these are: prayers, rants, questions, waking dreams, conversation, verses, curses, verbal wordplay and chu'ch. when you read this, we are community, please holla back.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010 Reception 6PM, Program 6:30PM Poets & Playwrights presents
SoonCome: Poems Painted & Spoken
by Yvonne Fly Onakeme EtagheneThe Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center 208 West 13th Street (btwen 7th & 8th aves) New York, NY 10011$8 online (http://www.gaycenter.org/node/5226)$10 at the door
Soon Come: Poems Painted & Spoken is a multi-media art exhibit and poetry performance by Yvonne Fly Onakeme Etaghene and will debut Etaghene's visual art. Her art is acrylic and spray painted visual poems passionately splashed on canvas and wood surfaces in order to share the colors of her soul. The space will have life-size poetry hanging around you, video art as well as a loving, tender, soul-deep performance of Etaghene's poetry spanning the last decade of her career. The poems shared will be about the revelry, magic, heartache and angst of love. Etaghene gives you these poems and paintings with open palms and heart, reaching to love you, ever more, ever deeper.
i love you like the breath i was born with, you are the song i move with. this poem in my bones is for you you make me feel like sky, like honey, like red soil in my homeland feels on my feet i love you like dawn loves to yawn good morning like dew loves the blades of grass she always returns to the moment you enter my arms, i feel at home, i feel like who i always was but needed you to remind me, you give me hallelujah and amen all day you bring me bliss without even trying and i love you with a tremendous tenderness these words don't do justice.
FYI: I'm performing tonight and tomorrow! Roll thru if you're in the vicinity and/or spread the good word!
Friday, April 23, 2010, 8pm to 10:30pm
WESLEYANUNIVERSITY April (Asian, Asian-American, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern & Queer) Awareness Month
200 Church Lounge (at 200 Church St.)
Middletown, Connecticut (Please email cawkwardrich@wesleyan.edu if you're interested in performing, before Thursday night.)
***FREE
Saturday, April 24, 2010, 8pm
WESLEYANUNIVERSITY Solo Performance
200 Church Lounge (at 200 Church St.)
Middletown, Connecticut ***FREE
your voice all raspy and baritone with your lips closed
you
got me wrapped in you
you sing to me with your toes
you look at me and you make me believe in the dead
baby you could make an atheist a believer
in fairydust and poems
the way you say my name
sounds like poems you wrote for me and
your poems move mountains in me
my yes to anything you want from me
falls from my eyes
I’d be lying
if I said I don’t want you here
all these broken promises wrapped up in my bedsheets
I will burn the bed and sleep on the floor with you
because from the emptiness, there’s room for you
for all of this
I write you poems like this
trying to figure out if I like you
when I know I love you
you make me rock and twirl and whine my hips
I can’t even breathe without looking into all I see us being next year
it’s so
far past what I’m used to, what I’m used to, I used to stand still, I feel my feet running with my head turned back looking to you, looking for you, expecting you here
and you’re here
you rock me
when I was done with stones
you wrap me up in egusi and I can’t even—
say—you—you take the words out of my throat
and they sit on the floor between us
stretching and slithering away
giving us privacy
I want to blow glass for you
I do, and make you a house out of whatever you want—verses? brick? dance? kisses? my breath?
I’m at a loss
for words.
I don’t lose words
words find me when I’m lost
but I’m at a loss for words
all the ones I find still feel absent of what’s between the two of us
can you understand what I’m saying?I’m saying nothing
nothing gets said in poems like this, you have to feel it like a raging beat tearing your chest open
how can I confess what’s all over my face?how can you not know I want to have your babies?
do you want me to say it? do you need me to tell you?
I am telling you
in front of strangers, the birds, my past can bear witness
the priestess in me I be know I know no other way
but to give it all up to you
step aside and let the love crawl through my bones and stamp the beat out
can you hear it?
tell me you can hear it so we can dance to it
tell me you can feel it so we can rock to it
tell me this, tell me, tell me, tell me, please tell me you are here with me
I need you, I need you to—just breathe here with me right now
you give me shivers and little fireflies in my belly
and I want to hold your smile in my navel
this feeling in me strong enough to lift an anvil with my thoughts from across the room.
(on Sunday, March 21, 2010, a group of Queer Nigerians in New York City got together to have dinner and all be in the same room for the first time. this was written after that.)
