00:02:21.660I wonder, sometimes we invite people when we start to introduce themselves and we sort of mean it both as like, give us your professional spiel.
00:02:30.760And also, like, if you feel comfortable to unmask, tell us a little bit about how you actually are and who you actually are today.
00:02:39.200Oh, well, thank you for the invitation and the undressed version.
00:02:45.640That's really loving and I appreciate it.
00:03:05.000So at some point in my life, I take on and put off the work of organizer as I have capacity.
00:03:11.080And I, you know, I think I'm just a storyteller who uses words to do alchemy work and uses
00:03:19.000storytelling as a way to destroy old worlds and build new ones.
00:03:23.000and a little bit of there's a hat that I put on and take on and put on and take off that you know
00:03:30.120works with documentary and film and then there's a hat around I'm like working on the I'm like
00:03:35.920slyly working on a jazz poetry album right now and also I've been getting into pottery
00:03:41.640lately in a physical medium but that's neither here nor there I I'm doing I'm doing I am doing
00:03:50.600I'm doing and I am being and I am trying really hard to remain as tangibly rooted in the body
00:04:00.320as possible right now. I, you know, 2022 has been a whirlwind of a year. I went on tour with my
00:04:10.760first book. It was my first book tour and bought a home with my partner and we're getting married.
00:04:18.960And so I'm doing a lot of adulting this year. So there's a lot of like shifts in privilege, a lot of shifts in like the material reality of life, shifts in career.
00:04:31.260And, you know, as the year comes, you know, the fall season is like a reflective season for me. So I'm just I'm just I'm being in it.
00:04:39.300And that's, you know, depending on the hour, it's, you know, it's beautiful and hard and, you know, all the things, but I'm enjoying it.
00:04:51.220Can you talk a little bit about how writing those poems?
00:04:58.220I'm talking about your first book, you know.
00:05:01.020I got to spend a lot of time with it this week.
00:05:03.160Can you share for us a little bit about how writing those poems worked for you?
00:05:10.220Those poems are very much a story about an incredibly painful, brutal reality in the world and trying to encant for, conjure for, write psalms for something better.
00:05:26.260Yeah, I think what was the momentum behind Gabo Yaya, what felt most urgent, was first, it felt incredibly declarative, the poems at first.
00:05:42.140I felt a need to process in real time my experiences as an organizer, my experiences as a Black queer person who was coming out in the South in a family of Southerners.
00:05:56.000It felt like there was a lot of declarative processing that the poems held for me.
00:06:02.920And I am still someone trying to think through my sort of, like, theoretical analysis of the I and the speaker and poems.
00:06:13.160And the project was a me project, was an Ariel Marie in real time as we go project.
00:06:21.560And I had a book deal with a publisher in 2017. I won a book prize. And these little raw, wild, kind of like rascally poems were, you know, just kind of as is with this publisher.
00:06:45.040And through the editing process, I realized that there were more voices and more momentum, more mobility in the poems, more inertia. And I wanted space for that. And I think that that publisher wanted to condense really cacophonous ideas into singular voices.
00:07:03.620I wanted to simplify complex ideas, intersectional ideas, because the publisher and the people that were editing the book themselves had no space to consider the intersections.
00:07:19.320Once I recognized it as a function of anti-Blackness, as misogynoir, I realized I had to, as a then-organizer, as a person who did and does truly believe that you are writing into the worlds that you want to build and that poems are scaffolding for those worlds, I had to kind of make a decision.
00:07:39.800And I, people that are in the restorative justice spaces know you set boundaries and you can ask folks to meet you there or you can, you know, change the relationship. And so I went to the publisher. I said, hey, this is working. This is what I need. This is what this book means. And the publisher wasn't able to meet those, meet me at those boundaries. And so we parted ways.
00:07:58.940And I think then, and again, rambling, but this is the nature of intersectional origin stories. But I think then, I mean, I was terrified. I was sad. I was angry at the sort of, like, reality of what was happening at this, like, career mark.
00:08:18.800But I was also excited and thrilled about the possibility to do something different with the book. And in that, was able to explore fugitivity, was able to explore, you know, if there can be abolition inside of a poem, what does it look like, was able to just be a maximalist on the page, I think.
