#cupsi

You call me suspect As if there were anything criminal about my love

I’d be the first to admit it I was at the scene of the crime Leaving evidence behind on chapped lips and discarded jackets No caution could have warned me about the shit show that was my mother The night I missed my curfew after being out with some girl If I am the number 1 suspect She is merely my accomplice

I swear I would have turned myself in

But some days it already feels like I’m in a cell Where the walls are made up of “You’re just making things harder for yourself” “This isn’t something we do” The key to letting me out is you understanding that this is not a choice But even if it were I wouldn’t trade away this life of crime for your love

Because your love is putting in a box I could never call home Your love is putting me on trial Your love is ignoring a key piece of evidence just to get the conviction So no I won’t trade this life away for your love

Because when she and I are on the lam together It feels free-er than any cell you could put me in Holier than any saving grace you could give me

I swear I’m an honest person I would have turned myself in But this crime It carries a sentence that I just can’t bear yet

So call me a runaway Call me a problem-child Call me disagreeable Or temperamental But don’t you call me suspect As if there were anything criminal about my love

Only the first link actually provides the poems in question. As for the rest, everybody says they were very awful, take their word for it. One was misogynistic because he made a poem about resenting being reduced to an “old white man” by another poet, who was a woman of color. That absolute monster.

I mean, it’s really not surprising that a bunch of slam poets are a bunch of pretentious, overly-sensitive jackasses with their heads up their own ass, but if we’re getting to the point where a genre leader is shunned for this shit and being accused of “silencing” other poets when he did no such thing, then I guess the arts are fucked.

I don’t want to be in this club.

Also, what happened to that prize money? I guess anybody hoping to compete for it could go fuck themselves, eh?

Coming Out Eulogies (For the Victims of Pulse)

Hey, wanna support 4 young queer artists? 

Me and my poetry team are trying to go to CUPSI (College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational) in Chicago this April, but we need help with the costs of travel. 

All of us have worked super hard crafting pieces that our important to our identities and communities. My teammates and I have written some incredible pieces about police brutality, racism, misogyny, rape culture, nonbinary gender identity, Trump, body image, mental and reproductive health, and so on, and by donating to our GoFundMe, you can help us bring a voice to these pieces on a national level. 

The Baton Rouge poetry community has been through a lot in the past year. Our city was (further) divided by the Alton Sterling case and destroyed by the flooding in August, and on a more individual level, we lost an important member of our community, my friend and teammate Kaiya. In the months following all of these tragedies, our poetry scene has been an incredible healing space and like family to me. This opportunity would really be a blessing to us, as we’d love to bring Baton Rouge’s story to Chicago and have the opportunity to learn and heal with artists from around the nation.

We have been fundraising locally, but the costs of travel are high, and we still need more help. If you’d like to support marginalized voices and the arts, you can donate at https://www.gofundme.com/lsu-cupsi-team