I wanna be close to you
you and I who are from the same place, soil, laughter
I wanna be close to the places our souls overlap
this is where my smiles live
egusi and pounded yam and pepper soup
are all ways for me to be close to you
you cook in the kitchen
I come up behind you, hold you and lay my head on your back
I just want to be close to you
feel your breath
know you’re real
know there's more than one me
know someone else has the same rhythms in their blood
has the same blood
know someone else has this many vowels in their name
I want to know someone else whose name sounds like a poem when it’s spoken
round sound full with beats dips valleys drums and heartbeats vibrating in their name
I want to know someone who knows Nigeria this way
I want to look at you
you who looks at me and looks like me
smiles like me
you who I know already and don’t
and want to
and you who I love already
who is family
you who are who I’ve been looking for
you who are me
you who have taught me in one night more about home than I can put into this poem
I wanna be close to you
us sagging jeans, tight jeans, bright colors, dark colors, shy, outspoken, exactly the same, completely different, beautiful earrings, sexy boots, sneakers and barefoot
so much flava
Edo and Jos and Patani and Lagos and Yoruba and Igbo and Urhobo and Ijaw and DeltaState gets the last word cuz she the one writing
I love us
I want to touch you
like how you want to touch a rainbow or a newborn or run through sprinklers in the summer
I want to be with you, be around you, call you by your full name, the whole thing, the long long name that everyone tries to find shortcuts to avoid, gives you nicknames you never asked for and American names and French names and English names but baby I only want to call you by your proper name, the whole thing, and I will say it twiceeverytime so you know how much I love it
I want you
I want to feel you breathe
have summer with you
always make you feel understood
when no one understands
or maybe they do, but not quite the way you need them to
I want you
I want to flirt with you
playfully
with no intention of anything but being playful with you
to tease you
and eat the crepes you make
(and plantain and yam and stew and goat and fish)
I want to listen to your stories and see my face painted in the words you say
when you’re saying words that describe you
and somehow me too
and I want you, in the purest sense, I want your stories and the things that hurt you and the things that lift you, build you, make you happy, to come to light,
I want you to bring all of you into the circle of all our arms
this is what I mean when I say I want you
I want your spirit in the building, in the room, in the circle, here
I want to hear about who you love and why
I want to know about your little brother
your sister
your mother
your father
you
your joys
your confusion
you
I want all of you to come here
sit here
be here
breathe here
it’s—it’s just wow.
to know you
to know you like this is wow
when you speak, I feel it in me because I’ve lived what I’ve lived
you are my family
and I wrote this for you
I came home and I can’t sleep and I can’t watch any movies or read anything
all I can do is think about all of us
all of us
all I can do is lay here and think
and feel all the magic you are
this is the poem that is too small to fit all of this
how many times and how many people and how many books have told all of us that we don’t exist?
and there we were, recreating the recipes our mamas, daddies, aunties taught us to make and bringing them to each other from all parts of the city
to look into the eyes
of the ones
that don’t exist
tell me what else is that but magic?
and that is why I can’t sleep tonight
that is why even though I walked through that door with a broken heart, something shifted and brought laughter into me when I saw you
I learned awhile ago that even when I am tired and hurting and unclear
the thought of our queer Nigerian stories
always brings me joy
I started writing tonight because I thought maybe I should put it all down somewhere
like I can bottle the laughter in that room and conjure it up when I need to
{today a friend wrote a poem for me that brought tears of gratitude & honor to my eyes. this is my response. as poets, we joyously give so many words to the world but sometimes poets just want someone to write a poem for them for once, you know? with much love to claudia moss. thank you.}
say everything. set aside pride. bleed a little. risk something. speak the fear out loud so i can walk thru it. open. open. open wider. open bigger. open deeper.
speak give unfold unwrap unravel let go give in be wrong apologize recognize say what I mean
admit I don’t know
admit I do know
show the truth walk my truth
walk my talk. keep my word. be my word. be bigger than my word
courage in the building means more than cursing out a stranger when they piss you off
it means loving your lover
loving yourself
humble
on the humble
remember when tupac said “humility is sexy”? he was right
cry
cry again
cry for all that’s unsaid
not giving in order to receive reciprocity
not giving in order to be recognized
not giving in order to be thanked
giving just to give—that’s what love is.
grieving
not to disappear in the grief,
not to lose one’s self in the grief
grieving because it’s what I feel
and running from it don’t make it any less real
stop running
take off shoes
sit
listen
LISTEN
breath
breathe
open eyes to what eyes didn’t know how to see
until now.
if i whisper this tenderness into the night of my bed
& you're not here to hear
does the tender matter?
should I have given you the tender when you were here to receive it?
doesn’t matter
this is the only moment I have
and in it I am sending you tender on the backs of snowflakes and raindrops
I have to believe that that tender will make its way onto the curve of your neck
to rest there
like I would
if I was there
i love you. should i have not said that? cuz i do. should i have not felt that? cuz that's the only way i could not say that.
