So. I'm Here.

in Oklahoma

Okay. Real talk. 

I am holding it together with a bobby pin and also losing my shit simultaneously. 

I am very safe and cool (as in temperature) and not mosquito-bitten in my grandma’s house. 

And also, staying in this city again makes me wanna cry. 

Yesterday was Juneteenth, and I freed myself from educating people. I began reading Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison.  I celebrated with old friends last Friday and Saturday.

Today is the summer solstice. 

Tomorrow is the full Strawberry Moon. I’m gonna go figure out what that means. On TikTok. 

In late November, I wrote a poem asking how I ended up in Guatemala. It’s in the book of poems I self-published in December. I read it to some friends on Zoom this morning and realized some synchronicities.

Oklahoma is where “I had built myself/ a 3-star prison,/ safe from the sound of/ hollow promises and allegiance.” It still feels like “I locked the covers of purpose/ in the cell beside me,/ painted the cinder block pink.” Oklahoma is cute and really safe. But I “settled into a home in the wrong place/ because it was comfy beneath/ the fuzzy weighted blanket.”  I was a bit delusional in a bad way, not the new, exciting, manifestation way. I wrote about how “the warden” of my OK prison cell block “brought my letters from outside,/ the smile that thanked him/ forgot it was in the wrong location.” The comfort and ease had lulled me for so long. 

My second year in Guatemala, I started to feel like “I wasn’t s’posed to be here.” I wrote that it “was the first train outta town./ I looked too quick/ at the destination,/ just a point on a map,/ far enough from my detention center/ to feel new.” I wanted it to feel like freedom, like “a life without borders.”

It didn’t feel like that. 

Now that I’m back to Oklahoma, for an indeterminate amount of time, I’m feeling these things again. On the way out of my hometown two years ago, “I drug too many tin can tears/ down the tracks.” So I’m currently in the process of the “circle back,” trying to “sweep up some debris” of my feelings and history.

And it feels like fucking chaos. But I know “if I keep opening Black books,/ they gon’ spell North Star.”