Category: Spoken Word

“34 Excuses For Why We Failed at Love” by Warsan Shire

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry, Spoken Word

1. I’m lonely so I do lonely things
2. Loving you was like going to war; I never came back the same.
3. You hate women, just like your father and his father, so it runs in your blood.
4. I was wandering the derelict car park of your heart looking for a ride home.
5. You’re a ghost town I’m too patriotic to leave.
6. I stay because you’re the beginning of the dream I want to remember.
7. I didn’t call him back because he likes his girls voiceless.
8. It’s not that he wants to be a liar; it’s just that he doesn’t know the truth.
9. I couldn’t love you, you were a small war.
10. We covered the smell of loss with jokes.
11. I didn’t want to fail at love like our parents.
12. You made the nomad in me build a house and stay.
13. I’m not a dog.
14. We were trying to prove our blood wrong.
15. I was still lonely so I did even lonelier things.
16. Yes, I’m insecure, but so was my mother and her mother.
17. No, he loves me he just makes me cry a lot.
18. He knows all of my secrets and still wants to kiss me.
19. You were too cruel to love for a long time.
20. It just didn’t work out.
21. My dad walked out one afternoon and never came back.
22. I can’t sleep because I can still taste him in my mouth.
23. I cut him out at the root, he was my favorite tree, rotting, threatening the foundations of my home.
24. The women in my family die waiting.
25. Because I didn’t want to die waiting for you.
26. I had to leave, I felt lonely when he held me.
27. You’re the song I rewind until I know all the words and I feel sick.
28. He sent me a text that said “I love you so bad.”
29. His heart wasn’t as beautiful as his smile
30. We emotionally manipulated one another until we thought it was love. 
31. Forgive me, I was lonely so I chose you. 
32. I’m a lover without a lover. 
33. I’m lovely and lonely. 
34. I belong deeply to myself .

by Warsan Shire, On Twitter @warsan_shire

“A Good Day” by Kait Rokowski

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry, Spoken Word1 Comment
Yesterday, I spent 60 dollars on groceries,
took the bus home,
carried both bags with two good arms back to my studio apartment
and cooked myself dinner.
You and I may have different definitions of a good day.
This week, I paid my rent and my credit card bill,
worked 60 hours between my two jobs,
only saw the sun on my cigarette breaks
and slept like a rock.
Flossed in the morning,
locked my door,
and remembered to buy eggs.
My mother is proud of me.
It is not the kind of pride she brags about at the golf course.
She doesn’t combat topics like, ”My daughter got into Yale”
with, ”Oh yeah, my daughter remembered to buy eggs”
But she is proud.
See, she remembers what came before this.
The weeks where I forgot how to use my muscles,
how I would stay as silent as a thick fog for weeks.
She thought each phone call from an unknown number was the notice of my suicide.
These were the bad days.
My life was a gift that I wanted to return.
My head was a house of leaking faucets and burnt-out lightbulbs.
Depression, is a good lover.
So attentive; has this innate way of making everything about you.
And it is easy to forget that your bedroom is not the world,
That the dark shadows your pain casts is not mood-lighting.
It is easier to stay in this abusive relationship than fix the problems it has created.
Today, I slept in until 10,
cleaned every dish I own,
fought with the bank,
took care of paperwork.
You and I might have different definitions of adulthood.
I don’t work for salary, I didn’t graduate from college,
but I don’t speak for others anymore,
and I don’t regret anything I can’t genuinely apologize for.
And my mother is proud of me.
I burned down a house of depression,
I painted over murals of greyscale,
and it was hard to rewrite my life into one I wanted to live
But today, I want to live.
I didn’t salivate over sharp knives,
or envy the boy who tossed himself off the Brooklyn bridge.
I just cleaned my bathroom,
did the laundry,
called my brother.
Told him, “it was a good day.”

