June 1985

behind you

there’s a tree

what is it

cedar?

behind you

stands a tree

it’s brown

like you.

and maybe

here

your spine

is not yet crooked

not yet weighed down

by backpacks full

of printed afterlives

so stand here

in the dignity

of tall

in the sureness of brown

the shade

trust me

there will be years

enough

to twist and curve

stand here

where you already

know your roots

stand here

where you already

feel your reach

stand here

and just remember

who you are

i’m right behind you

And….my inner-child homeschooling continues. Summer session. I am working with a series of portraits my mother Pauline McKenzie made of me in relationship to the natural world. The purpose of this time travel is reclamation and collaboration with what my mother saw. What is the poetic form here? Maybe lullaby as time travel technology. What I may have known, what I need to know now. I am traveling back before particular learnings. This particular poem is in honor of my spine. How was my spine related to this tree? What are the forms of support I forgot I had. What is the persistent love still there behind me? And this is for you. Your dignity. Deep underground and reaching sky.

The printer didn't work.

Valerie J. Boyd was getting ready to give her first public talk on Wrapped in Rainbows, her brand-new biography of the great Zora Neale Hurston at Hurston's Alma Mater, Barnard College in the City of New York. This was a major event coordinated by Monica Miller celebrating the 75th anniversary of Hurston at Barnard. Valerie's shero Alice Walker was the keynote speaker at this homecoming festival to Hurston's brilliance. So Valerie had carefully typed out the key insights about Hurston's life she wanted to share with the hundreds of people who had gathered for the event.

And the stupid printer wouldn't work.

And so, she had no choice. She took a deep breath and spoke directly from her heart. She spoke about how she felt Zora Neale Hurston's ancestral collaboration over the years that she researched and wrote Wrapped in Rainbows. She talked about how there are some things you can't explain away with the word "coincidence." She talked about love, how she and Zora Neale Hurston had actually cultivated a loving relationship across the barrier of death and generations. How she felt chosen. How sometimes you just have to listen and surrender. Later she would wonder if Zora even played a role in blocking the inner workings of the printer that day. On the stage in Barnard Hall, a building where Zora herself once sat listening as a student, Valerie J. Boyd let go and spoke from her heart.

Directly into mine.

I had never heard anyone speak in mixed company about ghosts. I was looking at a black women speaking with complete conviction, passion and rigor about what I felt but didn't have words for yet: ancestral assignment.

It wasn't until I was at Emory, stewarding the archival papers of my dear mentor Cheryll Greene and saw Valerie in the temporary reading room researchers had to use while the Manuscript and Rare Book Library got renovated that I was able to say thank you. Of course I was too nervous to interrupt her so it took days. She was reading and re-reading Alice Walker's journals working on the forthcoming Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker. When I finally introduced myself she asked how long I would be in Atlanta and if we could go to lunch. Her whole manner taught me that I should never have been nervous. So many can testify to her generous and eager mentorship as one of her favorite forms of creative practice, especially the graduates of the program in Narrative Nonfiction Valerie created at UGA.

And so of course I said yes to every opportunity to collaborate including that forthcoming collection of essays and the recent issue of Bitter Southerner. And of course I reached out to her for advice when I was writing the book proposal for my very first biography, the forthcoming Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. At the beginning of the pandemic we talked for hours over zoom and telephone. She offered advice on practical narrative concerns (like chronology and differentiation) but most of all she encouraged me over and over again to trust myself. "Because Audre trusts you," she insisted.

I have so many more questions Valerie. I was supposed to send you this most recent draft. I was looking forward to the day I could put the hardcover book in your hands and hug you and thank you again. You didn't see what I wrote about you in the acknowledgements. I love you so much. And I know that you know. I appreciate you letting me gush out my gratitude every time we spoke. And I hear you even now. You are telling me to hang the art on my walls. You are telling me to use a more active verb. I hear you still saying the first thing I ever heard you say. Death is no barrier to guidance and love. And still. Valerie. And still.

I love you in the place of surrender. I love you in the place we can't describe. I love you in the place where machines break and ink fails and we have no choice but to trust our hearts.

Later today our first retreat at the new Mobile Homecoming Retreat Center also known as Soul Sanctuary, begins! A dozen Black Feminist Breathing participants from around the United States will be breathing, chanting, meditating and writing together on this sacred land, cherished hunting grounds of the Occoneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, colonized and desecrated by the Cameron empire as part of one of the largest plantations in the US history of slavery and now reclaimed for and by the spiritual elevation of BIPOC and especially QTPOC people! This day has been more than a decade coming in the history of the Mobile Homecoming project and centuries in the making in the dreams of the old ones, the first loving stewards of this land.

Yesterday as I was walking the land in between one-on-one sessions with retreat participants I took a picture of this one rose among many thorns in the medicine garden next to the main building of the retreat center. As I continued to walk I noticed that sprouting up out of the land, which still holds the shape of old cashcrop fields, rows of rape, ridged evidence of forced labor, there are green thorny shoots everywhere. This land, survivor of generations of extraction, holder of the blood sweat and pain of enslaved ancestors, record of the transformation of sacred tobacco from medicine into a vessel for capitalist poison, is healing. And at this stage of the healing, there are thorns.

Me too. I said aloud.

I have so much love and respect for this land. I feel loved by it already. My breathing has shifted thanks to the trees and vines and wild muscadines and blackberries that grow here. And the strong green, the sturdy stalks, the armored thorns growing up here are so justified. After such a long time of violent cultivation the stregnth of these thick thorny shoots says, never again. Never again.

Me too.

