Vanessa Everts

“when i am afraid to speak is when i speak. that is when it is most important. – the freedom in fear”
― Nayyirah Waheed, salt.

“my english is broken.
on purpose.
you
have to try harder to understand
me.
breaking this language
you so love
is my pleasure.
in your arrogance
you presume that i want your
skinny language.
that my mouth is building
a room for
it
in the back of my throat.
it is not.


--i have seven different words for love. you have only one. that makes a lot of sense”
― Nayyirah Waheed, Salt

“knowing your power
is what creates
humility.
not know your power
is what creates
insecurity.”
― Nayyirah Waheed, Salt

“our tragedy begins humid.
in a humid classroom.
with a humid text book. breaking into us.
stealing us from ourselves.
one poem. at a time.

it begins with shakespeare.

the hot wash.
the cool acid. of
dead white men and women. people.

each one a storm.

crashing. into our young houses.
making us islands. easy isolations.
until we are so beleaguered and
swollen
with a definition of poetry that is white skin and
not us.
that we tuck our scalding. our soreness.
behind ourselves and
learn
poetry.
as trauma. as violence. as erasure.
another place we do not exist.
another form of exile
where we should praise. honor. our own starvation.

the little bits of langston. phyllis wheatley.
and
angelou during black history month. are the crumbs. are the minor boats.
that give us slight rest.

to be waterdrugged into rejecting the nuances of
my own bursting
extraordinary
self.
and to have
this
be
called
education.

to take my name out of my name.
out of where my native poetry lives. in me.
and
replace it with keats. browning. dickson. wolf. joyce. wilde. wolfe. plath. bronte. hemingway. hughes. byron. frost. cummings. kipling. poe. austen. whitman. blake. longfellow. wordsworth. duffy. twain. emerson. yeats. tennyson. auden. thoreau. chaucer. thomas. raliegh. marlowe. burns. shelley. carroll. elliot…

(what is the necessity of a black child being this high off of whiteness.)

and so. we are here. brown babies. worshipping. feeding. the glutton that is white literature. even after it dies.


(years later. the conclusion:


shakespeare is relative.

white literature is relative.

that we are force fed the meat of
an animal
that our bodies will not recognize. as inherent nutrition.
is not relative.
is inert.)”
― Nayyirah Waheed , Nejma