ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Nicole Morris holds an MA in Education, with concentrations in decolonizing strategies in education and anticolonial resistance movements. Her research is rooted in the intersectionality of identity, structural oppression, and BIPOC liberation. Poetry informs all aspects of her life as a mother, activist, scholar, and educator. She resides next to a river that is dry for half the year and runs wild the other half in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Poets Resist
Edited by Sandra L. Faulkner
June 5, 2020
Edited by Sandra L. Faulkner
June 5, 2020
birthing black boys
i took my last breath the moment
my sons grabbed at their first one;
forty hours of labor between the pair,
pink and white spotted topped with black hair,
i had to fight those nurses to lay them on my chest,
my milk, my first act of rebellion, reclamation
i gasped as they broke out through the other side of me,
into this white, into this this this light
and i stopped breathing then
i will tell you there is no waiting to exhale
my life however far it stretches, to whichever coast of sunrise or sunsetting
no inhalation, not never, no matter how shrill my lungs keen:
they born black in a nation that eats babies like them,
food for the devil unless we hide them real good,
dress them real right, teach them to speak in whispers,
feather light corvid kings in waiting and even then,
even then sweet babies, i can’t breathe for the fear
of the what ifs and the are you safes
alongside the don’t leaves with the hide with mes
the toll of birthing black boys into men.
Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