I stood still and thought about the ridges and ruts in my life, my most fertile soil still shaped by the harms I have survived. Evidence of what has happened here, in the brown place without my consent over time. Evidence of the violence of capitalism that cuts and ties back and burns away my wildness with a million daily acts of surrender. I am growing something different, this retreat center is the most tangible evidence of that, but yes. My new green shoots have thorns. I have made it hard for you to touch me. I have razor clarified the terms of my never again.

The gift this sacred land offered me yesterday is compassion for how I’m growing. How I’m prickly even though I long for collaboration. How my areas of newest growth protect themselves instinctively. And if amidst all of these thorns I can offer you even one flower, one place of unapologetic blooming, one place where I am so alive that you can smell it, one place where love unfolds me layer by layer then this is that place. I love you. I love your thorns. I love your red. I love your soft.

Love,

Lex (in bloom)

P.S. If you want to support or sustain the Mobile Homecoming Project as we take this big leap you can donate here: https://www.mobilehomecoming.org/donate

Last night we gathered to celebrate Ntozake Shange’s birthday by writing together for an hour. We time travelled back to childhood streets, we redefined the necessary, we celebrated collard greens, we mourned, we re-evaluated. We became witnesses for each other and for ourselves. Ntozake Shange’s bravery held us and made us brave. Below is the poem we wrote together as a group at the end of the workshop. Sign up for Sculpted Impulse our Ntozake Shange Immersion which goes live today. You can engage the immersion at any time.

i remember         i was there

after Ntozake Shange’s “i. mood indigo”

(created at our writing hour in honor of Ntozake Shange’s birthday)

            9 deep breaths are a portal

i remember                 i was there

so many trees: oak, maple, sycamore, beech, birch, pine.

i remember                 i was there

            The Red Apple on Jackson

i remember                 i was there

            the pots were well seasoned

i remember                 i was there

            the cobbler from the peaches from the tree out front were love

i remember                 i was there

            I saw you in my dreams

i remember                 i was there

            Flagged by walking with my sister..

i remember                 i was there

            Mold bloomed along the edge of the banana bread,

              sweetness draws out all kinds of growth

i remember                 i was there

            The name emerged as breath

i remember                 i was there

traveling the waters with mama, the ancestors a whisper

i remember                 i was there

            that street felt like home, even if it wasn’t

i remember                 i was there

            My dead sister time traveled with me

i remember                 i was there

            I dreamt, I rooted, in earth and in the air

i remember                 i was there

            Aunt Lorry’s magic pot had enough for the whole block

i remember                 i was there

            healing my inner child is possible

i remember                 i was there

            familia as the capital of a country and dreaming forward

i remember                 i was there

            The street below this street, tar and rocks turned to dust

i remember                 i was there

            I belonged like the mango trees in the yard, abundant in fruit

i remember                 i was there

            Collards, collards, collards!

i remember                 i was there

            a soft suture for open wounds

i remember                 i was there

            Beauty still blossoms in darkness

i remember                 i was there

            My mama nem stood gentrification in the eyes and never blinked

i remember                 i was there

the man feeding long sugar cane stalks into a cold greedy machine to extract its juices     and mmm gimme some

i remember                 i was there

            East 44th Street to Tallwood Lane Tall would tell tales pain bare Mama K

i remember                 i was there

            We lived on Cutler Road and the little church did too

i remember                 i was there

It was a quaint street with lots of sad houses and even sadder people, who somehow took all that sad and made love; a love that still lingers on longing fingertips and weepy eyes 20 years later

i remember                 i was there

            The sky, the sun, the mountains

i remember                 i was there

            the bravery of going back, love to the time travellers

i remember                 i was there

            A softness that remained inspired.

i remember                 i was there

            jet magazines and World Book encyclopedias

i remember                 i was there

            unconditional love of the grandmother, delight at my mere presence

i remember                 i was there

            The house of Black feminist abundance

i remember                 i was there

What is flowing through you? Love and gratitude is flowing through me. Fittingly, last month when we kicked off Wrapped in Ocean: Undrowned in Practice with an oceanic writing and breathing workshop called “The Scale of Breathing,” LOVE and GRATITUDE were the words that showed up the most times in in the chat (followed closely by SPIRIT.) During the workshop more than 60 people participated live in a series of reflective writing and breathing activities over the course of two hours, and more than a hundred people have engaged the recording since. It never stops amazing me when people show up for their own transformation and the possibility of experiencing love, especially with strangers, especially across space and time, especially at the invitation of a weird poet obsessed with marine mammals. But it happened!

The participants in this workshop were brave about their empathy, accountable to to their ancestors and communities, creative in their experiments in healing. And everyone was brilliant, literally luminescent with love through the screen. At one point I thought I was going to dissolve into a puff of glitter. We were honest about our sputtering awkwardness in the face of change, and learned from the baby and mother weddell seal about how to breathe into and through it all. In the end, we became poets again. And this is the group poem we created to honor what was flowing through us in that moment. We made it as our portal back to that time of togetherness and we offer it to you so you can join us in possibility of freer breath.

