Sometimes, when I have to make a major life decision and find myself paralyzed by indecision, the only way I can move forward is to imagine myself as a manga character.
Read moreheaven's reward fallacy
God doesn't like that celebrity you dislike
God is just
God's likes are equal to ten thousand likes or a hundred thousand whatever it takes to make you happy
God ignores your ex for you
God likes everything your best friend has ever posted online
God gives and takes away
God let your parents spank you and let your mother miscarry after you
God helped you find those family photos in the attic that one time and the memories just came flooding back
God likes how skillfully you describe the innocence of your childhood of social media
God wants you to get that raise
God sees how well you tip
God watches you eat local
God loves how you love animals
God knows the wallet was empty when you found it
God knows you didn't mean to hit her that hard
God believed you first
God let your abuser get off scot-free because it’s good for you
God will have him crash while drunk driving and he will post a selfie from the emergency room but he won't die yet (it will be liver failure)
God knows when you will die of breast cancer, that you will die of breast cancer you are unknowingly attracted to pink ribbon merchandise
God loves you back
God is busy watching sports
God has a favorite team and it’s the same as yours which is the same as your dad's
God wants you to get that energy drink caught in the vending machine it's meant to be yours
God lines up the green lights just perfect for you to catch the bus on that one day for that crucial interview Thank God! you say once for yourself and once to the interviewer
God loves praise
God is like you in that way
God gave you DD boobs but didn’t make you blonde you made yourself blonde and you took selfies at the salon you took selfies at the gym
God loves every face you made
God made Candace blonde
God gave Candace parents that gave her a BMW in high school and a Porsche in college there she goes tagging herself in her family's cabin #ilovemylife
God hates Candace as much you do there is no Fuck You button on Instagram but your fingers are like God's as you ignore her but one day yes one day someday eventually... and you can’t wait until the afterlife
poems about insecure attachment
there was a hole in me where
Home should be, a childhood
deep & a mother wide
my filling is praise receipts
& prayers names crumpled days
by the handful a
megaphoned song for anyone
digital lights singing i'm still hungry
the hole in me a lover tall
(i told myself) and burrowed
huddle small but
she was an ontologist who spoke rainfall
named as adam did the animals
unmade monsters into nothing
my absence into absence
once, each blink destroyed the land
--to a child, everything dies at night but me
but then she gives object permanence
brown & fertile
in two cupped hands
to plant.
Platonic
there is more love
in the bus driver's thumb
when he covers the slot
it's okay, go ahead
as my card chirps from hunger
as I stall and my purse coughs
than the thousand soft sighs,
rising wonders and longings
forming cloudlands for dreamed selves
of downcast-eyed boys
love poems for myself
you are the cutest little boy asleep
like a heathen legs wide & sheet-tangled
a bed of rainbows & donuts & all your best friends
(are silent) no Deco artist designed you
gangly neotenous elbowed& kneed thing
til death adolescent the plaid skirt itself
breaks curfew ah! it rises and swirls
like the first ever turns red-black stripe red-black
baby-halty eyes widen
the discovery of girlhood that wet
of a body still being learned--another naked dance
for a body still being learned--the first personal language
the last cartwheel is far too distance
the sand that drips from your underfoot
is sandiegan the hands' undertan knows
the blue-brown mix of beach
(& this can be a song in Robinese)
for applemound breasts & pearbottom
peachvellum tree brown yes & blue & future blue
the afro sprouts has become a halo
of strangers' caught compliments our thought cloud
in the glow of somewhere else you carry
& will one day return to a star or sun isn't that right?
hot black girl mess/ black girl hot mess / hot girl black mess
Sometimes, I want to tell a really unflattering hot mess bachelorette story about myself, like the time I was cooking half-naked on my second floor apartment and I heard someone call my name--but then i remember that the concept of “hot mess” belongs to young white women who are deemed attractive enough that their self-deprecating “mess” is forgivable because their lives have an underlying expectation of goodness and success regardless of their peccadillos whereas my mess as a black girl is not seen as charming but an endemic representation of the failings of my race whose negative stereotypes i must fight with declarations of royalty, fierceness, and beauty if not an 24/7 facade of respectability due to the societal expectation of me being low enough that the mess is assumed while the success is not, the success must be seized, the competency must be asserted, the intelligence must be proven, the confidence must be tested, and with all the time i must devote to these small tasks, i will scarcely be allowed the luxury of a benign mess. But still, I was cooking half-naked in my second floor apartment and I heard someone call my name. Of course I freaked out, thinking that 1) someone could see into my second floor apartment, 2) they recognized me, and 3) they now knew that I habitually went about my day in a state of undress. What else had they seen? Who else had seen me?
But as they continued to call my name, it occurred to me that they might have been calling for a different Maya. And yep, I eventually met a little girl with her hair in barretted braids who lives in the same complex I do. Meanwhile, I bought a frilly black apron to fend off the oil spills and still wear whatever I want at home.
first world
what it first meant was:
the strongest buildings still announce bomb shelter
sturdy tan boxes where
before i was born
my parents cousins possible friends
learned to hear sirens and crouch under desks
what it really meant was a blue for freedom
like the seas between us
an arbitrary line drawn in bullet or tank track
red over there, for blood we still desire
what it means now is that a children's tv show
told me to save water.
i choose not to i like the fizz of its pressure,
white with excitement after brushing my teeth
& after the first spit, i cup my hand,
lower my mouth
lips to the water,
ah! how tasty how endless beautiful clean & free