00:08:40.180And from that point, I was like, well, if I don't have a publisher, if there's no one telling me what I can't do, right, if there's no one saying that I've got a font criteria, I've got a margin criteria, and I've got, you know, a line limit, I've got a hell, a page limit, what can we do if we just explore and play?
00:09:00.940And there, the book just started to root and it started to, I felt like I was, there's some poems that I feel like I didn't even write because there was just such a conjuring practice. There are poems in Gumbo Yaya that scare me, that maybe didn't go through an editing process because they felt necessary, but they felt too big for me to touch.
00:09:21.780And I just let it be and didn't police it. And I think that, I think the book, I love, I love, I'm at a point now, right? Because you go through a journey with your books. But I'm at a point now where I just love Gumbo Yaya because it is a first book on police.
00:09:40.020It is like me doing what the fuck I wanted and having a rigor there, having a theoretical understanding, having a craft understanding of what is happening.
00:09:53.360But it's just so young that it just kind of became just a glimpse of a thing that I think I'll be chewing through for, you know, as long as I'm writing.0.95
00:10:01.400I want to highlight poetry as a scaffolding that builds the world.
00:10:06.800Slack yes to that. And how appropriate and powerful a term to rest on that it was unpoliced
00:10:15.480when so much of the story of the book is about policing. Yeah. I wanted to hop in. So this is
00:10:23.720Zoe. Thank you, Missing Richards, for letting me participate in this conversation. So this piece
00:10:29.960about policing and editing. And for me, I'm wondering about organizing and the poetry and
00:10:42.100some of the editing that we find ourselves doing in social justice, social change movement. I
00:10:47.560wonder if you could talk about any ways that you've come up against that and how you've
00:10:56.520addressed it, sort of the similarities in those worlds, if you see similarity in those worlds.
00:11:02.140Oh, I do. Oh, I absolutely do. I think I was talking with Danes Smith and Franny Cholpe on
00:11:06.800the Versus podcast a while ago because I am someone who just loves the sort of like meticulous
00:11:14.720beauty in form, but I didn't even, I didn't have, it took me so long to reach
00:11:21.760a neutral at least and now maybe positive relationship with form because it is taught
00:11:28.760it's taught as the a poetic policing it's taught as a way to to to tame you know as if as if the
00:11:38.680poem is a beast right these these wild emotions these these like new young thoughts these burgeoning
00:11:45.240sort of understandings of the world these reorientations are wild and we must restrain
00:11:50.060them with form. And that is the way that, you know, you know, schooling and even, you know,
00:11:58.160outside of universities and colleges and that side of academia. As young as middle school and
00:12:03.940high school, the way that form is taught is as this sort of like sanitized, clean thing. And so
00:12:10.520it took me a long time. I think I grew with Gumpo Yaya because I think, I mean, I first started
00:12:17.220writing this book in 2015, maybe 2014. So I think that I grew with Gumbo Yaya and sort of my
00:12:25.820analysis, my approach to organization has shifted over time with it. I think a lot of my relationship
00:12:37.660to poems and the editing process has changed because I see the editing and
00:12:47.020know I see editing and organizing as a like a kiln maybe um instead of a cage let's go with that
00:12:57.420maybe that's that's a new thought but like I instead of like locking up locking an idea up
00:13:05.540or tying something down or cleaning it up I think the kiln like the kiln idea is like
00:13:12.280you put you put this beautiful thing in the kiln you fire the baby up i'm really enjoying my
00:13:19.220pottery phase apparently you you fire it up see if if the poem isn't strong enough if there's a
00:13:26.440weak spot if there's a crack that you know the the finished pocket would suffer along the line
00:13:30.680then the kiln just kind of reveals it to you and then you get to decide you get to decide how you
00:13:36.600build around if the weak spot is actually a larger praxis of the idea itself, right? Which I think
00:13:43.860sometimes I leave weak spots, what Western or Eurocentric poetics might say is a weak spot in
00:13:52.540a poem. So not as strong enjambment or maybe inconsistent capitalization, which I love,
00:13:59.300Or something like that. Use it to divert attention or to, you know, make something uncomfortable or incongruent for the reader. And as long as you know what's happening on the page, then you can come up, you say, you do whatever you want about what's happening on the page.