Through Me

a poem on the scale of breathing by the participants in the first ever Undrowned writing workshop

(to be read aloud if possible)

a future is flowing through me

a life-tide is flowing through me

those who have met in the water undrowned are flowing through me

ripples ripples ripples

ripples are flowing through me

genesis is ongoing and it is flowing through me

abundance is flowing through me

the infinite love of the universe is flowing through me

love is flowing through me

ancestral affirmation is flowing through me

love is flowing through me

village is flowing through me

love is flowing through me

the glow of each other’s love is flowing through me

gratitude is flowing through me

all the places I have ever been are flowing through me

gratitude is flowing through me

softness is flowing through me

gratitude is flowing through me

grounded divinity is flowing through me

gratitude is flowing through me

the breaths we take together are flowing through me

gratitude is flowing through me

silky waters full of nourishment are flowing through me

gratitude is flowing through me

deep gratitude for the core of my belly is flowing through me

gratitude for the unknown and the unlearning is flowing through me

wind is flowing through me

oxygen is flowing through me

all of you are flowing through me

us together is flowing through me

connection is flowing through me

glowing thick connection is flowing through me

luz is flowing through me

the stars are flowing through me

amber is flowing through me

glory is flowing through me

resonant song is flowing through me

the dance of the unknown is flowing through me

wonder is flowing through me

tenderness is flowing through me

spirit is flowing through me

movement is flowing through me

lands and seas are flowing through me

exhaustion is flowing through me

cariño is flowing through me

surrender is flowing through me

release is flowing through me

relief is flowing through me

death is flowing through me opening my heart and vision

my ancestors are flowing through me

generations to come are flowing through me

life is flowing through me

clarity is flowing through me

grace is flowing through me

ease is flowing through me

abundant trust in myself is flowing through me

grace is flowing through me

hope and stardust is flowing through me

laughter and trouble-making is flowing through me

joy is flowing through me

hope is flowing through me

quiet power in community with bits of glitter are flowing through me

hope is flowing through me

wow is flowing through me

rusty hard rain is flowing through me

unafraid song is flowing through me

bravery is flowing through me

trust is flowing through me

faith is flowing through me

light is flowing through me

truth is flowing through me

possibility is flowing through me

movement is flowing through me

magic is flowing through me

iridescent light and sound are flowing through me

coolness and clarity are flowing through me

expansion and co-creation are flowing through me

compassion for the bumps and bruises is flowing through me

longing for sea tendrils reaching the moonlight is flowing through me

trust is flowing through me

manifestation is flowing through me

balance is flowing through me

poetry is flowing through me

spirit is flowing through me

Sign up is still open for Wrapped in Ocean: Undrowned in Practice a series of activities inspired by Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals which includes a module based on this workshop. If you only want to participate in the workshop retroactively you can do that here.

tête-à-tête

of teeth and foreheads

angles and sweaters

you and me

you and me

patterned and big-eyed

teeth and foreheads

smiles and hands

big eyed and patterned

looking forward

smiles and hands

tilting side

looking forward

held and holding

tilting side

to melded minds

held and holding

angel warmth

mind of god

you and me

Sharon Bridgforth has a blessing card that reads (among other beautiful words) “you are your father’s nextnow.” This birthday season and father’s day which conveniently come right on each other’s heels I have been wrestling with that. What does it mean for me to be my father’s “nextnow”? What does it mean to be present with him and not anxiously wondering what would make him proud, or worse what would prove to other people that I am a good enough daughter to him. All of those things get blurred together for me, especially around this time. For a long time I have been deep in the father/daughter mind meld in this picture. My father and I are both Geminis. Twins of spirit born on consecutive days. As my father studied his astrology he taught me mine. As a child I wanted to be a lawyer like him, until he quit and decided he wanted to be a poet like me. What have I been doing this whole time? Have I been leading or following?

Just this week I noticed something very obvious. My father’s poetry writing practice in his later work was prompted by photographs. Earlier in his work he wrote inspired by individuals or groups of people conceptually, but in the last decade or so of his life he would wrote poems in conversation with one particular picture at a time. Of course that’s what I’m doing now, but as usual it takes me a while to find and acknowledge when what seems like my individual good idea is already as it has ever been collective, old, given. Maybe being present to my ongoing collaboration with my father is hard because it means being present to how exactly I miss him right now today. What I wish I could say to him right now this particular morning. No. I haven’t deleted his number out of my phone. Yes. The cellular provider reclaimed and repurposed the phone number years ago.

What I also know (and gratitude to Laura Mvula’s new song “what matters”) is that when I am present in this moment, my father is here with me, as me. I am here as more than me. More than us. Sometimes that scares me even more. But the only Juneteenth Solstice Father’s Day present worth giving or having is the present itself. This moment. My gift to my father also known as the whole universe is to be here. Forever. For us.

Join us for our Queer Black Feminist Father’s Day Sunday Service tomorrow (Sunday June 20, 2021) at 11 am Eastern at mobilehomecoming.org/live

P.S. What is your child helping you learn ? Inner Child Summer School is in session! Sign up here.

P.P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. Videos, poem prompts, meditations and more are here for you in the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

Two weeks ago we gathered on what the United States calls “memorial day” to remember our child selves, to love up on our vulnerable genius and to be curious together about what our youngest wisest selves are teaching and asking of us right now. More than 100 people participated in the “I Love Your Face” writing workshop to kick off Inner Child Summer School and for me it was a dream come true. We looked in the mirror, we looked at pictures of ourselves from childhood, we created a loving reflective space and a technology called reparative return to love ourselves in ways we have always wanted to be loved but just now became ready to offer ourselves and each other. I am still radiating with gratitude for the bravery, generosity and brilliance of everyone who participated. At the end of our time together we created a group poem to affirm the world our child selves are calling into being through our lives today. We invite you into that world and encourage you to read this poem aloud if you can!

P.S. You can still sign up for Inner Child Summer School right here and get the full recording of the workshop and many more activities and guided prompts from me.