– Kait Rokowski, “A Good Day”

 

 

“The Sea of Unforget” by Gypsee Yo

On By JennieIn Poetry, Spoken Word, Video3 Comments

***

The Sea of Unforget

She answered my advertisement on Craigslist.
My name the only one who didn’t sound
Like crackle dry magnolia or menopausal peach fuzz lips
Snoring like the echo of the sewing machine’s murmur.
She found me when I was two years foreigner. A social security card
screaming in carbon letters “do not hire under the penalty of law”.
I was sewing for rich women with closets
The size of my old country, and nothing to wear.
They liked my silence. The discretion of my hands.
The thousand yards stare I wore for a face.
They paid me in leftovers, gas money, and last season shoes.
They taught me for their kind, unlike mine,
Starvation was a necessary choice.
She has the name of old steel money and golden plaques
On library and hospital lobbies all over Birmingham.
She says she wants…. just in case…. .A white noise replica
of her mother’s wedding dress…. And only if… it doesn’t fit…
She doesn’t shrink…. fast enough….. in time…. for the wedding.
When I tell her
I believe in making clothes for the body
And not the other way around
She turns her back to me, an angry ship
The mast of her spine protruding under designer sails of silk.
I am blasphemy and untruth. To say she doesn’t have to mold
bones inside the cavern of that dress. to unholy the garment.
To shun it as a cathedral of trimmed women’s voices.
What would I know,
Coming from burning bush,
what it means to come from evergreen bristle.
Southern girl been raised on that religion.
Duty to be pretty. Worthy to be seen.
Believing only in the gospel according to mirrors.
They wait for her everywhere, all clean cut and white shirt smile
Like a pack of Latter Day Saints, always ready to recruit.
Southern girl been raised only
To fit into the wedding dress
The way
The truth
The life
She shall be saved
In child bearing.
Her cross hangs in her closet
The way it did in her mother’s
And her grandmother’s before her
Vanilla bean color, surrender size.
She tries it once a week, asks me to zip it up.
My throat is a hot tub full of dumb bridesmaids
When I ask her to suck in.
When the zipper’s teeth still refuse to kiss
Her fear crawls out of her bustle
a roaring engine tearing through White County
Whistle full of frat boy spit.
She becomes closed door and running water.
I stand in the middle of her lime porcelain bedroom, trapped.
I do not understand her. I am unfair. I tell her to come out.
I threaten to shred the dress with the fangs of my shears.
I want to tell her, shut up. Like she already hasn’t.
I want to tell her. Rape Camps. Mothers and daughters in the same room.
Same men breaking into them. with hammers. Wrenches. Fingers of thick trees.
molding their bones into shame they will wear
Seven generations of shattered blood.
I want to tell her, two years means nothing in the sea of unforget.
I am two years of unwords, unpoems, undone. I want to tell her
I do not want to ever finish her dress.
I have seen how wearing shrapnel changes a woman’s landscape.
I sew for her at night, when the radio plays static to kill the unbearable silence
Of a city which used to fight people with bursting water and unmuzzled dogs.
A city ran by her grandparents. Their steel furnaces. Their luncheons with the governor.
I rip her dress in the morning, when the humidity starts creeping
through the screen doors like the memory of the violence neither one of us can escape.
The sound of the seams splitting apart makes me weep.
I am a lost narrative thread.
I put it together again. I am stalling, hoping to buy her time
to find herself. I wish I knew what to say.
My sewing machine cannot stitch like a typewriter.
It cannot master the dialect of my longing.
Its jaws are tight with tension. They were not built for words.
Its foot stomps relentlessly through yards lost in translation.
The needle is an unreliable tongue,
piercing through my solitude.
The day I handed over the dress, my silhouette
slipped a murderous quiet through the back kitchen door,
once used by her family’s black maid.
The last time I ever handed a woman
a weapon against herself.

~Gypsee Yo

 

 

“Unsolicited Advice to Adolescent Girls with Crooked Teeth and Pink Hair” by Jeanann Verlee

