A POC Magazine
Listen to “Sway” Listen to “Ode to My Pussy” I Am (after Monica Hand) I am A. what you say I am or what I answer to. some of us carry our prison with us wherever we go. B. cell memory. same family. different colors. C. water mixed with blood; call us mud babies; a …
Tumblr And today born; bare untroubled few seconds, unconventional, unembarrassed angst is best friend after. Society – only hidden body beautiful. Only man; pleasure his stop being uncovered body acceptable dignifying redemption (how?) For the sake of self. This . is. NOT. How you revolution. Instead become whore; …
Erika “Extra Bread” Brown. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. She has been gracing stages stages since 2005. After taking a break on the rap scene in 2014 she is returning with a powerful message through her music. Finding her way back in the scene not just defined as a rapper but as an artist. Creative In many more aspects than just music. As a early childhood educator she fines it in her blood to teach children through music and art.
I Be Too Busy to Love Anything But a Drink I’m used both the bottom of a bottle I drank alone and body of someone I kinda loved. what makes a wine bottle a body. is what spills on the floor and onto my hands I lick it up clean, nurse …
Cooking Day My momma cleans our history in a bowl of water; calls them chitlins Mumu spread wide like legs, an emblem of her childhood, this trance that transports her back to fridges being the cool depths of lake wata, of pickin cotton that bites ya hands, I watch the blood Pool …
does one heal from domestic violence /
is it a trauma / much like losing the mother?
did your mother succumb to the abuse/ a blunt object / specifically : a thick glass bottle /
to the head / an early Tuesday morning / after an argument / when she finally had enough / broke
it off / said the relationship no longer served her / an affirmation she had practiced –
or was that you / also at the death / of an exhausting love /
each heavy clash / your lover blows / against your skull /
you scream /
smell your mother / being buried
Simone Savannah is the author of Like Kansas (Big Lucks). She is a 2017 finalist for the Rita Dove Award in Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming GlitterMob, The Fem, Powder Keg, The Continental Review, and The Pierian. She holds a Phd in Creative Writing from the University of Kansas. She is from Columbus, Ohio.
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My inspirations are drawn from a place of worry. I reflect my troubles on a canvas as bright colors. I believe I’m changing the negative moods into positives perspectives with colors.
At a Feminist Craft Talk a tall white man sat in the chair in front of me and began scooting back, a just little scoot, enough so that his knees didn’t touch the seat in front of him, exploring. Then it grew larger, bolder. he began to colonize– his chair less than an inch …
Every day I joined single file lines.
One for breakfast.
Lunch.
Dinner.
One for school.
One for rec.
One for meds three times daily.
One for group.
One for meetings that parents never showed up to.
One to the movie room to trick you into thinking you were a normal teen that had sleepovers and ate junk food and watched cheesy films with her best girlfriends.
One back to our rooms because it was lights out and we had a long day of lines ahead.
Little did I know that I was being groomed.
My ability to wait is nearly immaculate.
The urge to ask for permission is embedded.
May I?
Use the bathroom.
Make a call.
Have a snack.
Leave my room.
Be a person.
Yes. But first?
Get in line.
29 year old woman from the obscure hoods of Atlantic City, NJ. An involuntary nomad with no sense of direction and a heart of tarnished silver. (Gold is overrated) First time mother to a one year old and just navigating life as a disabled black woman with a pen.
Our mothers never let us run the streets barefoot,
hypodermic needles discarded like bubblegum wrappers,
so we laced our sneaks up tight, ran into a time
when at last the streets in the neighborhood
are newly paved.
Christine Taylor, a multiracial English teacher and librarian, resides in her hometown Plainfield, New Jersey. She serves as a reader and contributing editor at OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters. Her work appears in Modern Haiku, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Menacing Hedge, and The Paterson Literary Review among others. She can be found at www.christinetayloronline.com