00:14:21.220do. It doesn't mean that the poem itself needs to be more sanitized or more perfect. And so form
00:14:28.580for me has become a part of the editing process. I'll throw an idea that feels just not complete
00:14:34.820yet into form, into a sestina, into a sonnet, just to see if there's something else, there's
00:14:41.300another side of it that I'm not, that I haven't met yet. As far as organizing a body of work goes,
00:14:48.440oh your guess is as good as mine I think I treat organizing books I'm not to the point of organizing
00:14:55.220the second collection yet but with with the first collection I'll still go back to the
00:15:01.020the master document and move fittings around because it bothers me to look in the book and
00:15:07.440see oh that would have been yeah clever or sly these two poems were together why did I think
00:15:15.140about that or I see poems that like I kept going for another three stands I'm like well you really
00:15:20.900could have just clipped it there and that that's a whole new poem I just I'm not I'm not ever
00:15:25.680satisfied I don't know if it's a Sagittarius in me or if it's the fact that I see poems as little
00:15:31.000worlds and I'm just like well the world you know well you leave the poem and like I think I like
00:15:36.260to think that like you leave a poem and then it's doing stuff while you're gone and then you come
00:15:40.640back to it. And that's why you see something new. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like I'll always be a
00:15:46.300little bit disgruntled with like the organization of a body of work. Cause I think there's no right
00:15:51.360answer for me and that's exciting, but also frustrating. Yeah. Yeah. I'm the same way. I'll
00:15:57.300just keep going. I'll just keep like working on something, working on it, working on it.
00:16:00.980And it's like, girl, leave it alone. Leave it alone. My editors hate me. Cause I mean,
00:16:05.940I think they were like their, their finger was hovering over the print button. And I was like,
00:16:09.980I literally I changed the entire order of the book. I took two poems out that, you know, I still think I still don't know if that was the right decision or not. But I was just it never feels done ever.
00:16:20.820Amanda Yates Garcia told us, her mentor had told her, you fix the problems with the first book and the second book. And that was a bit of relief to us. It's like, all of these pieces go forward. Every piece goes forward.
00:16:34.980one thing i loved watching videos of you perform your work aurielle is that they're different
00:16:41.340they're totally different performed there's call and response there's singing and some of the lines
00:16:47.800are just different or they stop and start in different places um yeah do you do you think
00:16:53.080about the future performance worlds of your pieces are there pieces of yours so this poem
00:16:59.840is a hex tread light one of my favorite but that one is like that seems like a piece that's meant
00:17:05.760to live a very rich life outside the context of the book like that's a piece that's gonna go
00:17:13.380into women's lives and queer people's lives and people's lives and give strength and also go into0.89
00:17:20.180rapist lives and give them fucking nightmares and i love that poem yeah yeah yeah i'm gonna answer0.94
00:17:25.440that in just a second I think my dog snuck outside okay I just gotta watch him he's he's1.00
00:17:31.900doing a lot can you repeat the question for me I think I asked like a really sloppy question
00:17:36.500no I love a lot of a lot of feelings in it but I guess I'm thinking about like the future of
00:17:43.520your poetry and especially when thinking about it being performed both by you or by other people
00:17:48.960in the case of the hex? Yeah. So my start in poetry was in slam. I started slamming at 14,
00:17:55.72015. And even before that was in a performance group here in Atlanta that does theatrical
00:18:00.980performances across the country. And then I went to performing arts high school. So I am a lesbian.
