Love Note To My Sistars

By Joy KMT

The hardest thing for a traumatized people to do is look in the mirror and love themselves, and their reflections. I say its revolutionary to open your heart up to your fam when you’ve been told it’s seditious to do so. But you know what?

Let’s love each other on a real level. That means we gon get down in the mud with each other, and we gon witness each other and reflect each other til we see each other and we see ourselves.

I’m talking about a quality of love that I can’t describe in this language, cause all this language give me is some jesus shit or some romance shit, and that ain’t what I’m talking about.

I guess that’s why I call myself poeting, cuz I was born with a tongue that ain’t mine, but that’s not my point.

There is something fiercely beautiful about the strength of black women. When I say strength, I don’t mean the hard mean ass fuck the world attitude that we put on as a cloak to hide our tender hearts from the pain of being too other in a hegemonic world.

I mean the strength of a black woman reflecting on her body-emotional, physical, spiritual, energetic,-body and tracing the scars of imperialism and oppression and abuse and neglect and self-hate with her fingertips

and finding herself. and sharing herself and sometimes It’s like a river

that’s been dammed/damned and she floods all your gates and your defenses and you can do nothing but acknowledge her as a force of NTR.

and worship this reflection of self. because look,

 

I’m talking about myself here.

When I am connected to the flow of all that I am and am sure in what has spanned the breadth of time in me,

ain’t nothin quite as beautiful but

I know the pain of tracing those scars like a puzzle

you tryna solve so that the devil

will give you back your soul only

you don’t even understand why it’s worth it in the first place cuz the

greatest lie the devil ever told was that

you

didn’t exist.

 

so when we trace it and unlock it,

unweave it, spiral back to

and struggle for our own worthiness

in our own eyes

and strive to not only accept but celebrate

the divinity of ourselves and our paths and our destiny

 

and when we cry, and when we grieve

when we laugh not in spite but in delight

when we show up as our black selves unafraid to

shine a light

when we speak to our core knowings

and know the circle is unbroken

and only an illusion will tell us otherwise,

 

it is then that we resist

it is then that we revolt

it is then that we begin to fight

 

when we begin to love ourselves

when I begin to love myself,

then We, You and I have already one/won

cuz an army of lovers

cannot be defeated.

 

It was written in my blood that one day the dead

lovers that have fought

and been buried defending

their rights to love

would be born again.

they are here now

we must stand

the winds are strong

we will stand

remember who you are, lover

here we stand

______________________________________

Joy KMT is self-taught & queer & black & femme & hood & poet & mother & lover &. A MacDowell Fellow as well as a recipient of a Heinz Endowment Fellowship, her poetry has appeared in Check The Rhyme: An Anthology of Female Emcees and Poets, Amistad: Howard’s Literary Journal, Blood Lotus, Backbone Poetry Journal, and Black Girl Dangerous. Her first chapbook, Organic Spaceships and Black Madonnas, is due to be published through NuBorn Sage Press. Facebook her at www.facebook.com/joy.kmt.