back

And I like knowing I have control over you

Don’t let me have control over you, little elf

I will not loosen my hold

I will only love you when it’s convenient to me

And you will call it beautiful

Say I am your Master

As I make you need me

Want me

You will love me more than you care for yourself

Will crucio yo vitality

Around my finger

Avada kedavra your life away

You will have me imperio

Any thought of this

Of me being wrong

Out of your mind

Without a second thought

You will think I am everything

Even though every part of you

Tells you I’m not

And I won’t correct you

I won’t feel like it’s my place

I won’t let you go, little elf

Daitya

I come from the pyramids of Egypt

Grow in the Congo

Where the heat kills

Faster than my black petals

People call me beautiful

Tempted by my darkness

They whisper sweet nothings

Just to have a taste of me

Stare at my white stalk in longing

For what could be

If they just had one touch

No one ever likes the feel of me

Inside them

Say I wasn’t worth dying for

Blame me for their temptation

As they connect with the wet, hard earth

They call me Daitya

Say I laugh as the breath leaves their body

Sway a forbidden dance as their body hits the floor

I hear them say I smell of a safety

A scent of  lilac and home

That gyrates into their nostrils

Hooking them on my sensual beat

Moving them to lay my body to rest

Inside their mouth

Holding their vigor

Inside me

For the first time

Absorbing all the life

LaShawn Smith-Wright is  a college freshman originally from Detroit, MI. she loves spending time around other poets ready to develop their craft and share their story which isn’t an available experience at her college. Regardless of this she still loves poetry and writes daily. All in all I am someone who loves telling my story in everything I do

Scribe: “My favourite thing about being a Slytherin is that excellence is a standard held by your people. The same people you have to hold you down, make sure you’re elevating. It’s no trash standards accepted among Slytherins & I’m a sharper competitor because of it.”

The College Dropout

They could not fathom how
their boy with a polished bayonet brain
made his mind seem forsaken parchment
Intelligence and capability incompatible here

Their boy with a polished bayonet brain
“We expect better from your effort”
Intelligence and capability incompatible here
“Where are your grades buried?”

“We expect better from your efforts”
“My passion is unfanned forge flame”
“Where are your grades buried?”
“You can’t see the progress I’ve made?”

“My passion is unfanned forge flame”
Cold blooded spark chained in Dragon Harness
“You can’t see the progress I’ve made?”
Strict tongues restricting unharnessed skill

Cold blooded spark chained in Dragon Harness
Heat honed between chattering teeth
Strict tongues restricting unharnessed skill
What forbidden nectar drips from lips and quill?

Heat honed between chattering teeth
Invisible ink steeped across imaginations
What forbidden nectar drips from lips and quill?
His words technicolor provision from grey matter

Invisible ink steeped across imaginations
made his mind seem forsaken parchment
His words technicolor provision from grey matter
They could not fathom how

Scribe’s Wand

My wand is God and Devil wood,

Kumaka tree wrapped around a Horned Serpant’s shaved horn

Black Black magic         fueled by ancestral soil soil soil soil soil    and blood

Horned core to ground me here

North America is my home

Away from my home

Away from my home

But it is what I know best

My wand chose me to to to to to  connect the three

My ancestors connecting connecting connecting connecting to my forefathers

Connecting Connecting Conn     Connecting to me

We became parts of song spell unending

Conductor Conductor     Conductor

Orchestrating change change change  silently

Until the moment we need speak out

My wand felt me staring my oppressor in the eye

Canines bared bared bared smile deceitful disguise

It felt the tide of magic in me

A free man in chains

Waiting for the opportunity

To flee bloody into the night

My wand found me soaked in twilight

Body cauldron, blood blood        blood boiling

The brightest parts of of of         my nature

Casting casting casting              shadows

To balance cosmic scales

Inheriting their weight

Creation and chaos are one face

We are pen and chisel

Dagger and pistol

Our magic is instrument

Violent vessel

Hard in soft soft soft soft soft soft soft soft     center

A low resonating note

Full of dangerous conviction

And critical vision

Willing to turn

Even on

Myself

Bonds

It is so much older than I.

It’s kind born in the era of Olympus

Placed in lake Lerna for Hercules to face

This descendant was born in a time of Colosseum grunge,

Gladiator glory

And civilian sacrifice

It’s immortality based around (but not born from) Gospel truth

It’s other heads around White lies

That multiply when challenged

Dearest beast, it is time to die

When I was dunked in the tank

Capsized into belief,

A piece of me flickered out

In the Lerna’s murky water

The fire in me, more an ember

The Blackness of my coals

Unimportant, unwanted

In this white church

I came to question your honesty

See your many heads as duplicitous

Instead of resourceful

My faith confounded, corroding my solid rock

Knowing nothing    suffering wholly I cursed Heaven

Demanding answers to my trials

My first trial my health

Your wicked ways my second

I block out the lie that told me Jesus was white

Two more take its place.

I ask my white siblings about police brutality.

They silently condemn me  me me me my face

I retreat a fair distance

Leave Evangelicals

Under the rain of fiery arrows

The light finally brings you out in earnest

A Hydra

Even the blood of Christ, venom in you

I see your history in your scales

Slavery and death

Shame and restriction

The Vatican wrapping a healing factor

Inside white supremacist power

There is no good news in white Gospel

Your final bite

An attempt to subdue me with theology

Forgetting Heaven is a kingdom of hearts

I remind you

God and Love are the only masters I submit to

And you know neither.

I mark your immortal head

Leave it under a rock

To remind those who come across it

That even if I could not finish the job

This church is dead to me.

A lifetime immersed in the performing arts has made Joshua “Scribe” Watkis entirely devoted to the gift of storytelling. Through Spoken Word Poetry and Hip-Hop, he has taken thousands into his world to experience it as he does. The Toronto born poet has performed on stages across Canada, appeared on CBC and has opened for the legendary Hip-Hop band ‘The Roots’ with ‘The Uncharted’ collective. As a competitor he has attended the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word in 2014, 2015 and 2017, never having missed a finals stage. Scribe, owner and facilitator of Word is Bond, is an Arts Educator and event organizer as well, on the Board of Directors for BAM! Youth Slam and a curator for the Roots Lounge Open Mic & Poetry Slam. His goal is not only to bring his audiences through his story, but to gift them with the courage to do what he calls the “bravest act on Earth.”. To share their own stories, in their words, out loud….

AKA

Scarborough born & raised. West end res. Spoken Word Storyteller who will run up if you call him a slam poet. Pac’s son, God’s child, Cass’ husband soontime. All for excellence.