Notes Toward a Poem on Self-Care...
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start with decisions — take a break from mirrors…
decide to stay in bed today and tomorrow… count time only through midnights… isn’t there some voodoo about being the middle child/ of a middle child?… you should Google that… start humming… to broken bones of electrical appliances… that old CD player? yep you can fix it… take on do-it- yourself projects — face cream, shelves, the perfect guacamole, and a Home Alone arsenal just in case a Joe Pesci-like villain tries to arrive… pretend the varnish brush is a stag horn… who needs an app for calm??… be greedy about breathing… be greedy about breathing… avoid phone conversations and relate only through yes and no texts or emails… hey baby, can I be your Melanin Maid Marion? yes … does _____ have a job? oh no girl… is your brother/ father/husband accounted for?… (silence)… yes… if voice is required, realize that he/she/they can’t be your Sun… trust what you can hold in the hand… when we talk the body vibrates… aim for a dinosaur roar when people least expect it… enjoy words like Kilimanjaro and origami… write odes to the Do-rag, … sonnets to the Soul Train line where you dance in military-choreographed precision… so fresh and so clean Outkast, take a look it’s in a book Reading Rainbow… Jolly Ranchers, your mother’s kitchen table… at any altitude remember that ink can hold the right kind of memory… |
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#45 Vibrations
at work they talk of taxonomies
how words creates bubbles
of conversation matter
until everyone is on the same name page
homogeneous white wonder
bread on top of unlined paper
about who and what matters
when it comes to funding female bodies curled
like a fig manmade grassy knolls with
little grass but I sometimes think no the room
is too small there isn’t enough light for
this conversation it’s always starless here I say where
are the gone things not pretty enough for bows
how words creates bubbles
of conversation matter
until everyone is on the same name page
homogeneous white wonder
bread on top of unlined paper
about who and what matters
when it comes to funding female bodies curled
like a fig manmade grassy knolls with
little grass but I sometimes think no the room
is too small there isn’t enough light for
this conversation it’s always starless here I say where
are the gone things not pretty enough for bows
Cynthia Manick is the author of Blue Hallelujahs (Black Lawrence Press, 2016). A Pushcart Prize nominee with an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School, she has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Fine Arts Work Center, Hedgebrook, Poets House, and the Vermont Studio Center. She serves as East Coast Editor of Jamii Publishing and founder of the reading series Soul Sister Revue. Manick’s work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day Series, African American Review, Bone Bouquet, Callaloo, Kweli Journal, Muzzle Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.