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry, Spoken Word4 Comments

When your mother hits you, do not strike back. When the boys call asking your cup size, say A, hang up. When he says you gave him blue balls, say you’re welcome. When a girl with thick black curls who smells like bubble gum stops you in a stairwell to ask if you’re a boy, explain that you keep your hair short so she won’t have anything to grab when you head-butt her. Then head-butt her. When a guidance counselor teases you for handed-down jeans, do not turn red. When you have sex for the second time and there is no condom, do not convince yourself that screwing between layers of underwear will soak up the semen. When your geometry teacher posts a banner reading: “Learn math or go home and learn how to be a Momma,” do not take your first feminist stand by leaving the classroom. When the boy you have a crush on is sent to detention, go home. When your mother hits you, do not strike back. When the boy with the blue mohawk swallows your heart and opens his wrists, hide the knives, bleach the bathtub, pour out the vodka. Every time. When the skinhead girls jump you in a bathroom stall, swing, curse, kick, do not turn red. When a boy you think you love delivers the first black eye, use a screw driver, a beer bottle, your two good hands. When your father locks the door, break the window. When a college professor writes you poetry and whispers about your tight little ass, do not take it as a compliment, do not wait, call the Dean, call his wife. When a boy with good manners and a thirst for Budweiser proposes, say no. When your mother hits you, do not strike back. When the boys tell you how good you smell, do not doubt them, do not turn red. When your brother tells you he is gay, pretend you already know. When the girl on the subway curses you because your tee shirt reads: “I fucked your boyfriend,” assure her that it is not true. When your dog pees the rug, kiss her, apologize for being late. When he refuses to stay the night because you live in Jersey City, do not move. When he refuses to stay the night because you live in Harlem, do not move. When he refuses to stay the night because your air conditioner is broken, leave him. When he refuses to keep a toothbrush at your apartment, leave him. When you find the toothbrush you keep at his apartment hidden in the closet, leave him. Do not regret this. Do not turn red.

When your mother hits you, do not strike back.

“Unsolicited Advice to Adolescent Girls with Crooked Teeth and Pink Hair” by Jeanann Verlee, published at PANK Magazine

Copyright © Jeanann Verlee

Jeanann Verlee is an author, performance poet, editor, activist, and former punk rocker who collects tattoos and winks at boys. Her work has been published and is forthcoming in a variety of journals, including The New York Quarterly, FRiGG, PANK, decomP, Danse Macabre, and The Legendary, among others. Her poems have also been included in various anthologies such as “Not A Muse: The Inner Lives of Women” and “His Rib: Poems Stories and Essays by Her.” Verlee’s first full-length book of poems, Racing Hummingbirds (Write Bloody Publishing, 2010), earned the Independent Publisher Book Award Silver Medal in Poetry.

“The Type” by Sarah Key

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry, Spoken Word2 Comments

The Type

Everyone needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside of someone else. -Richard Siken

If you grow up the type of woman men want to look at,
you can let them look at you. But do not mistake eyes for hands.

Or windows.
Or mirrors.

Let them see what a woman looks like.
They may not have ever seen one before.

If you grow up the type of woman men want to touch,
you can let them touch you.

Sometimes it is not you they are reaching for.
Sometimes it is a bottle. A door. A sandwich. A Pulitzer. Another woman.

But their hands found you first. Do not mistake yourself for a guardian.
Or a muse. Or a promise. Or a victim. Or a snack.

You are a woman. Skin and bones. Veins and nerves. Hair and sweat.
You are not made of metaphors. Not apologies. Not excuses.

If you grow up the type of woman men want to hold,
you can let them hold you.

All day they practice keeping their bodies upright–
even after all this evolving, it still feels unnatural, still strains the muscles,

holds firm the arms and spine. Only some men will want to learn
what it feels like to curl themselves into a question mark around you,

admit they do not have the answers
they thought they would have by now;

some men will want to hold you like The Answer.
You are not The Answer.

You are not the problem. You are not the poem
or the punchline or the riddle or the joke.

Woman. If you grow up the type men want to love,
You can let them love you.

Being loved is not the same thing as loving.
When you fall in love, it is discovering the ocean

after years of puddle jumping. It is realizing you have hands.
It is reaching for the tightrope when the crowds have all gone home.

Do not spend time wondering if you are the type of woman
men will hurt. If he leaves you with a car alarm heart, you learn to sing along.

It is hard to stop loving the ocean. Even after it has left you gasping, salty.
Forgive yourself for the decisions you have made, the ones you still call

mistakes when you tuck them in at night. And know this:
Know you are the type of woman who is searching for a place to call yours.

Let the statues crumble.
You have always been the place.

You are a woman who can build it yourself.
You were born to build.

“The Type” by Sarah Key, published in Alright and on the Huffington Post.

* Sarah mentions in her performance that this poem is inspired by a line from “Detail of the Woods” by Richard Siken (shared on Words for the Year yesterday): “…Everyone needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside of someone else.”