Calling

By the participants in the “I Love Your Face” Writing Workshop for your Youngest Wisest Self

“the world you called by being you”

         -from love poem to snow angel space cadet by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

we are calling a world of love

we are calling a word of warm violet love

we are calling a world of soft-threaded blankets

we are calling a world of joy

we are calling a world of sun-soaked joy
we are calling a world of genderqueer joy

we are calling a world of light

we are calling a world of bright hearts
we are calling a world of unabashed enthusiasm

we are calling a world of unafraid ease
we are calling a world of arms flung wide
we are calling a world of loving embrace

we are calling a world of time travel

we are calling a world of play

we are calling a world of souls in free flight

we are calling a world of healing

we are calling a world of playful healing

we are calling a world of brave healing

we are calling a world of tiny dimple cheeks

we are calling a world of unlimited cuddles

we are calling a world of fierce determined toddlers

we are calling a world of revolutionary mothering

we are calling a world of transformation

we are calling a world of transformation

we are calling a world of refusal

we are calling a world of seeking to know

we are calling a world of repair

we are calling a world of seeing

we are calling a world of seeing ourselves without judgment

we are calling a world of rhymzomatic connection

we are calling a world of free and happy

we are calling a world of feet, bared

we are calling a world of bare soles

we are calling a world of wildness

we are calling a world of beauty

we are calling a world of green

we are calling a world of rest

we are calling a world of warm gold days

we are calling a world of seasons and sunrises

we are calling a world of turquoise and indigo

we are calling a world of interconnections

we are calling a world of interdependence

we are calling a world of siblinghood

we are calling a world of compassion

we are calling a world of understanding

we are calling a world of loving our “flaws”

we are calling a world of learning from the small creatures

we are calling a world of escapes from the mundane

we are calling a world of holding ourselves in our most vulnerable tenderness

we are calling a world of remembering the way home

we are calling a world of abundant love for all of us and all parts of us

we are calling a love that spills over into the space around

we are calling a world of trusting our intuition and the love of the universe

we are calling a world of complex beauty

we are calling a world of letting folk simply to be whatever however that be shows up

we are calling a world of grieving ecstatically and making space for our erotic power

we are calling a world of courageous, vulnerable, bare-faced, open hearts

we are calling a world of hands in the dirt, days stamped with love

we are calling a world of squirrel friends

we are calling a world of intuitive loving

we are calling a world of goofy, almost nonsensical love

we are calling a world of unabashed, unashamed joy,

so deep the light shines from our bones

and the trees inhale our exhaled relief

stand

feet in the water

at the edge of the land

that made us

sand

takes our skin

like tithe to burnish

all the salt within

thin

brown stance

the sun

took her chance

to love us

Here we stand at the edge of the world. Daddy almost one foot out the sea. Daughter delighted by all the forms of sunlight. All the love that shines on her from all directions. Is she taking it for granted? Wasn’t it actually already granted, given, always hers? When did she learn that she had to earn the light and salt that keeps her here? Today would be my father’s 67th birthday. And sometimes I still blame myself. I didn’t keep him here. I wrote poems for him every day after his diagnosis. They must not have been worth their salt in time. The experts say this eclipse energy is an opportunity to go within. To rest our minds. All day yesterday I had a restless mind. Have you ever felt that? Desperate to avoid your grief through busyness but too clouded with grief to think or act clearly at all? That was me yesterday. Wishing there was something I could do and unequipped to actually do anything well. On The End of the World podcast Adrienne Maree Brown said that maybe spirit-centered world everything would shut down during eclipses. And I’m doing my best. Tomorrow is my birthday. So today I am going to the beach (not the beach in the picture) where I won’t have anything I need to work. Sometimes that’s the only way I can turn it off. Turns out I will be staying in the same place I stayed one birthday years about 10 years ago during my Saturn’s Return. I remember calling my dad and having a long conversation, drawing on his study of astrology. This is when he was still walking miles everyday. Was he walking while we were talking? He told me I was born during his Saturn Return. And just like that I turned his life around. And in his second Saturn’s Return he was satisfied with his life. He said he felt like he did it. He got us kids to a place where we sure of who we were, where we knew what we needed to do to live what he called “inspired and inspiring lives.” He felt like there wasn’t anything else he wanted to accomplish. I felt happy for him and sad at the same time. “What will keep him here?” I wondered silently. And I couldn’t hear it that day, but now I know the small achieving voice within whispered, “you will keep him here by always doing something impressive, you will offer relentless success that he won’t want to miss it. So he will stay.”

My achieving voice is eloquent and wrong. Persuasive and so very lost. She can’t help it. She’s capitalism’s daughter. She offers me what she has, but it’s a lie. And now it’s a lie I can’t ignore because all the evidence is right in front of me. It didn’t work. Work will not keep anyone from dying. Including me.

Tomorrow is my birthday and I am not capitalism’s daughter. I am Clyde’s daughter, the place where sea meets land. The place where salt meets sun. I am the burning fact that this moment was given, and not earned. I am evidence that love lives. I am reborn because love learns.

P.S. What is your child helping you learn ? Inner Child Summer School is in session! Sign up here.

P.P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. Videos, poem prompts, meditations and more are here for you in the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

song into your collarbone

when you become wing

i will return

right here

to your shoulder

i will return

small as i am

to your shoulders

when you fly

small as i am

when you are infinite

when you fly

i will be here

when you are infinite

my open mouth

i will be here

to sing this song

my open mouth

right here

to sing this song

when you become

wing

My father’s favorite metaphor is the butterfly. All Spring he sends them as messengers to remind me: “The whole point is transformation.” I still rage against the way cancer transformed my fathers bones into dust. I still resist who I’m becoming, I cling to who I thought I was. This time of year, close to our birthdays I forget our birthdays are coming. I protect myself from the signs everywhere singing “REBIRTH in T-6 days.” But in this poem, this remembered song, that I sang in the first month of this life into the archive of my father’s shoulder comes back to me to take me into flight. One month old witness to so much transformation my lungs had learned how to breathe air, my eyes were taking in the light, held not in the orb of womb but in the hinges of adult arms, everything changed. Now I remember my capacity to change. My father who was one place is now everywhere. The universe is teaching me to fly.

