Category Archives: Poetry

My Awesome Place: An Autobiography of Cheryl B

Poetry, ,

I recently read a great book that I just have to recommend to you all. It’s called My Awesome Place: An Autobiography of Cheryl B, and it’s an excellent portrait of a young writer finding her voice and her awesome place in the world.

I knew Cheryl B back in the nineties at NYU. She went on to become a playwright, poet, and spoken word artist in New York. Sadly, she passed away way too soon in 2011.

When I finished this book, I felt I had to pass it on. It’s the kind of book that should be passed around. Then I started to get all poetical in the head. . .

This book is for that girl, that girl who’s too fat, too shy, not a straight A overachieving high school student. This book is for that girl who gets told she’ll never be anything except a toll booth fare taker. This book is for that girl whose parents don’t understand or maybe sort of do but can’t talk about it because the words don’t come out right. This book is for that girl who dreams of being more than what everyone around her thinks she can be even though she doesn’t know how to do it exactly. This book is for that girl and her friend and her friend’s friend. This book should be passed around while music’s blasting and the pages should get stained with beer, cigarettes, weed, and aquanet. This book shows that girl how to get to that awesome place.

You can get My Awesome Place on the Topside Press website.

Things from the Writing Box…

Playwright, playwriting, Poetry, , ,

In the early nineties, I began my quest to look at my heritage and find more pieces of what makes me who I am.  I imagined that any journey toward that knowledge would be good for my little box of things to write.  One day while home from my day job, a man stepped out from between two cars in front of me.  I had to swerve to miss him.  Later that night in my apartment, I had a visitation from the man in the street. Not his physical self but his spirit or so it seemed.  I write about things of the spirit a lot in my work…it just shows up – like he did.  I have been trying to put the vision I had that night in a play but am not sure when, where or how to enter as I really do not want a literal interpretation of that experience.  I want to capture how I felt in those moments…  Over the years, I’ve tried different things but can never quite get that, “this is it” feeling.  Two years ago, I wrote this poem:

the Medicine Man

he stepped out from between the cars

with his staff

magnificent, authentic, ancient, familiar

he was tall like my uncle huron

with chiseled facial features

in headdress/ high moccasins/ native attire/ regal/ warrior-like

the feathers hanging from the staff caught my eye first

they were real

and i wondered if they were eagle

then i noticed that he was looking directly at me as i approached

our eyes locked for an instant/ for an eternity

my car seemed to be driving through a time warp

as i slowly passed him there in the street

looking through me to some place

we must have met before

in the rearview mirror

he turned his entire body to watch me drive away

i could not watch the road for watching him

he was a shaman/a medicine man, i knew

but why was he looking at me

did he know me/ daughter to native ancestors

i should have stopped/asked

later that night as i lay on the floor in prayer

i could hear and feel footsteps vibrating on the floor

moving toward me

a hologram in moccasins was all that i could see

his…

he placed one foot on the back of my head and pushed me into a vision

of the past

afraid/ unable to resist/ unable to move from the floor from the smoke

what is that?

i could hear the rattlers and sounds of war

the screaming women and children

i could smell the smoke and see its fog

then it lifted just enough for me to see

i was there dressed in buckskin

lying face down in the rubble

watching the boy as he searched through it for

his family

i was there

he knew me, daughter to native ancestors…

he knew me…

As a writer, do you ever wonder just how long a story can germinate before you can write it?  Have you ever come up against any story that just doesn’t seem to have an “in”? What do you do?  One of the greatest things about theatre is that the playwright doesn’t have to limit their approach to conventional ways in order to write their story.  Stuff just needs to be pulled out of the box, lived with for a while and looked at it from several angles…

 

 

the Secrets of Poetry…

Poetry, , ,

One of the things I deal with in my writing are secrets; those kept by family, others, and those kept by me.  Poetry is a way I file them away for later days.  My brother used to read my diary and thus, knew my secrets so I started using codes, the best of which is the language of poetry.  Now, after all these years of writing, I no longer use it to always conceal but also to reveal.  Poetry:  snippets of moments or events captured in verse…

  

My Brother’s Eyes

my brother’s eyes pierce

shallow graves

to view the bones

set in awakenings and armor

dress right dress

till the cover is sure

secrets double time between memories

lay out half naked on the asphalt

soaking up the tar

hair black black now

skin black blue now

scrapped and pus-ing over

my brother’s eyes pierce but i cannot tell

the price i paid for his life…

 

the Blues of It…

LAFPI, Playwright, Poetry, , , , ,

it’s a rhythm

slow, low and bluesy

seeping like vapors into a waking day

me in the middle of it

always caught by surprise

always caught

off guard/off kilter

by the soothing riffs

slur/sliding down the notes

trilling backward in time

to then

when…

even after checking the archival catalogues

i can never find any foreshadowing

it’s always the same interrupt/

same perpetual stop-loss/

same…

decades passing

has not changed the cadence

henderson born, kentucky rooted syncopation

dating way back to the 1800s

way back to when

my shawnee mothers hid out

near robards station

waiting through

the trip to containment

waiting through

the loss

it’s the blues of it

that keeps the song going

pizzicato

shimmer/slur

pluck

me in the middle

me on edge

traveling back to then

in the middle of a waking day

stop-loss now/ me caught

in the blues of it

 

My grandmother used to tell me stories…before she began to forget.  I stored them somewhere in my subconscious.  I remember them at the oddest of times, in the middle of dreams, while writing other things.  When I was 26, I joined the army.  The days before I left, I would bury my head in her breasts – like I did when I was a baby – to soak her up.  I knew that was the last time I would see her alive and I needed to keep a piece…  She’s in a lot of my plays in some way and when I am really tired, I slip into her southern way of speaking.  Nora Lee Phillips Morris…could sing a whole church happy…right in the middle of the blues…

Being a storyteller means remembering and sharing even when you got the blues…