Composure: Karla Holloway

Composure
(for Karla Holloway)

if hope made fabric
like its own style of weaving
like the thick strength of soft
you'd be wearing it

if grace published dance steps
like shoeprints to keep going
like a sure turn to here
you'd be walking it

if beauty released a soundtrack
like bone structured bass-line
or a stretched sketch in ink
you'd be humming it

and
if bright put on a light show
with a symphony of leaves
and a reservoir of stays
i'd guess that you had
composed it.
_______
Karla Holloway is the William Kenan Professor of English and African and African American Studies at Duke University. Please read everything she's written as soon as you can.

This is part of a series of poems and collages called The Listening Project.

Nia Wilson

Nia
(for Mama Nancy)

your face is a playground
for things that grow
or that want to
and
your hands are gardens
for all that flies

your cheekbones are support beams
for everything fierce
everything wild
that tends toward love

i think your arms
must be passageways
to homes thought impossible
to marooned desires

i think your skin shares
a freckled map
of endless mines
of water prepped
for communal baptism

********
Nia Wilson is Director of SpiritHouse

This comes from a series of poems and collages called The Listening Project.

Kai Lumumba Barrow

Training
(for Kai)
if fun house mirrors
and loose sunk chains
could speak out loud
and scratch toward move

if curled archives
stacked under urgency
colored in spilled desire
were on display

if brown maps
stretched directions
of more than now
of sticky lifting
left calling cards

if revolution
had a whole car tag
a muralled rush

i could hear that
i could see it
i could recognize all of it
trained in the practice
of knowing you

**********

Critical Resistance is one of the many places that Kai makes revolution.

This is part of a series of poems and collages called The Listening Project.

Aisha Peay

for Aisha


i think you carve

your statements

into iron

round and solid

sounds of knowing


or maybe you shake

sand and gravel

through hardcover wings

firmly out towards yes


i would call you

a subtle detective

or a calm and self-sufficient

rescue mission

looking for what


i believe

we all

need
________
Aisha Peay is a doctoral candidate in English and Women's Studies at Duke University. Her dissertation focuses on black feminist anthologies. She has helped me find a place to live in more than one way.

This is part of a series of collages and poems called The Listening Project: A Poetics of Relation.

Treva Lindsey

for Treva

glamour
has a code
rhythm-based
like morse

urgent
like the bottom
of a hard-spoken
tone

critique
fortifies itself
with costumes
such that
the visual
beomes lyrical
allusion

to the song
yet to be
penned

or the dance
we should be
stretching for

all ready

_____

This is part of a series of poems and collages called The Listening Project: A Poetics of Relation.

Alisha Gaines: Shuck n' Strategy

for Alisha

Clearly

clearly
some of us
were made
for TV

some of us
can animate
the mundane

some of us
speak flat spaces
into declarative
remixing ruts
into interrogatives

some of us
open our hands
so minstrel spirits
fall through
and recolor
the everyday making
of same

at least one us
clearly

_______
Alisha Gaines is a doctoral candidate and instructor of English and African American Studies at Duke University. Her dissertation focuses on liberalism and passing in the 20th Century US. She also writes brilliantly on black masculinities and makes Micheal Jackson and the color yellow even cooler than they already were.

This is part of a series of poems and collages documented at The Listening Project: A Poetics of Relation.

Monica Miller

for Monica Miller

imagine landing
through some accidental decisions
on a ground of blossoms
dispersed upward in peals

or try
pushing yourself forward
finding that doorways
have names and gifts
that unstring
the need for striving

or maybe
there is a sharp
upward note
asymptote of conclusion
that when projected
with a hand to frame
wins everything
before wanting

what i mean to say is
when i wrote this
i was sitting
in the place i sat
at the moment
i decided
to go to the school
where i never knew
i would meet you

so therefore
miracles
are
______
Monica Miller is a professor of English and Africana Studies at Barnard College. Her book on black dandyism is forthcoming from Duke University Press. She makes it look easy to be as miraculous as we are.

This is part of a series of poems and collages. To see the whole set see The Listening Project: A Poetics of Relation.

Deborah Small: Break the Chains

for Deborah

like rubber-souled
stairsteps
or gavels with ridges
your voice builds
platforms
thick enough
for rollerskates

and in rhythm
with the last sigh
of the first bus home
your hand pulls
the seal
off the waiting punch-line
for the joke we're living

as a curled up
surprise for a
world in the wings
and a secret passageway
to the part of the story
when all the walls fall down

so
i know what happens
when a link bursts open
and steel reveals
its internal edges

i can see
the mosaic
of rubble painted clear
so I know what it means
that Deborah is here

every break
every chip
every slip
and mistake

gets a new life
and smoothed space
to grow

****************
Learn more about Deborah's organization Break the Chains

This is part of a series of poems and collages by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. To see the whole project go to The Listening Project: A Poetics of Relation.

Farah Jasmine Griffin

for Farah Jasmine Griffin

it could be
that bright paper
intentional folds
and stolen staples
are deceptively long term
propellers that
wing awake in our chests

it could be
that sound has its own
sweepstake calculus
that listening is the prize
when our eyes
close

it could be
that teaching is a faith
in rebirth
not through a doctrine
of more selves
but in rays of growth
frames of reflection

and
it could be
that I had
already known
all of these things
somehow

but it is
necessary
to say it

it is crucial
to say

that the first time
i heard
and recognized
each of those
truths

it was you
who was speaking

_______
Farah J. Griffin is a Professor of English and African and African American Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of and Who Set You Flowin' , Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends and If You Can't Be Free Be A Mystery. Something about the way Farah told me about Kitchen Table Press eight years ago gave birth to the obsessive research that still shapes my everyday.