P.S. What does your child self want you to remember? Inner Child Summer School is in session! Sign up here.

P.P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. Videos, poem prompts, meditations and more are here for you in the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

For Daddy

write my name in the snow

spell it all capital letters

so you can see it from heaven

shovel your love like a cloud

spell it all in capital letters

as if snow is forever

shovel your love like a cloud

as if love could be frozen

as if snow is forever

as if spelling is spelling

as if love could be frozen

and kept

as if spelling is spell

and my name is a prayer

kept in your heart

which is cold now

and my name is a prayer

so you can feel it from heaven

which is cold

like my name in the snow

One day my father shoveled my name into the snow in the front yard. Available to an aerial view, more like his view now in the way that I think of it. The way I think of it is that as an ancestor my father is still writing my name upon the world. And where will I see it? Will I see my name and its meaning (helper of humanity) in the trees, the masked faces of my community members, in possibilities growing up all around me? I am deepening my idea of heaven. Maybe heaven is the way we learn to know ourselves through the writing of our loved ones on the surface of the earth. Maybe heaven is a poem, a spell, a name, an infinite presence. I’m pretty sure my mom took this portrait of “me.” Not of my body, but of my name preserved for longer than the snow lasted. And one day my writing upon the face of this earth will only be known by those who see themselves in it, and remember. And maybe also in the earth herself, maybe also in the universe which can know and can feel this.

what’s the word

dappled

with light

touched by leaves

left by sun

to learn shadow

dappled with light

three generations

left by sons who learn what black means

and return

three generations

of faces dark and light

return

to the same brown the same land

the same face dark and light

refracted to

the same brown the same land

the same salt the same sand

refracted too

and touched by leaves

the same salt the same sand

and no words

One way to tell the story is that there was and will forever be so much unsaid between my father and his father. One way to tell the story is that there is no language for the matrix of expectation, identification, fear and admiration that flowed between them across lifetimes and oceans. One way to tell the story is immigrant striving, boarding school, debt, Caribbean masculinities all of which are other names for silence. Or maybe those are all ways to not tell the story.

There is another available story which is that my father became a poet to create the language he needed to be his father’s son. For my grandfather’s 80th birthday, my father who had never written a poem wrote a book length epic poem for his father. He wrote it because my grandfather loved poetry and memorized and recited his favorite poems at every opportunity. What happens in the book, “The Seven Seeds,”? A an unnamed adult “son” asks an unnamed “old man” a question he has never found a way to ask. The son admits that despite prestigious educations and career success he and his siblings “are not at peace.” He asks “Please Father, tell us of a better way to live.” The father does. But then he also can’t. After outlining the seeds of a meaningful life, faith, determination, work, sacrifice, service and courage, he admits that there is one seed, the most important seed that he is actually still struggling with: LOVE.

My father said the poem rushed out of him all at once in one day turned night turned early morning of writing. After that he never stopped writing poetry. What my father learned was that poems make the impossible possible. There was no way my father outside of the book would have admitted to his father that his own first -generation Black immigrant measures of success left him feeling empty, that he was not at peace. There was no way that my grandfather outside of the book would have admitted that he longed to learn to love and be loved unconditionally. But in the book, it all happened. My grandfather loved his birthday gift. What he said to my father was “So you really were listening all this time.” What he did was brag to everyone that his son had written a book about him. My father published it so my grandfather could give copies to everyone who passed his porch.

In the picture I am doing what I do or crave to do while I am writing: snack on salt. It is no surprise that I come to this daily writing looking for a miracle. A way to say to my father what I never got to say, to hear what he never got to say. “The Seven Seeds” didn’t vanquish the patterns of silence in our family which are still mediated by capitalism, oceans, fear, expectation, longing and loss. The pattern of the sun and leaves writes on our faces and in this photograph my mother works with light shadow and wind to make us visible to ourselves and as each other. I am everyone in the picture now. I am the one left alive to look. I am the one left alive to speak. I am the one left to write a poem with enough light and enough shadow to hold all that we didn’t learn to say.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. Videos, poem prompts, meditations and more are here for you in the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive. Click the link to learn more.

 look

silent and open

as you can be open

you see i have

silent and open

faced the camera

you see i have

one hand behind my back

faced the camera

let it take

one hand behind my back

in barter

let it take

what it takes

in barter

keep your soul

it takes what it takes

if you can be open

keep your soul

look

It’s one of my father’s poses. One hand behind his back. I have seen it even in pictures of him as a little boy. When I was a kid on the playground, we would put one hand behind our backs and cross our fingers which was some kind of childhood absolution shortcut. We used it when we needed to say something other than what was true, and yet also needed to bear invisible witness to another truth. When you put your hand behind your back your chest is more open. One side of my father is vulnerable and open. On the other side he holds me in one strong arm. Look at his hand. There is no way that he will drop me. You can see that I have never even considered the possibility that I might fall.

The blue mist in the photo is not part of my mother’s design of this portrait of us on the threshold, the floral walkway into what we called “the porch” which was really the main building of my grandparent’s hotel in Anguilla. The blue mist is an accident of my digitization process, that I have decided to keep. It helps me think about the context for my fathers advice through this long-distance poem. What do we barter? How do we keep our souls when the specter of blue waits over our shoulders? How do we look? How do we witness the recurring violence and horror against our lives, against Black children, and yet protect our openness? What are the boundaries, signals and prayers that allow us not to completely shut down?

