From this — I got this — For the 30 pieces I performed on my TikTok platform, the family was like, “But Sis, where the rest at? These titles are as follows: Day 1: MISSISSIPPI Day 2: We Whisper Loud Day 3: What Tish Coulda … Continue reading And Then This Happened…
This year was freeing.
I think I have been able to become more confident in my own poetic voice, and own that voice!
I am proud of myself and the work I am creating. I am bringing the joy back to my art, and along with that— power.
I no longer fear my pen, and I used to. I used to be afraid of how angry I would sound sometimes — but it’s necessary.
Audre Lorde said that there was purpose to anger! And there is.
There are pieces in this cycle of poetry that are angry, because I was angry.
There are pieces in this cycle that are fun and happy, because I was happy.
There are pieces that are introspective and poignant, because I was thinking at my life so far.
This year, I feel so much lighter than I have in succeeding years. I feel like my feet are under me as an artist, able to stand up to criticism and silence my own inner critic.
I’m maturing as a poet. Growing as an artist. And accepting criticism and compliments.
I finally feel like a poet— I hope that makes sense.
Plus! My first poetry anthology is released May 12, 2024. How amazing if that!
Thank you for going on this journey with me.
JBH
The old texts say
It is appointed unto man
Once l to die
and then the judgment.
what happens to writers
who leave the world
And in the contents therein
with their mouth full.
Their desks full of papers
And pens
And post-its….
Of jump drives, and
Missing chairs,and
Desks never cleaned out.
What happens to the work when the worker is gone?
When that writer
finally drifts away,
and moved to
Avalon or Valhalla
or Nirvana
or wherever it is
writers get to rest.
Our only regret
is that we had
Only one life to write
all the lives in us down.
In the quiet mind
Of the poet,
there is a graveyard
they forgot to write down.
Novels unfinished.
Thoughts and essays
That they never managed
To submit…
calls, answered from editors or fans.
Scripts that never materialized.
Yet it we could leave
One word for those
who endured our lives
as both person
and immortal vessels
filled with language
it would be this:
Remember.
Remember
how we tried to put
everything
into everything
Ran and out of time.
Remember that we loved
As this truly as we could
and our heart was broken
1000 times…
Remember we tried
to put fire into paper
and try not to burn ourselves.
Remember sometimes tears
Became the water you pull from,
In many a well.
We wrote to live.
We wrote to stay.
And for this great cause
Did we not throw
it all away!
if we could leave
But one love letter
What to you will
find in our wake,
Is tried to correct
every mistake.
to bring back those
who were lost
at the cause of war
Or famine
or evil…
to make the good
Loud and present, and
the fear understood.
We tried to put everything right
to organize
so you can fight!
we did our work
so you could do yours too:
because now our time is come
And this is all we have
to give back to you.
Our only regret
Is we had one life
to write everyone else’s
-JBHarris, 4.2024
I will be in the everywhere.
When I am
an ancestor,
when the weight of age
and body
are no longer
my trouble over these waters,
I will be in trees
and leaves
and grasses.
I will be thunder and storm.
I will be the truth
that is picked over
during dinners my hands
prepared and in the eyes
of my family,
and those we have heard of me saw me prepare.
I will be in the stares
of grandchildren,
creaking on the stairs
of old houses that
my feet once tread upon.
I will be cloud
and rain,
My truth,
will come from
their mouth
And I will be in dishes
Over glasses and
In the rumbling of laughter —
I will call
And I will be
called an answer.
-JBHarris, 2.12.2024
This will be in the upcoming work dedicated to my father, DADDY, I’M OKAY.
When I’m tired,
my mother tells
me to stop wiping
and holding my face
like my daddy did
when he was tired.
I think that,
even in those
neurons and synapses
That is my father,
reaching from the beyond
into me to let me know
that he still wants
to take care of me.
I want him so bad,
“Daddy, I’m okay.”
I know with you
being so far away,and
you being into the mystery, and
me eight years from
the point from
where your heart beat
For the last time,
I still want to say:
“Daddy, I’m okay.”
I won’t lie and say
There aren’t days
Where I ache for
your voice and
Rely on your grit—
It is impossible not to miss you.
There are days
I struggle to remember
all you were,
all that you are,
and what you meant to me.
In this world of grief and strife
it sometimes makes memory
so hazy,
that I have to struggle
to remember your voice.
I have now crossed
a threshold in this life,
I have been without you
more than I had you.
I understand if God be for me,
I will have more years
in front of me,
and that holds
the unique paradox
that I might forget you.
And yet Daddy, I’m okay.
I’m okay because
for whatever reason
you fit to give me
rock —and to speak to it,
to demand
I’m not let go of it!
That you endowed
this pretty Black girl
who is now
a strong Black woman
with enough in her
in 17 summers
to summon
when the storms of life rage!
Daddy, I’m okay.
I’m gonna be okay
until it’s okay
speak okay
Until a way is made!
And Daddy, I’m okay…
You can rest now.
I am reminded
there is no time limit
on how long
A father will
love his daughter—
even from million miles away.
I take solace that even on my dying day,
I’ll still be your babygirl.
Daddy… Immabe OK.
-JBHarris, 4.2024
He said
My mouth was slick,
And I was always
Poppin my shit!
You think that
Him knowing me
As long as
he knew
Himself would prepare
Him for me to
Always come
Ace High,
No chaser —
Hot.
Smooth.
And…
Thick!
Full-bodied
And smooth
…like he likes
All desirable things
He believes
Belong to him.
He brave enough
To say I, too, belong
To him—
Who am I
To argue when
…he be right?
