Feb 28, 2015
Blown Away
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Blown Away
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Mega - "This Is How I Challenge Diabetes to a Fight" "You made Aunt Glenda's arms open up in the bathroom; blood ran the floor like a point guard."
Getting ready for CUPSI 2014! By request, here's Mega, performing at last year's semifinals for CUNY Brooklyn.
might be my favorite poem from #CUPSI2013
"Samson" by Brandon Melendez
A poem by Safia Elhillo that I love
When love flickers in the corners
It opens in me what I pretend is a need to confess
What is actually a need to blame everything for my cowardice
This preference for men whose daughters will not have my eyes
Anyone who threatens to matter
Who is not my preferred shade of disposable
Whose shoulders are enough to tell me that I will succumb to the softness
That I spent a lifetime coaching out of this body
This is the one that I will crowd out the door
And say that I am protecting him from my love
From everything that it is not
I will say:
A woman betrayed by her own body will never keep any of your secrets
I will say:
Most men are afraid of me, you know?
Or, I will say:
In my culture we do not take our men's names as our own
You have nothing for me
I have my own name
I know now how this body works
How it will never let a name go until it has taken it into the mouth and fed it to the breath
I still know by heart
The phone numbers of the ones who have lied the most
It was they who I loved best
I let them name me in their language until I forgot every word of my own
Now every mouthful of me is gone
Caught between the teeth of liars
Who hiss when they laugh
And will load a whisper with the kind of spells that could convince a girl that she is nobody's daughter
Or, I will say:
My mother and I are women who look like nobody's wives
The strong girls
Inheritors of every bitterness of a country wrapped by war until it broke itself in half
Through the capered point
Of a horizon line of women who've learned to cook dinner at night whether or not their men come home
Lover,
The whole world knows the colour of my people's blood
Lover,
I am a girl without a country
Carrier of a nature lost
Lover,
I cannot keep house
I haven't enough language to name a child with
Lover,
Loving you,
I betray all the left behind women in my blood
I've left my home behind once already
I cannot survive another loss
Or, I will blame my father
I will say:
My father is a backwards glance
My father is a whispered breath
My father is forgotten and I have his face
A skull pierced by the eyes of the man who left makes me the girl who leaves
These are the heirlooms that I've got
My father is a stranger
Every man is a stranger
Once, I let a stranger introduce himself with his hands
I have been trying to remember my own name ever since.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Why I Write*
*This was a question posed to a CUPSI 2013 post, shortly after CUPSI had ended. This is my well delayed response to that question, although I will not be posting it on that thread, or at least not yet. Rather, I'm going to makes its presence known to some people and the passerby and see what happens after that. Out of the entire CUPSI 2013 experience, I think the thing I got out of it the most was knowing without a doubt that I really, really, really wanted to be a better poet. I think getting the opportunity to represent my school and my squad after four years of being a bystander was the perfect bookend to my story, the only way I would allow myself to end the narrative arc of it. Although, a friend told me you don't really need to try to get the perfectness of the story right, it just sort of happens. This is probably. Once a friend of mine from another school made her team, I had extra incentive to make mine. Once I made my team, I switched from mad scientist to technician. This is an apt metaphor for everything, because rather than playing around all of the tools I had in a imaginary toolkit, I took the ones I knew how to use really well and put them to work. Prep for CUPSI was more about refinement, and I swore off writing indy shit and focused on group stuff and performance and I grew a lot by virtue of that alone. And I still kept up with my personal writing. And I started a 30/30, but my god, were some of those pieces horrible. And after CUPSI had ended, I felt like I couldn't write. I felt like I really needed to be a better poet, but did not have the means too. Nothing was catching on fire. Nothing was clicking. There was no moment of revelation to change everything and help me on my way, and that was damn frustrating for me. And in lieu of usable work, I wrote pieces that were cognizant of the fact they were horrible pieces and that type of meta-meta-poetry is not something I'm proud I'm still capable of producing. But I pushed past it and on Day 23, I found a piece that was mostly usable. On Day 24, I shook out of the dust and found some old sparks. Day 25, I found something I liked and promptly rewrote it and promptly rewrote it again. Day 26, I dug into my roots and found something worth tracing back towards. Day 27, I wrote something simple and sincere and those moments come so rarely when you're distracted by the world. So, on Day 28, I plan on writing something else, but right now in a 3AM delirium, because let's be honest, right now it's the best time for poetry, I want to say this. I write because I'm fascinating by the emotional and technical limitations of language and what we can do with it when we try. I write because there is still a lot of good I can do. I write because sometimes my words can save people that my hands can not. I write for the spaces in between. I write for the people who need it and people who didn't realize they need it. I write for the stray observations and the moments where it may or may not make perfect sense. I write to save other people, and failing that saving myself. I write to challenge myself, to see what I can do and what I can't and where the journey takes us. I write, because after everything, the missed-it-by-that-much's, the damn-i-could-have-done-better's, the i-guess-it-was-not-my-day's, I always find that someone comes up to me and say "Thank you for sharing" or "I needed to hear that" (even week after). I write because when I go back to my old school, I get kids to care about poetry. I write because my fingers have not worn away from bone and my tongue still works and there are too many voices in my head that tell me I'm not done and I chose to believe 1) I have voices in my head and 2) that they are right. I write because of the infinite-ness of language and pushing boundaries and exploring and seeing how it all comes together. I write because I keep getting signs that I'm doing something right.
I've been away for the past week because my slam poetry team was competing at CUPSI! I took a bunch of video, and this is what came of it. (: I'll be posting video of individual performances later in the week so that you can check them out.
In addition, I'll be putting out my second album at some point within the next few months, and this album will have poems on it! Yaaaaay! If you have any requests (for songs or poetry), now would be the time.
Enjoy! -Amanda