I hold you in front of my heart. Not as a shield but as a reminder. Of why I must always protect my capacity to love. As Sharon Bridgforth says on the blessing card I have chosen randomly from the deck two days in a row: “Even when you can’t See it/ Reach for Love again and again and again./ Know that your Love/ is more powerful than your rage.” Watching Ma’Khia sweetly comb her hair on tiktok takes what it takes. Wouldn’t it be easier if I knew how not to love her? If I could somehow close my heart? The ease of capital, the way it flows depends on a state that knows how not to love anyone. It teaches itself how to not love anyone by specifically hating and repeatedly sacrificing Black people. That is the story of capitalism. The lie we live each day even though we know the truth. Capitalism the long story of unlearning love. It can only work if we too forget to love each other. And we will not.

Look. Sharon Bridgforth is right. I do not have to look far to find love. I do not have to learn an algorithm to love you. It is the most natural abundant thing here, my love for you. Look. I can love you any day. That is my strength. Look. I can even do it with one hand behind my back.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. Videos, poem prompts, meditations and more are here for you in the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive. Click the link to learn more.

my hand on your hand

elbow in your elbow

who is frame who is shape

other hand softens in a tentative fist

elbow in your elbow

i refuse to eat anything

but macaroni and cheese

bloom tiny fist

small soft black power

i eat only macaroni and cheese

grow strong in the reflux of the beast

small soft black power

you want to tell me

a story about free

i grow strong

in the reflux of the beast

not the belly but close

you would teach me the nuance of a fist

that can relax

and hold

not umbilically connected

my hand on your hand

relax and hold this

soon you will tell me the story

she was framed

in the belly

but the fist

persist

soon you will teach me her name

My father was born in the state of New Jersey. He also died in the state of New Jersey. My father disagreed with the state of New Jersey on most important things. The first and lasting disagreement he taught me was about our beloved Assata. My father taught me to love Assata. She was our superhero. The definition of true power. The person we learned to love who we had never met. The person who inspires us to meet the freest parts of our living. We love Assata as a way to love ourselves.

My father wasn’t a Black Panther or an activist when he taught me this. In fact, he was an ivy leage trained corporate lawyer and at the time of this photograph about to be the first Black vice president of the oldest and most conservative investment bank in the country. Banks were the strategic targets of some of the work of the Black Liberation Army. And of course my father’s relationship to the bank was also strategic. He did it to feed us. Until he couldn’t (but that’s another story). My father believed that loving Assata was the most effective way to unlearn what capitalism taught him about himself, on a daily basis and through the periodic rough hands of the police. He found Assata’s life, her survival despite police violence, her dignity despite the entire apparatus of the state and the media leveled against her to be another possible story of Black life beyond Babylon. For my father, Assata’s victory was a source of healing of wounds within him he was still working to name. He believed that her name and her story should be celebrated and shared.

The state of New Jersey disagrees. They say to this day that Assata is a terrorist. She is on an official list with an official bounty on her head. The highway police of the State of New Jersey who showed my father he was their enemy when he was still a schoolboy, (guns drawn on that same highway at him and the other black boys on a field trip), are still angry that she survived their comprehensive attempts kill her. They are angry that we are still listening to her despite their ongoing attempts to defame her. They are angry that she is somewhere safe and free, because they don’t know where or what that really is. Safety. Freedom.

So they fear the part of us that loves Assata. The part of us that inspires love and protection. The part of us that finds poetry in prison. That makes new life in the face of attempted eradication. The part of us that outlives the lie. I am Clyde’s daughter. May the the part of me that loves Assata be water. May it be every part of me, may it flush out the fear the state insists on and turn it into faith. May I remember this example of Black love across wildly different experiences. May I honor the place where the underground revolutionary meets the 9 to 5 corporate lawyer. May I remember in times of division and contradiction that Black love does have the capacity to flow through everything and arrive to itself as itself whole.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. Videos, poem prompts, meditations and more are here for you in the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive. Click the link to learn more.

your collar matches

the jersey blue

of the license plate

my white dress matches the car

the jersey blue

of prison metal

my white dress matches

the cars that pull you over

of prison mettle

the arms that hold

the cars that pull

the white we wear

the arms that hold

the soft of brown

the white we wear

like summer armor

the soft of brown

the license plate

our summer armor

at your throat

I only remember being with my father one time when the police pulled him over. Once is enough. We were driving through the rural south. He was bringing me home from one of my summer enrichment experiences, the academic camps I went to in other states as if school wasn’t school enough. I don’t remember what the pretense was to pull us over, I just remember my father became a completely different person. A person I didn’t recognize. He shape-shifted to save our lives.

All the other times are stories. They start when he was on a field trip with the few other Black boys at his private school and their mentor. Guns drawn on the turnpike. And of course he didn’t have to be driving to get pulled over. Often in New York City, and then in Philadelphia he was stopped and searched and threatened just walking down the street alone or with groups of friends. Those godfathers of mine who share with him the tight edge of jaw that tenses when they tell these stories. The part of them still responding to the fact they didn’t know if they would live through it.

Last time my partner and I got pulled over it was nighttime in Durham. We had the Black Feminist Film School Fellows in the back of the car. Everyone in the car was Black and queer and more masculine than me. I was not driving. We pulled over into the brightest place possible, the parking lot of Hillside High School our historically Black manufacturing site of legacy. Sangodare says I became a completely different person. But my shapeshifting was not useful. It was a panic attack. Turns out I have it too. That place in my body that does not believe we will live through any of this.

In this picture, in this poem I struggle to reconcile the softness of the man holding his daughter who is holding her sippy cup, my father and I posing quite peacefully in the driveway in the broad daylight of my mother’s camera. Our soft white summer clothes that July with the metal of the car in the background. The detail of my father’s open shirt collar with the blue thin metal of the state. How soon and which parts of us turn to metal here?

In my dream this morning my father and I were walking in a river. We were wearing white robes. We were quiet and focused. The morning mist was rising off the surface of the water. In my journal I asked him “What if our ancestors who walked through water to escape enslavement did it not only to evade the tracking dogs, but also to baptize themselves into another vibration. Another reality consistent with their freedom?”

