Anastacia-Renee
I grew up with dictionaries, encyclopedias and research books as my siblings. The kind of books you could hold and say, “This is so heavy” as you heave it on a kitchen counter or a plastic covered couch and thumb through it with a librarians thumb cover. I reveled in the idea that I was “being my mom,” who was a research librarian. I felt electric company power knowing that I was holding “the books” that teachers, librarians and scientists were using in their lives. What a weird aquarian child I was! Still—there is something in my DNA that keeps traveling the same spiral in my work. I created a form called “The Nines,” which is comprised of 9 stanzas, 9 lines, 9 section heads and a series of 9 “things.” For example, nine days, nine hours, nine lovers, nine miracles, nine wars, nine doors, etc. This particular poem was born out of me deconstructing that form but wanting desperately for the poem to maintain its potentiality as long poem in general and an “epic” poem for me because most of my poems are one to two pages.
Beyond form, the roux of the piece, is an interrogation on the definition of “Black Woman.” I envisioned the black woman as multiple patches of story, lineage and memory sewn together like a coded quilt. I desperately wanted to create a recipe for the black woman metaphorically and realistically and ponder what some of those ingredients might consist of. Then I thought about the black woman as both the created and the creator. As a hybrid writer who is drawn to mixing/meshing/messying up traditional forms like the haibun, sonnet, or epistolary, and poetic devices with footnotes, short editorial essays, and research I am always drawn to teetering around with music as its own source of hybrid infusion to poems. Truly the final draft did not arrive at the “ending point,” as I am still excavating what might be a definition for the black woman as no black woman is the same. But this “final” piece is where I am comfortably ending and calling it a poem—for now.
< draft 1 >
Entomology (1): Black Woman
the b stands
for brains
for bandages
for beloved
for beauty
for before & after
for beyond to yonder
for bad bitches
for burnt biscuits
bar hopping & blessings
(lack)
she lacks nothing
she lacks the luxury of living
(ack) when she cannot fix it
k could be Kareema or Kristina
lack to lag if you are from the midwest; you lacking
you laggin’ behine
lack in the text books
lack of color is—
(bla)
b l a c k
a permanent marker
multitasking preposition
inside outside
over there under
the color of my true loves hair
blackity black ass black
midnights mouth gaping
spools of thick hair
black like caution
as the winds wife
black like blank
(c) a (n)
black god//dess
the universal fabric: the cosmos
wrap black
rap black hip hop black
bars
bars
bars
pipeline to prison black
black pipes breaking black
black ancestors
black-ing
black-out /slay/ out-black
/slay/
/slay/
the berry juice
black butterfly- deniece williams (black)
black magic woman-Santana (black)
young gifted & black-nona Simone
(black)
woman
whoa!
a can of woop ass waiting
a chunky belt of love holding us together
om
a blazing moon cratering
time at warp speed slowed down
for the rest of us to see