00:18:06.560I am a performer and the vehicle that made it to the finish line was poetry. But I'm always
00:18:13.580thinking about performance I recognize now that there's a part of it that is my little theorist
00:18:19.460brain that I'm trying to embrace I'm just thinking about the way that a thing acts in the world and
00:18:27.120how it what other conjuring is possible when you lift words from a page and put them in a room so
00:18:33.460I think I'm always writing thinking about the eventual sound the eventual sound of the
00:18:42.440work a lot of poems that i write change when i perform them and that's just because i i kind of
00:18:49.480believe in that in that like maybe southern baptist sort of thing of like you know the you let the
00:18:56.340spirit move you and you know maybe it's someone in that room who you know their energy confronts
00:19:05.520the energy of the poem or my energy and it makes a new thing possible and i and i love that i love
00:19:12.200that exchange and it feels very necessary to me. So I don't feel like, like I don't police my poems
00:19:19.160and they sure don't police me. You know, like we have a, we have a consensual relationship where
00:19:24.300we share agency and choice about what, what happens on the page and in the world. And you
00:19:29.580know, sometimes I like to flex that and be like, see, I can change it at any point. You're not the
00:19:33.680boss of me, little poem. And the other part I think is that I can't make anyone decide to be
00:19:46.600a witch or a conjurer. My folks are Creole and we water folk, we swamp people. I descend from folks
00:19:53.140who were enslaved in Louisiana and conjuring and conjurers are in my lineage. I can't make anybody0.50
00:20:01.900dig into their lineage and find the conjurers and connect with them. I can't make anyone set an0.86
00:20:06.040altar. I can't make anyone hex their rapist, but I can offer a little roadmap the way it was offered
00:20:11.640to me and the way I needed it. When I needed it, it found me conjuring. And I think with something
00:20:20.160like the hex for rapists, I got so much joy from finding conjuring or being reconnected with the
00:20:30.060legacy of conjuring in my family. I got so much joy and it felt so good to be performing ritual
00:20:38.120work in a way that returned what is stolen systemically and historically from Black women,1.00
00:20:46.340from Black sims, from Black queer people. It gave me so much like peace and empowerment to reclaim0.83
00:20:52.300that. And I wanted to pass it along. And, you know, the statistics about sexual assault are
00:20:58.960abysmal. And if everybody who's ever been sexually assaulted or raped had a little hex in their back
00:21:05.400pocket, it'd be a lot of motherfuckers walking around without toes, you know, losing their0.99
00:21:11.440livelihood and actually holding on to the consequences and repercussions of taking1.00
00:21:17.940someone else's agency. I don't think the state will do it. I don't think police will do it. I
00:21:23.280know the hex will. So I wanted people to be able to feel welcomed in to a practice that does not
00:21:32.300require anything of them other than to take a little bit of dog shit in a glass and go to a1.00
00:21:37.420cemetery and stomp on their rapist's name. And I don't know what it'll look like when I perform1.00
00:21:43.720that poem. I haven't done it yet. That's one of the poems that scares me in the book because it
00:21:47.940is truly like that's it's not a plain play hex you know that's really I don't I'm not being coy
00:21:55.620or cute or it's not to sell books when I say tear this page out I mean really like I named my rapists
00:22:02.740in that in that poem and that's a name I don't say out loud so because I know I know what it
00:22:08.860means to say someone's name out loud when you've already put them in your shoe so I am inviting
00:22:15.580people to be in performance with me and to kind of to recognize what what performance is you're
00:22:23.000putting on something and know what happens when we do that when we're intentional about the what
00:22:29.500what we're practicing and how we practice it okay I'm gonna leave it there that was probably 20
00:22:33.920minutes so don't put it down just yet because I know that over the summer even in our coven
00:22:40.840conversations with some of the things that were happening that continue to happen. We were having
00:22:46.100conversations around feeling powerless, feeling angry, feeling rage. And there's been so much work
00:22:54.640put into silencing the anger and the rage of women-identified people, femme people,
00:23:02.800etc right and so I'm wondering about sort of when that thought emerged about the hex because it can
00:23:11.880it's a very like volatile like thing right and so I just wonder when that sprinkling of an idea
00:23:21.440came to you how did you like meet that inspiration you know I'm from Atlanta born and raised
00:23:32.560And this is, Atlanta is also my political home. I spent a good number of years, though, in the Bay Area. And I organized full time while I was there. And one thing that I had never come across before, ever, in all my days, was there would be, I was privileged to have connections to a lot of Black and Indigenous solidarity spaces.
00:23:54.200And there would be medicine folk from indigenous communities in the area and Black communities in the area, folks who did, whose work was spiritual and embodied practice, who would come to protest.