What is the river you need right now? What rededication of your body to another context? How can our evasive survival maneuvers become a baptism, a balm, a source of peace. I am asking for myself as much as anyone. My spiritual teachers have taught me to wear white when I need to be calm in spaces and situations I do not control. And so most days I match this photograph. And everyday the shapeshifters lift me up. Hold me in an embrace soft enough that I can still displace the skin of metal, the expectation of clank. The misrecognition of my bones.

I dedicate this poem to your softest armor, breathing. I open to the peace we can’t imagine. I remember. The river was there before the chains. I remember. The water is older than the state. I remember. My ancestors are all here, riverine right through my veins. The cup is red. But it is in my hands.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. Videos, poem prompts, meditations and more are here for you in the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive. Click the link to learn more.

solar plexus

and when i have to leave

forgive me

when you can

and know

forgive me

for the healing

and know

i had to do it

for the healing

i didn’t do it

i had to do it

when i did

i didn’t do it

until i could

when i did

it was for all of us

until i could

i had to leave

it was for all of us

and you can

It’s the warmth, the multiple haloes in this picture for me. From here it is as if my father is looking me directly in my eye to tell me something, while the youngest part of me still clutches at his chest. Sometimes the break is in our hearts. Sometimes it reaches lower to the solar plexus, we wonder about the the life source that created us, we shut down our solar power in our loss. We question our own power because if we were really powerful wouldn’t we be able to prevent all this loss? If I could do anything I would undo this loss, bring back your heat. Embrace you again. But here I am, on yet another day, and none of that has happened. And deep inside I think it means I can’t do anything. I doubt my power. I feel so acutely disconnected that don’t remember where the circuits are that link me to the sun.

The words behind this poem are the words “right here.” Right here my father says. I am right here. Right here where feel you the most grief, the most rage, the most longing, right here is your connection to the heat the bright eternal. You can. He says. You can. And he means everything. I can embrace, bring back, remember, hold. All dreams I’m protecting myself from. All the healing in multiple directions. You can. The solar plexus chakra is the generator. Our relationship to that energy hub is about what we believe about our capability. What I learn in my longing, my reaching, what I learn in my crying and screaming, is that I am only capable of one thing. Love. It is enough.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. Videos, poem prompts, meditations and more are here for you in the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive. Click the link to learn more.

the other shore

there will be other shorelines

and you will reach them

and you will reach for them

and you will reach them

and you will reach for them

with your small hands

and you will reach them

with your big belly

and with your small hands

you will find your way

and with your big belly

you will breathe

and you will find your way

with all our open eyes

and you will breathe

on through

all our open eyes

you will reach for them

through through

to the other shore

In Black “new world” sacred song “the other shore” means heaven and a return to Africa at the same time. Reaching the other shore is a spiritual goal, it is a communal effort. We offer our breathing to the journey our ancestors must take across everything we can imagine into the unimaginable. The unimaginable past and the unimaginable future become the same place. In the time of this photograph, I was reaching for my mother. A few days before we had stood singing as my great grandmother Sarah surrendered back to earth, buried in the citrus grove on land she worked her entire adult life. We sang that our breathing might help her reach beyond before the sugar trade that brought her ancestors, triangulated to Jamaica from where I’m still researching to find in Africa and Scotland. That she might reach where she was going. The other shore.

But in the time of the looking, right now when I look at this picture, I feel the stretch, the contradiction. My spirit is reaching for my father, even as he holds me, grounds me in my reach. He is the one now who must reach beyond my grasp, but am I not the one who must hold on, not let him fall? I am still reaching. Do I believe that he can fly? What is the holding we learn to do across oceans and lifetimes? What is the letting go we can learn awash in grief and love? What do we let go of when we reach out with our hands? Here at the shoreline, the sound of arrival repeats and repeats and repeats and yet every impact shapes the shore, the water arrives at a different place, made different by the persistence of getting there. When I say grief comes in waves, it is not a metaphor. It will dress my face in salt wherever I am. The other shore is the beyond and it is where we were before and it where we are all going, as the song says, soon. Up yonder across the cosmic tides but also down into the deep letting go that could allow us, intergenerational us, to be reaching home and free across across which is right here. Where we are.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

Devotion

first clue

the Mets shirt

he will love you if you win or if you lose

but he really wants

you to win

and he will

yell about it

second fact

he holds your hand

though you already know

how to walk

and you are not crossing

the street you are

walking on a wide deserted beach

but the ocean is big

third thing

the sunglasses the cap

he’s fully clothed and walking

with you mostly naked children

in the sun of afternoon

what does he clothe his spirit in

to set you free

If you are truly fortunate in this lifetime, you will be loved by a Mets fan, a Knicks fan, or the versions of these lovers in other regions and contexts. What I mean is that you deserve to be loved by a person loyal to their own decision to pay attention, to study you, to bring their full presence, to root for you , to fully believe in you, even though you usually lose when it matters. Because that’s the other thing, if you are like me (or the Mets or the Knicks), you usually lose. It is usually too much, the first period or quarter is more beautiful than the last, fatigue is real, and people keep leaving. The post-season is a mess, if you even get there. If you are like me you know what it is to lose, to know everything and everyone we love will go beyond us at some point. The only way to avoid it is never to love anything, never to want any closeness, and how is that going? You don’t have to tell me. I tried it too. But now I accept myself as a lover and loser. Which means (no offense to the Yankees fans among us) that I have compassion for those who have only practiced loving the winners, who benefit from a fashionable love, a love supported by empire. But I am a daughter of diaspora. So I know that our love will have to be stronger than playbooks and billionaire acquisitions of sweat from abroad. Our love will have to last season after season after season sometimes without any reason for hope. Our love will have to reach across oceans. Our love cannot bank on external guarantees, we will have to regenerate it ourselves. And we will. This is what I mean when I say my father is a Mets fan. Which is not really about the Mets. It is evidence of a particular approach to love that I can see now. An approach to life. Which is why I look past the brave chests of my cousins to my father, in this disintegrating photo, clothed, somewhat subdued, not smiling, but holding my hand while I look at the ground. Because I need to remember that, I need to know that, I need to practice a love that is not based on performance, ease, success. A love bigger than stadiums, countries or time. A love that is its own reason. It is a love I can depend on right now. I can feel it right here, not because I deserve it, but because it offers itself to me anyway while I’m over here losing. Where I thought I was losing. Learning what I was losing. And that it can never be lost.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

