Liberated Muse Vol I: How I Freed My Soul is out. Edited by Khadijah Ali-Coleman. Of my three poems "Chakra Walking", "Purifying Rites by Water" and "A Migrant's Tune" that appear with the work of several artists and writers in the collection, here is:
Chakra Walking
This has a wood-scented flower-center bright like a
Peeping bird's eyes, awake
Also watery
From floating gas fumes of the bus
Station
Invading a space of always, ever, where like pure water
The mother goddess’
Pupils flow with a meadow-rust
Gaze
And split the day like egg-shells -- A grass-bride giving off stillness to my
Moldy brown hands
That keep tracing
A path, again and again
Stuck like a Greek mythical hero gone to slay
The Minotaur
When I tell this story to my friends
Disbelief and
Awkwardness take over
Because we know we walk chakras at homes, jobs and road stops
Just as we inhale unheroic opposition
Of fate, weather
Wood-scented flicker of other eyes to emerge from shackles.
This has a wood-scented flower-center bright like a
Peeping bird's eyes, awake
Also watery
From floating gas fumes of the bus
Station
Invading a space of always, ever, where like pure water
The mother goddess’
Pupils flow with a meadow-rust
Gaze
And split the day like egg-shells -- A grass-bride giving off stillness to my
Moldy brown hands
That keep tracing
A path, again and again
Stuck like a Greek mythical hero gone to slay
The Minotaur
When I tell this story to my friends
Disbelief and
Awkwardness take over
Because we know we walk chakras at homes, jobs and road stops
Just as we inhale unheroic opposition
Of fate, weather
Wood-scented flicker of other eyes to emerge from shackles.
***
See http://outskirtspress.com/webpage.php?ISBN=978-1-4327-2415-3 for more info on the book. The blurb says:
Contributing writers include: Tichaona Chinyelu, Nabina Das, Venus Jones, Farah Lawal, Omar Akbar, Anthony Spires, Amy Blondell, DJ Gaskin, Summayah Talibah, Maureen Mulima, Randy Gross, Margaux Delotte-Bennett, Serena Wills, and other notables. Visual art work by Turtel Onli, Marshetta Davis, Shan'ta Monroe and more.
Foreword by author Ananda Leeke.
Cover Art by Sharon Burton.
1 comment:
If I were a responsible commenter, I would first inform myself about chakras and their cultural significance. But I think I prefer just letting vague, alien-seeming associations drift from my tongue. Maybe that would be akin to a strange arcing and merging of sensibilities. I don't know.
Besides the beautiful, connotative word-pictures you've written, I am taken by the sense of centering our protagonist experiences. An intense state of being, not ordinary, thus isolating her from everydayness and "sleeping" people. Between breaths, she discerns scents of spiritualized time. She is not taken out of herself, as transcending anything; rather, she is cohering deeply INTO herself and is breathing in shocked, fragrant moments of realness.
And in this condition of being, she partakes of something like the Jungian archetypes; she grasps a-hold of the ancient cultural chain, connecting her and anchoring her to Woman...to the organic layers behind her in other time.
Or maybe I just need to lie down with an ice pack on my head until this blathering fit of mine passes over. :)
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