00:24:10.280And their job was to just bind the power, you know, thefted power of the police to bind their communications, you know, with hopes of protecting people who were on the front lines from arrest and from harm.
00:24:32.240And not that there was never an arrest and a protest
00:24:37.940And not that there was never anyone who got hurt
00:24:41.100But the energy that people felt at those protests
00:24:50.500The energy that rippled through, you know, hundreds of people
00:24:55.580When they realized that they were covered
00:25:00.240I mean, I saw this one girl watch one of her friends about to take a rest, and she runs up, and she slips her hand into the zip ties and pulls her friend's hand out of the zip ties.
00:25:32.620I can't even, I can't count how many protests I'd ever been to.
00:25:35.480But once I saw that, I never went to another protest without doing practice beforehand.
00:25:41.400And doing practice with witnesses.0.99
00:25:44.160Even, you know, my little liberal white girls who didn't know what the hell was going on, who thought, who were like, what is this wild animalistic shit y'all are doing?1.00
00:25:54.100Uh-huh, sit right there, move to front of the line because we know that y'all get, you know, brutalized last.0.99
00:26:00.780Just to be in space while folks did that, it changed what was possible.
00:26:08.020And so I, of course, I'm in this book talking about, I mean, I don't have a lot of memories or my body has chosen not to hold on to the memories of my experiences with sexual assault or rape.
00:26:21.800I have, and I don't need to, obviously, for my, you know, my folks or my body, they said, you know, you don't need this.
00:26:30.280So the healing process has been difficult for me because, you know, your body remembers smell, your body remembers, there's so much stuff that the body keeps score of.
00:26:40.100And so as I'm trying to write about this process, right toward my anger, the poems just weren't, they felt hollow. And that felt like a different kind of dangerous, to almost be flippant or to gesture towards something as significant as rape or sexual assault and not be, what word am I looking for?
00:27:07.440It felt dangerous to gesture towards rape and sexual assault in a poem and not be ruthless.
00:27:14.720And I didn't feel like I had enough memory to be ruthless about my specific experience.
00:27:22.220And so I thought what was more useful was, okay, it happened.
00:30:50.220to be just sitting at the feet of so many people who are doing audacious protest who protest this
00:31:00.480old world and are a part of building the new one. For me, I think I was always going to end up
00:31:09.920with utilizing poetics no matter what because poems offer me permission to envision a thing
00:31:23.640that doesn't exist. Poems give me a place to be as gluttonous or ridiculous or petty or, you know,
00:31:37.740precious or salacious. Poems are, I think it is Octavia who was talking in this interview I was
00:31:48.340watching and she said something along the lines, oh, I hate describing her. She says something along
00:31:53.940the lines of, academics will teach you that poems are a form. They are a material thing to be
00:32:01.940examined and to be read and to be interacted with that way. But poems for me are a way of life,
00:32:08.520a way of living and living the world. And Audre Lorde says something similar. And Zora has said
00:32:14.120something similar. And these are all people who are thinking about poetics as an embodied thing,
00:32:20.160poetics as a way to be what I think Joy Priest, who is an amazing writer, would call fugitive
00:32:27.800poetics, like fugitive embodying. I think there's something about Blackness that is, you know,
00:32:33.720Black people are inherently fugitive, inherently on the run, inherently outside of what is1.00
00:32:40.020normal or accepted just because of the way the world has built itself in antithesis of Blackness.1.00
00:32:47.820And well, I won't say the world has built itself. That's really lazy language. The way that white1.00
00:32:53.200people have built the world in antithesis of Blackness. And so I think a part of wayfinding0.98
00:33:00.000the new world is to embrace being on the Rhine. And these poems is being fugitives, being
00:33:07.640abolitionists being in protest. On the line, I'm trying to figure out how to do that in the way
00:33:14.180that has the same impact with the reader as my work in the streets would. My hope as someone who
00:33:20.660is always going to be oriented towards justice work and oriented towards organizing work, my hope
00:33:27.000is that as I'm writing, I'm also remaining rooted in the communities that are building the
00:33:34.720the modalities to make those you know fugitive worlds possible i have two questions i have so
00:33:41.840many questions but no i love this so many questions okay i'm gonna give you my first
00:33:46.340question but then i'm gonna give you my second question and i want to go back to the okay but
00:33:49.740i want the second question answered first okay okay okay first question terrible interviewer so
00:33:54.660sorry the first question is what are you listening to right now that's why we're gonna go to that
00:34:00.840answer that second. I, okay. All right. I know you know. I know you know. Okay. I just got
00:34:05.720goosebumps. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. But here's my first second question. Okay. Do you envision
00:34:17.260a world where we get to stop running? Wow. Okay. So I'm glad that this is an answer to your question.