I wanna watch you watch me walking to you, wrap my arms around you, feel your arms around all of me.and melt
do you know how much I want to play it safe?
I want to hide from the simple fact of
I want you back and
ain’t no hiding from that
that fact is in my purse, on my palm, hanging from my earlobe, in my tea,
sitting on the bus next to me
coming out the mouth of an actress on the movie screen
it’s everywhere
it’s in my tears, in each step I run around that track, is under my breath
in my breath
is my breath
how do I be free
from the fear of exposing what I fear you will reject of me?
by letting you see the truth
the broken beautiful bruised perfect imperfect of me
I look forward to seeing her like we have a standing date; every 2 to 3 weeks, usually on Saturday or Sunday mornings.I wake up early on my weekend (a rarity for me), trying to avoid the rush of women getting their nails, toes, eyebrows did.I always ask for her.I sit before her.we exchange familiar how are yous.smiling, she comments on the bright colors I wear.the first time I told her my name, she smiled and said “everything about you is free.”that made my spirit happy.
she’s in her mid to late twenties, wears heels all day and pretty things while everyone else wears sneakers and flip flops.she dresses up for work like work is on her way to somewhere sexier and more important.
while all the other manicurists ask me to pick from a photo album of nail designs so they can carefully stare at it then re-create the image on my nails, lily (my manicurist) just asks me to pick the colors I want and tells me “I know what you want.”I tell her she’s an artist.she laughs.I tell her I’m serious.she smiles and goes about the business of making my nails beautiful.she designs beauty off the top of her head, each nail a unique design of fuschia, purple, turquoise, yellow, lavender, gold glitter and silver glitter.each nail is an impromptu improvisational work of art that will live on my body for the next few weeks.each time I look at my nails, catch a stranger on the train admiring my nails or a friend compliments me on my nails, I smile and silently thank lily.I am consistent with this self-love ritual of taking the time to get my nails done.even when I don’t make dance class as often as I like or don’t drink as much water as I know I should, I make sure I tend to my nails, I make sure that I take that time to relax and let myself be still.
I watch her, like a student, I watch her take care to take care, speaking rapidly to her coworkers, laughing at their jokes, making her own.she occasionally laughs with me, asks me how I am but is mostly quiet, firm with the filing, cutting and buffing of my nails.firm but gentle with it too.knowing in a way that comes with repetition—like I know my poems, she knows my nails.
the last time she did my nails, when she was done, I looked at the masterpiece of my nails and beamed, “you’re the best!”she responded, “I like it when you say that.because it’s true.”lily got that undercover swagger like what!?!
me?I love butches like some of y’all like your coffee black, no sugar—strong and undiluted.y’all know this.but.but there’s something subtly hypnotic about her, quiet and lovely.charming and laid back.femme.feminine in this sweet way that brings softness to my eyes.
this affair is a sweet little thing.a hushed secret that amuses me.no kissing.she’s held my hands more tenderly than some former lovers.that’s real talk.I watch her.one of those women who doesn’t know how amazing she is.one of those women wrapped up in taking care of everyone else.I wonder if anyone holds her un-manicured hands with the tenderness she holds mine.I wonder if her eyes watch someone buff and polish and file and file and file again her nails, watch someone open bottle of liquid color and apply wet brush to her nails once twice, then a shiny, clear top coat.I wonder if anyone ever took her nails and made 10 visual art pieces on them for her to walk around with and feel beautiful because of.
she’s my favorite manicurist.her heels, her laughter, she’s soft spoken but her fire bursts out once in awhile in the way she sculpts her words, especially if she’s slightly annoyed.lily.the unexpected affair with no lovemaking, but plenty of intimate moments.we keep our clothes on and don’t kiss.