This is part of a series of poems and collages by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. To see the whole series go to The Listening Project: A Poetics of Relation.

Phillis Wheatley: Something Like a Seance

The Difficult Miracle (where June Jordan meets Phillis Wheatley)

This is part of a series of collages and poems by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. See the rest of the seires at The Listening Project: A Poetics of Relation.

Born in June

to June (Jordan)

either the accident of my birth
starts in the miracle of your name
or the intention my word
lives in the groove of the same

laugh
and
say
both

and else you brave vulnerability
leaves me soaking in salt
then each essay builds trapeezes
for my heart to sing

and again you
shake your head
both

thus from an honest body
choosing anything now
light define of alive

i say "yes"
and know

***************
Studying June

This is part of a series of poems and collages by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. To see the entire series go to The Listening Project.

mama audre: generate light

for audre lorde (to be whispered in hurricane season)

mama audre
how did you no
facing gale
force consent

to plant letters
like collard seeds
who new how
to ride wind
dispersing into
breath?

who did you
make
a line less birth
certificate
tracing from
Grenada
to St. Croix
to New Orleans
a bee-line
designed to clog machinge guns
an oracle
fashioned from scraps
of cloth and ink?

"i wish
you were living

(up the road)"

and
i
no
that
you
are
********************
This is part of a series of poems and collages by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. To see the entire series go to The Listening Project.
Basic information on Audre Lorde

Loving Audre

The Intimacy of Praise: Wahneema Lubiano

for Wahneema

attention gains wings
outfits
land
from the way you listen

like a magnetic lift
a secret spring
that firms eye contact
into a place to be

what was glass ceiling
becomes sturdy
to rest books on
past our reach

or foam legos
get born out
your phrases
placing each into
soft frames for knowing

in other words
i was never going to stay
with one metaphor
so thanks
for building
the slide

Wahneema Lubiano is a Professor of African and African American Studies, Literature and Women's Studies at Duke University. She is also the author and in person speaker of words that will blow your mind everytime. Despite all of this, she is the most generous teacher I have met.
_____________
This is part of a series of poems and collages by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. To see the entire series go to The Listening Project.

Hard Core: for Tina Campt

for Tina Campt

you make me think
it might be appropriate
to brainstorm with chisels
to rock-climb bare-handed
to say what i mean

when you look up
and nod forward
it's a head-butt to the last thought
and a measured faith in a desired now

as if you intend
abundant stones
to stand on
to test
to break through
to shape down to movement

like spinning a record
but much more
(hard core)

Tina Campt is a key figure in critical black diaspora studies and a Professor in Women's Studies and History at Duke University. She is one of the organizers of the Diasporic Hegemonies Conference Series and was also co-organizer of Reconstructing Womanhood: Beyond Empire, a conference in honor of Hazel Carby.

____
This is part of a series of poems and collages by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. To see the entire series go to The Listening Project.

The Intimacy of Praise: Maura Bairley

for Maura

if days had missions
cloaks, clocks and magic wands
so that peace was
a structured quest into faith

or if those barbed points
of intersection
met a quilted place
a made space
of meant limits
in soil-planted yes
fertile like a subtly voiced spell

and if i came upon this pathway
charted with the markings
of hand after hand
lovingly printed into earth

i would look north
i would look east
i would look west
i would look south

knowing that somehow
you had done this

___________________
Maura has built the Sexual Violence Prevention and Response Program at Columbia University
out of love and more love.
Read more about the program here

This is part of a series of poems and collages by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. To see the entire series go to The Listening Project.

The Intimacy of Praise: Cheryll Y. Greene

for Cheryll

for an adolescent eternity
which might have been a year
my dream
was to be editor
of Essence Magazine

to write in the spirit
of glamour and buffed brownness
to cushion the impossible success
such that soft would not mean empty

i remember sitting on a train
maybe fifteen years old afterschool
and releasing that plan
into tight puffs of change
airborne as the radioactivity of not knowing

and when i let drop that image
of myself
in a suit
holding always glossy pages
and breathed in the possibility that
anything might be waiting
that words had their own story
and black shapes to space looped
a miracle always yet untold

i was having one of the moany
self-crashing
scattering faith moments
that might have made me ready
might have let me deserve
might have helped me want
to know you one day

Cheryll Y. Greene, along with comrade Alexis DeVeaux, was the architect of a intervention into the politics of Essence Magazine that used the fashion magazine as a platform to publish incisive and revolutionary work about the black diaspora between 1979-1985 . Cheryll Green is also the former managing editor of SOULS the Journal of the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University and is currently a visionary editor and artist blessing the world with her crucial cuts and her expansive spirit.

This is one of a series of collages and poems Alexis Pauline Gumbs did as part of the Listening Project. Click here to see the full series.

'Shading the Ground on Which We Walk': Young Black Feminists Furthering Scholar Activism

As we begin this FireWalker Movement, it is important to know where we've been, where we are, and where we are trying to go. We ask that you add a comment about how you "shade the ground on which you walk." How have you, how do you, how do you wish to impact the world and people you touch day to day?