00:34:29.140your second first question. This is an answer. I promise I'm going to get there. I just don't
00:34:34.840know how to walk in a straight line ever. So the scariest and most exciting thing to me about
00:34:40.260conjuring is that you have to believe what you can't believe. You have to believe. I never talk
00:34:54.580about this stuff. I don't talk about, anyway, but you know, you hang out with some witches,
00:34:58.320You start talking about fucking nine cups of water on the table and shit.0.97
00:35:02.320So you have to believe things that this world, this literal, tangible world, this real desk, this real room, this real world tells us are not possible, right?0.98
00:35:13.340Because being in a practice of conjuring, it's just reminding me that this world is a fabricated thing, too.
00:40:01.780I mean, someone worked really, really, really hard and fought their whole, the whole life to make sure that I could love the person who I wanted to love and we could walk outside, hold our hands and not get killed.
00:40:16.420Someone worked really hard to make that happen.
00:40:18.720And I know all the people who worked to make that possible are not here, but they believed it.
00:40:59.960people use your poems to do public ritual this is a question for both of you
00:41:06.120what poems are they can you read them to us what music is playing what is the ritual like
00:41:14.680what do they burn what do the people do this is also a question for your like thespian teen self
00:41:21.360which i my thespian teen self loves this question too right theater of the oppressed like augusta
00:41:29.220Boal? How do we bring it to the street? What is the praise poem that they're chanting when they0.94
00:41:33.460remember us on the day they stop running? How does your poem become public, visionary poetics?
00:41:42.200I gotta go look. I gotta go look. Y'all really asked me the questions. That's my favorite
00:41:47.700questions I've ever been asked. Thanks, Zoe. Zoe, you gotta take this course.
00:41:53.260Well, I think as far as performance, it has to be in Praise the Witch. It's my favorite poem. It can easily be enacted. I would love to see people reading it and just making huge pentagrams and just beautiful things.
00:42:18.220Yeah. And then I have another one like about like love called Always Remember, which is really old. And it's just one of those that I was like, oh, okay. It's like about love and being sort of the villain and the victor, victim in relationships.
00:42:37.500because I think a lot of the pieces that I wrote were like oh you did me wrong but this one was
00:42:44.140one that's more like oh yeah I did some stuff too so yeah I don't know if I've got any like
00:42:50.860what I would consider a protest poem is by way of like Sonia Sanchez and such like I don't know
00:42:55.540if I have any protest poems in Gumbayaya specifically but I do think that there is
00:43:00.160a poem that I would love to see alive at a protest.
00:43:07.200And that one is transhistorical for the ex of my girls.
00:43:11.620And I just think that there's just so much there that is so,
00:43:20.540there's like confrontation of liberal whiteness
00:43:23.800and how it tries to like adhere itself to Black radical movement.0.99
00:43:28.880I think Tres the Circle for the Examine Dress is such a badass poem, like I'm about to get your ass0.90
00:43:34.760poem, that that gives me, I just see somebody like at the protest on the mic and I see called0.88
00:43:40.960a response too. And I love called a response. So like that, that is exciting for me. I love this
00:43:46.560because one of the things that one of my spiritual friends and like mentor leader friend, someone
00:43:56.620with in a practice that has informed a lot of my practice they always say this thing their name is
00:44:01.060Che they always say this thing about how we're ancestors in training all of us and so the work
00:44:05.480that we do now is to distill ancestral energetic matter that our future generations have access to
00:44:13.280and so like we need to make good on our ancestral sort of like potential by practicing as best we
00:44:20.280can in real time right recognizing that we're flawed and like you know we're gonna fuck up but
00:44:25.200So reminding myself that I'm an ancestor in training lets me know that like I'm learning for myself. I'm also wayfinding, right? A bit of like a little bit of cartography in the work.