communion

for you

i want a life of touching

being touched

the way you want

i want a life of touching

being held

the way you want

to hold somebody

being held

full of the reasons

to hold somebody

free

full of the reasons

sunshine laughter

free

communion

sunshine laughter

being touched

communion

for you

What is touch? What is my father thinking as he watches me reach out to touch another baby. An Anguillian age-mate with whom I have not kept in touch. I wonder. Where is my friend? How is my friend of that moment feeling in this moment. Where is my father? Where is the one who even now holds me up so that I feel safe enough to reach out with these words. Where was he then? What is it like for a person socialized to be a man in a society structured by sexual violence to imagine, reimagine what touch could mean in the life of his daughter? What is my friend’s mother thinking as I reach and she studies her child’s response? What is it for all of us right now to reimagine, reinvent touch after a year of deprivation? Is there something that we learn by not touching the living that recasts our longing to touch our loved ones who have died? Is there something we learn by not having access to touch with our loved ones who have passed on that prepared us for this moment of reach? I don’t know. I do know that I want a world where touch is communion. Not the taken for granted invasion of my personal space as a small femme Black person embodied. But also not this isolation where touch feels impossibly deferred. I want a coming back together differently. Communion. Where the many ways we touch each other, physically, and with our decisions, and what we decide to share and not share and how we listen or do not listen to each other deeply is all reclaimed by communion. Our desire to be together simply different from our fear of what it means to be alone. Communion. Our loving acknowledgement of how our lives all touch each other anyway, our commitment to unlearning the violent ricochet of ignoring our inherent interdependence. Communion, a ceremony. Finding it. A ceremony of noticing how we are touching each other. A ceremony of finding enough safety to notice. To change. To reach. To respond.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

better

my face is your face

take it in your hands

better

take it with your eyes

take my face in your hands

while you can

hold my face in your eyes

forever

while you can

blink and think and carry on

forever

i will live and laugh in your eyes

blink and think and carry on

have as much fun as you can

i will live and laugh in your eyes

‘cause i am a funny man

have as much fun as you can

better

‘cause i’m a funny man

and that’s my face

my heart

and my heart

you have my heart

as strong as water

pounding stone

you have my heart

in your small hand

pounding stone

but soft to you

in your small hand

you’ll keep my heart

soft enough

to squeeze down small

you’ll keep my heart

where it always was

squeeze it down small

into your days

where it always was

as strong as water

you’ll have your own days

and my heart

Better my heart. It sounds like its own prayer. Better my heart. What I am asking for with my repeated return to the repetitive form. Better my heart. The repeating part of me, may this heart sound towards something more and better than I know. This is what loving you does. It betters my heart. Because better is a verb. It does something. This picture of sheer joy at Dunn’s River Falls with my dad and all his teeth and my (gorgeous!!!!) grandmother does my heart good. Does teach me something about what this heart is for and where it’s heading. We do put our faces, our energy, our hearts into the tiniest of hands. Our infinity into these small lifetimes. And the “better” in the title was not originally a verb. It was the redundant reflexive command form. The you is understood. As in when you volunteer to something you have already been assigned to do. And the one who knows they already assigned you to do it says “you better.” Also understood is the “or else” after the statement. “Better” stands between you and the consequences of acting like you don’t know what you are here to do. Who you are here to be. Who am I here to be? Better. Your heart.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

i know

one day

i will

have to

one day

put you

have to

let you

put you

down

let you

go

down

when i

go

leave

when i

know

leave

i will

have to

but

until

then

here is my heart

open to you

and lettered

read it

here is my face

your own

brown window

know it

here are my hands

holding you

safe and strong

believe it

here is my home

breathing

salted warm

eternal

here is my love

forever and fri-day

wear it on your chest

My father was born on a Friday. And so now, every Friday I write to him. I write what happened in the week. I write about whatever I’ve finally realized that I never got to tell him. I write asking for help. I write asking forgiveness. I write I miss you I love you. Every Friday. It wasn’t until recently though that I noticed that in these two pictures that my mother took of my father and I on my first trip to Anguilla I am wearing a bib that says “Fri-day.” Knowing my mother, the fact that I am wearing a bib that says Friday is as good as an almanac. It must have been Friday. In this poem is my father saying that he knows he will have to let me go, or am I saying that to him? It must be both. For me, now, Fridays are a day out of time. I can feel it when I wake up, somehow it takes longer to get into my body, feet touching the floor. I wonder as I walk around in the dark lighting candles if I am still dreaming. I am often already on the mat meditating before I even realize that it is Friday. Forever and Friday. When we say we love each other for forever and a day, we must mean this. We love with a love beyond time moving forward. We love with a love that allows us to go back and be together. We love each other with a love beyond consciousness and breathing. We love with a love beyond what bodies do, hold, be. We love to the full capacity of infinity. And then beyond that. That’s what I mean. I learn what infinity means by loving you.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.