-JBH, 9.3.2023
The most contagious lie
on the Internet is
that Black women
are undesirable —
unwanted,
not beautiful,
not trustworthy—
needing to be in our more natural state.
The road to perdition
is always paved
with eyelashes
and weave,
and HR approved hair colors.
It is the steady robbery
of person and self
And the marriage therein
that tells you that
the world can only end
where you begin!
the road to perdition
Is paved with stilettos
that echo hallways
we are not supposed
to be in,
the shunning of
our own selves
from our own selves
into places meant
to be margin.
Our place supposed to be uncomfortable.
Pleasure and purity
Never being ours—
walking these narrow roads
with a few gates, and
even fewer allies, and
no light, and
we were supposed
to just endure that
with smiles in our faces
because Black girls
are made for hard times.
And the only way
to find redemption
among this back door
To Hell’s Jericho Road
is to abandon all hope
of all ye who enter here [the World]
as Dante said,
but at the same time l—
who put us here?
it was Oracle Malcolm,
who told us
who looked like him,
“Who told you to hate yourself?”
and if a Black woman
does not hate herself,
Then,
how can she truly be Black?
But if Blackness holds
everything and
everything is inside Blackness
that means we hold
all power in our very hands!
You see perdition
Was never ours,
It’s was never
ours to be sent,
This road we were
Given is not ours to cement!
It for the cause of those
Who do not know who
They are and will never accept
Who we are
That we continue to forfeit
Our own selves for their selves!
But understand
The key to our CELL,
is never FOR SALE.
The road to Perdition
They say
Is paved with
good intentions.
But at the same time
Heaven is within us
so perdition is never made
for us, and is a holding spot
for those who don’t know
who they are …
besides the darkest trick the devil ever played was to to make the world believe he doesn’t exist, but
Black
women
always
have.
-JBHarris, 4.26.2024
Fun fact: the name Zachary is from Zachariah which means the Lord remembers.
Note: This is my first husband’s real first name and I never took his. He is remarried to another woman, has children with her, and makes no attempt to have a relationship with his children. As you read this work, with this backstory, it will make more sense.
He left us on
Constructed wings
Of wax to wain
Leaving us to watch
To see
the sea
Welcome him.
There is no love lost
When the man you loved
No longer exists—
If he ever had.
The name
The Lord remembers
Corresponds to
The same Icarus
Who left me with
The daughters
Held in body
And heart.
The same one
Who now has
Made his tribe
Complete with the
Sons be craved
So that his line
And its curses
Might not die
With him.
Tied to you by time
As my ancestors were
The language and land
Foreign because I
Never was supposed
To be here alone.
To rage, rage against the
Dying of the light!
I swallowed the salt water
For my children to breathe.
Pressing –
Swimming –
Towards the Son
With the
These two
Cleaving to me
To make their
Mother a mermaid
to bring them to
Dry land
To make the milk and honey.
My fins are feet
and feet are fins
The traversing between
The world given
And the world that is.
And taught my daughters to swim.
Their father is Icarus.
Their mother is Yemoja.
The death he wanted
Was his own —
And he can watch
from the bottom of the sea.
-JBHarris, 4.2024
I don’t know how 42 happened.
That is to say I didn’t think aging
Was what I would do alone.
That is to say the happily ever after
wasn’t meant for me, not like I wanted it to be.
That is to say I am the one who got away, and time marched on anyway,
That is to say the girl I was is the woman I am who takes the little girl who was old when she was young with me —
That is to say the dreaming only got bigger when time became quicker —
That is to say the girl who loved the boy, still waits for him to come back to her…where he belongs.
-JBHarris, 4.14.24
Note: Real history teaches…even when you don’t want to listen.
When the revolutionaries
Are bored in history class
They will say they
Your mind is wandering:
you are not paying
attention to the lesson
They is being taught
To the that you are being
Inattentive and dismissive
of what is being presented to you.
The information in
front of you
Is for your benefit
They tell you to study
To speak back
to remember and remember
and repeat and remember
and to internalize
for the exam
in front of you.
but when the revolutionary
looks at the information
in front of them,
knowing what they have
been given,
and what is on
the inside of them
remembering that
History is in the other room?
How can anything be saved if all be lost?
When the revolutionary is born
History books self-emulate!
Truth is on the inside of them
It will come from them,
And they will throw their hands
Up in the air —
The same fashion that
we did in Ferguson
When we said,
“Hands up don’t shoot?”
because I do have a question.
I have a question
because what you are
Presenting to me
Is so alien
It might as well
have come from
Jupiter —
Saturn—
Or a bar on Mars.
I do not understand
why all things dictated
in this realm of reality
focused on this narrative
have only been done
by anyone that is White,
And on money!
I do not understand
why my place in this
only is defined by
What my foremothers,
and my ancestors,
and those who suffered
from DRAPETOMANIA
were able to give to you—
that you stole from us—
and that you look at me and
say that I am lazy!
When the revolutionary
Is bored in history class
They will tell your parents
You are inattentive and disrespectful!
They will tell your family
That all is lost with you
because all they you need
To do is pay attention in their class!
Forgetting history is not static —
but is always dynamic,
and we are the result
of such history being erased
and mocked
and—
forgotten.
When the revolution
is born bored
in history class —
when those two meetings
of future and time
converge in
elementary school
middle school
or high school
You just understand
That when truth comes
As James Baldwin says
It must be spoken.
That oracle Baldwin
told us the world is
Held together
Really it is
By the love and passions
Of a few people
And what greater
passion is there
Than truth?
When the revolutionary
Is born in history class:
They will to change it.
-JBHarris, 4.21.2024
I Breathe Fire 