00:44:35.240So I think about wayward experiments. Wayward experiments is, according to the table of contents, on page 90. Thank you, table of contents. I think about the fiery lit up poem and protest space poem and how I want to be always carried in that space.
00:44:56.900And also thinking about your question, Zoe, and, like, I do truly hope there is a world that has no need for protest anymore. And in that world, I think wayward experiments is just, like, this tender affirmation of what, just like this world is the habituality of, like, what a whole bunch of colonialists colonizing colonial coensters.0.59
00:45:26.900This world, the world inside the Wayward Experiments is the eventuality for, you know, what we're fighting for, what we believe in and what we desire.0.77
00:45:37.060I'm always going to want a little sublime, a little pleasure, a little sexy, a little satiating, you know what I mean?
00:45:44.800And I think Wayward Experiments holds all of that.
00:45:47.240Thinking about the end of days as like this welcomed place and not like, I don't know, zombie apocalypse, you know?
00:45:54.660yeah that's those are my two those are my two would you read what yeah i'll read i'll read0.50
00:46:04.040wayward experiments trans historical is long as hell also wayward experiments is
00:46:10.360exciting right now so i'll read that one
00:47:39.040Lock the doors when you come down our block
00:47:41.880But you can't. You dead. Say we stir our soup with your sunlit bones. Say your precious lawns we overrun with lavender. Say honeysuckle. Say we burn your homes to make our frolic fields a little wider. Say we masturbate in your churches. Say we bastardize your holy. Say we gut God and gully our joy in his carcass in new glory.1.00
00:48:06.760We ain't got to explain how apples sound between two molars in June or what it means to be proven innocent.
00:48:14.280Say new heaven is full of innocence, full of guilt-free girls, free of juries or taxes or tyrants.
00:48:22.940Say it's the end of days and all the world has left is us standing beneath a green sun with a clean pair of Air Force Ones.
00:48:30.920Say it's the end of days and we wait to find the trees uproot and the oceans sweet.
00:48:36.020say we start new heaven with sage and a wild song. Janelle Monáe, the sound of carpenter bees,
00:48:43.820a thousand pulsating oyster knives. We will do the new world a favor and tell the truth.
00:48:51.280Maybe you were once good, but you left without making amends. Maybe once you believed in our
00:48:57.200freedom, but then decided liberation was the myth. We peer down from our new glorious,
00:49:03.100our paradise to the place you landed we send the cores of our apples as gifts blemish your mouth
00:49:10.840with our old sugar our old sugar old sugar old sugar old sugar
00:49:16.900i mean you certainly see how that could become a glorious ritual like
00:49:24.280absolutely not in a protest but in a really really sexy church
00:49:31.600yeah yeah we're missing sexy church I know right old sugar the old sugar yeah I had a lot of that
00:49:42.280poem highlighted to talk about so I was so excited you chose it I love do the new world a favor and
00:49:48.580tell the truth we talk about that a lot in our circle the astonishing spell that is just telling
00:49:56.900the fucking truth you know tell the truth about how wrong this world feels there's a million
00:50:02.300thoughts underneath all the lines in that poem but I think one of them I was thinking of was0.96
00:50:06.800just how I won't say the new world but the new versions of the world that we experience always
00:50:14.720seem to backslide like we're in this moment we're like everyone's like oh look fascism's in style
00:50:20.260again and I think a part of that is the way that like the truth just doesn't get told about where
00:50:26.440we've been right teachers are getting like not fined but you know threatened for talking about
00:50:32.860the civil rights movement and it's just like just tell the truth right like it is documented truth
00:50:40.200just just tell it and and maybe maybe there's a different possibility for us but you know
00:50:46.680we'll get it right in that in that new world maybe hopefully
00:50:52.180so would you read one sure i felt like i wasn't going to read in praise of the witch because i've
00:50:59.660done it before but i'm gonna do it again do it feels right to me too yeah
