My feet a landscape of mines
My legs two full pails of water I spill
at the weight of
My back where the sharpest knives are kept
My hands a scatter of matches ready to spark into flame
This body is lightning
Strikes the same place more than twice
This body is a fist pounding its own hand
This body crumples like paper I crumple like paper because of this body
This body just wants and wants and wants
This body
Says stop
Says go
Says stop
Says run
Says stop
Says STOP
This body is a stubborn traffic light stuck on red
This body will
have what it wants Or it is
blasphemous tantrum down every grocery store aisle
This body makes an embarrassment of me
This body is
an embarrassment
Then pleasure Then hunger
Then defender Then defendant
Then carriage
Then coffin
This body is Tupperware with its secrets sealed tight
This body scrapes and falls
Then gets back up again and again It's all I got to get back up with again
This body is an ocean of oil spill all over me.
Added: Friday, July 17, 2015 / Used with permission.
Photo by Brandon Woods.
Camisha L. Jones is author of the Finishing Line Press chapbook, Flare, and a recipient of a 2017 Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship from The Loft Literary Center. Through both, she breaks silence around issues of invisible disability as someone living with hearing loss and chronic pain. Her poems can be found at Button Poetry, The Deaf Poets Society, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Typo, Rogue Agent, pluck!, Unfolding the Soul of Black Deaf Expressions, and The Quarry, Split This Rock’s social justice poetry database. She is also published in Let’s Get Real: What People of Color Can’t Say and Whites Won’t Ask about Racism (StirFry Seminars & Consulting, Inc., 2011), Class Lives: Stories from Across Our Economic Divide (ILR Press, 2014), and The Day Tajon Got Shot (Shout Mouse Press, 2017). She is Managing Director at Split This Rock. Find her on Facebook as Poet Camisha Jones, on Twitter as 1Camisha, on Instagram as 1camisha, and online at her blog.
