Poetry Broth & POC solidarity

*realizing blogs posts are this week too*

I don’t have the time to make bone broth with these poems, to let it sit and soak as deep as I want. Just poem soup until the summer, until the sunny days of writing in abundance and not in scarcity, not as if I am losing words before I write them. 

Of the MANY poems from this week that will be part of this summers poetry bone broth, two will be be key ingredients. 

Leticia Hernández-Linares’ Translating the Wash and Nikky Finney’s Left.

What is it about these words, this order of words, that sank me into a scene and had full control of my emotions? Yeah, I had to write damn-near essays intellectualizing the two regarding the disposability and expendability of laboring bodies. Never-mind that. Because truly these poems sparked more questions than intellectualizations. 

-What does it mean to lift up the narratives of Elders in both pieces? (Side: both poets extensively include Elders in their larger works)

-How do these poems juxtapose these Elders’ social usefulness (as aging post-laboring folks within capitalism) versus their cultural usefulness (to enrich and relentlessly deepen us)?

-What humanized the people/characters of these poems? Was it that their identities became complicated (as mothers and daughters)?

-What’s the effect of Letica’s use of choppy sentences and Nikky’s emphasis on the woman’s spelling “Pleas” as it relates to the politics of their bodies?

-What’s the significance of both poet’s referencing the 2nd Indochina War or of finding common ground with Vietnamese struggle?

And lastly:

Did we get to the point of class where we full-heartedly asked ourselves: can we define ourselves as people/poets of color or see poetry of color without seeing the other? what stakes do our poems or lives have in honoring “the other” stories?

It almost sounds silly to ask questions such as “can I be black or indigenous without really sitting with the histories and wars and struggles and poetry of other people of color?” It’s clear that our general isolation from one another means we can understand ourselves without knowing or knowing of the other, that we can do so through amnesia of history and through segregation. But can we know ourselves fully, can we know our own struggles fully, in today’s context, without some sense of collective liberation?

Around the world, workers in sweatshops have sewn messages in jeans and shirts, in broken English or native tongues. An act of defiance, of visibility. A plea, a testimony. Wouldn’t being a recipient implicate you? You may not hold the whip, you may not wield the power, you may not make the system, but where, in fact, do we all stand?

Almost everyday I am the customer somewhere, a stranger to someone, who is homesick, who is both in fear that Trump’s administration with send them away or prevent them from seeing their homelands and families. And most definitely every week, I sit in my favorite Vietnamese shop, to do my school work, and keep up the two-year conversation with the mom n pop that own it. We talk about hip hop, about family, about where we come from, about honor and sacrifice (these old, old terms that still drive many Poc communities). And quite similar to how I read Leticia and Nikky’s poems, there are vast similar themes, even when the focus or stories or directions are different. 

So, I stopped my essaying to write a few poems instead. And kept many-a-chant in mine that bridge the struggles from NOLA to Oakland to Ferguson to Palestine to Mexico to El Salvador to Vietnam…