00:51:07.040earth we are the elements stay close to the ground omnipresent six feet under our mother's
00:51:17.100blood courses through our veins out our wombs down our legs feeding soil hungry we are dirty
00:51:23.240with your sadness different from anyone you know omnipotent we lick wounds and swallow sorrows0.99
00:51:29.400name ourselves goddess are not afraid of the dark call on god angels and ancestors when shit gets0.82
00:51:36.000tight we are round full figured full of ourselves water we bathe in basil and sea salt we're shackled0.89
00:51:44.540but jump ship anyway. Sharks fed on our flesh, we are ocean now. You eat us unknowingly, drink us
00:51:50.680in, believing you can suck us dry and quiet our storms, but we are oya. Settling accounts, we are
00:51:56.360ma'at shifting. You can't box us in, pin us down, or tell our story. Fire. We eat men whole when
00:52:03.940given the chance. Burn sage, incense, candles, tools of the trade. Dance under moons full. We are loud,
00:52:10.620alive stretch things out to fit our shape you itch to see us put in our place we are witch
00:52:20.520wise woman and chrome burned at the stake air but we are immortal reincarnated in the poems of our
00:52:28.600daughters we are phoenix eyes in the back of our head we are sankofa bird live betwixt worlds
00:52:34.060float through walls that you build around us blowing cigar smoke in your face we are juke
00:52:38.540joint, speak out both sides of our mouths, seeing your future in eggshells. It's not looking good
00:52:43.300for you. Familiar is at our side. We tag Miami, Haiti, and New Orleans with chalk circles, drink
00:52:48.740with leg bat at the crossroads, walk on water masquerading as poet, artist, and mama. We eat
00:52:54.880too many carbs, fall in love with men who are too afraid to love us back, and turn our crooked noses
00:53:00.180up at your traditions. Jazz, poetry, and chardé are our religions. We are Black Cat Crossing Your
00:53:06.720path that poem you wish you were smart enough to write the rhyme you're too afraid to spit0.99
00:53:11.140fucking up the mood we are the ejaculation that comes too quickly gas on a crowded elevator the0.99
00:53:16.260uninvited party guests flirting with your boyfriend and eating all your food an inconvenient truth we0.99
00:53:21.080are those shoes you can't afford to buy the thing you hate but can't let go those pants that are too
00:53:25.680tight around your waist now that song that keeps playing in your head that chick you know you're
00:53:29.860not good enough to bang the one your mama warned you about we are trouble urban sprawl haunting
00:53:34.780your daydreams, we are muse, inspiring you to get your game up, teaching by example, we are root
00:53:40.020worker, oh be a lady, and conjure woman, the scary broad living at the end of the road alone,1.00
00:53:45.760glamouring you through forked tongue, we make miracles, and yes, motherfucker, we do ride on1.00
00:53:49.440brooms, you should be afraid of women like us, chastity belted, we fuck anyway, do what we want1.00
00:53:55.260to do, walk butt naked in the daytime, and come to you at night, carrying blessings and justice0.99
00:54:00.240and our left hand machetes and curses in our right and praise the witch yes thank you that poem
00:54:09.280becomes like a ritual in our circle every time we get to hear it again so thank you thanks for
00:54:16.120bringing it back thank you orielle could i ask you to read one more there's one more i mean i
00:54:22.240we were joking before you came on the call that we would just ask you to read the whole book
00:54:25.740Yeah, exactly. But we've kept you quite a long time. If you have one you want to read, but the one that Zoe and I were talking about before you came on is in the event I become an unrecognizable beast, which I think is a really strong companion to the witch poem and to the idea of us all sort of tearing off the skin of this, the lies of this place and telling the truth.
00:54:53.560Yeah. Speaking of your organizing questions, Zoe.
00:59:13.860There's this song, and it's kind of, it's having another resurgence because of Cheryl Lee Ralph's acceptance speech at the Emmys.
00:59:25.660But there's a song by Diane Reeves called Endangered Species, and it is a warrior song.
00:59:31.940I've used it in both protest and poetry performance.
00:59:37.100There might be a video of me singing it on the internet, floating around somewhere, even though I am not a singer and I did not tell them to put that on YouTube.