Permission To Talk About Joy, & Other Soft Things
They keep airing the footage: another boy vanishing
into the ocean like a name no one bothered to remember.
The headlines bruise the morning again: a blast in the north,
another mother folding into herself, grief gnawing
her name down to silence. The radio hums its tired dirge,
calls it breaking news—but it’s the same flower
buried before bloom, the same garden of bones.
& maybe I’ve had enough of poems
that ache without relief, verses dressed in funerals.
I’m tired of the world’s hunger for sorrow.
Today, I want to talk about beautiful things.
Happy things. Like this mango, golden meat slurped
straight from the bone. Like the old man dancing
to Apala in the rain, socks soaked, laughing
like the sky just told him a joke.
Like how the barbershop bursts with Black joy
on Saturdays when the Clippers win.
Like the small boy who cupped a dying bird
& sang to it until it stopped shivering.
Let me love the soft things. The dog’s paw
resting on my open book. The boy who said,
I want to be a cloud because clouds
‘don’t get in trouble.’ There’s a field of sunflowers
that don’t care who the president is.
The horse still runs like freedom never left.
I know the ache. I know how silence becomes
a second mouth. But I also know my mother’s smile
when the bread rose in the oven—
that, too, is history. That, too, is worthy of record.
Tell me how delight is not resistance.
Tell me why I can’t write about a woman
planting basil on the graves of her enemies
because she believes even bad men
deserve to be beautiful. For the bees.
I’m collecting joy like bottle caps,
each one a medal for surviving
without letting the world harden me.
Today I want to talk about the garden,
the one blooming behind the house you burned for warmth.
How even ash can nourish lilies.
How my uncle told me: Joy is the bruise
we press so it doesn’t spread.
I stitched laughter into the hem of my sorrow.
My name is still a prayer. My hands still smell
like basil & sweat. Today, I’m giving myself
permission to smile. To laugh so hard
my sadness files a noise complaint.
To remember how Nana called Zoom Zuma
& we didn’t correct her—the first time we saw her happy
since her dad left. We know the world is on fire,
but my nephew just spelled hippopotamus
on his first try, & that has to mean something.
So here’s a poem that dances. That pours Fanta
over the tombstone. That wears yellow
even on a funeral day. You’re allowed to feel good,
to sing off-key, to make pancakes shaped like failed
countries & eat them anyway.
Also published in “Stanchion Review”