Torch :: Kamilah Aisha Moon

Kamilah Aisha Moon

Kamilah Aisha Moon is an alumna of Cave Canem, has received a fellowship from the Prague Summer Writing Institute and has been a Paumanok Award semi-finalist. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in several journals and anthologies, including Lumina, Callaloo, Bittersweet, Open City, Essence, Bloom, Bum Rush the Page, Gathering Ground and The Ringing Ear. A featured poet in various conferences and venues around the country--most notably the Langston Hughes Symposium at the University of Kansas and the Furious Flower Conference at James Madiston University , Moon received her MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College (06). She has two manuscripts, Goose-Daughter Lament and She Has A Name, a collection of poetry themed around her sister’s journey living with Autism. She has also led creative writing residencies for the Langston Hughes National Poetry Project, Community~Word Project, Sentenced to the Arts, and Voices UnBroken. She is a native of Nashville , TN , currently living in New York , where she lectures at Medgar Evers College-CUNY.

Tayari Jones on Kamilah Aisha Moon

I am eagerly watching an exciting young poet, Kamilah Aisha Moon. She's a gorgeous poet who is, like me, a native Southerner and writes about family. Her recently completed manuscript is called She Has A Name and explores her experience as the oldest of three daughters-- the youngest daughter is autistic. I almost said "suffers" from autism, but after reading Kamilah's manuscript you know that "suffer" isn't the right word. The poems are really about being a family and the way that family must be flexible to include and nurture all of it's members. She Has A Name is a remarkable achievement.

STIGMA

She hated those short yellow buses.

The sentence felt each day

that it pulled up sighing

to McMurray Jr. High’s curb,

delivering her to locker-lined halls

full of metallic, 7^th grade mouths.

ASSEMBLY REQUIRED

To the man at Black and Decker

8am sharp, you snap

Part A into Part B.

The conveyor belt brings

more resentment.

There are quotas to fill

as you wait for the dull

ache in your lower back to tell you

it's lunch time.

The ham sandwich and moonpie

don’t nourish. You digest

what it says about you—

having all of your faculties,

your deep voice and privileged skin,

to work along someone like her. Heartburn

turns you into a swearing, shoving fool

full of sour laughter.

Careful to use the urinal furthest from

the bank of mirrors; later, you drag

long and hard for 10 minutes every 2 hours,

leaning against weathered brick. She comes home

acrid as your smoke every evening.

Go ahead—

talk loud and bully

the clawless one.

AIRPORT SCENE AFTER HER FIRST SOLO VISIT

She wanted to fly like us, experience

peanuts and ginger ale at 35,000 feet.

Rent metal wings

and hurtle through the sky—

free to defy

Autism's gravity and simply be

the passenger in seat 13E.

She was coasting,

a look-ma-no-hands smile

resplendent on her face.

My fear

shortened her ride,

as I led her by the hand

to the front of the line,

telling the attendant

to keep watch

that she is different.

The disbelief in her embarrassed,

unblinking 21-year-old stare cut deep.

“Why?

Why did you do that to me?”

My hug had become

a vise—she needed

a ventilated love.

Bruised but standing, she turned

to exit through the gate—

her flight home

a lesser altitude.

TO BE THE FATHER OF THIS DAUGHTER (AN EXCERPT)

I held her the longest; until her legs began to grapevine

around mine, didn’t want to let her

down.

She didn’t wriggle

like my older girls did,

restless for ground.

No. Lord, no. Please. Not my baby girl, not the one

named after Mama, gone.

Mouth carved just like hers, like mine.

In my arms, she was safe from sharp corners, the shock

of sockets. She wasn’t “delayed”; a problem to solve

again and again, or resign to having. The world is aberrant,

not her. Not me. Not us.

The doctors, my wife and others spoke of what was to come

and what wasn’t.

No matter how hard I focused, I couldn’t hear them. Couldn’t bear

to understand. What could I have done? What next?

I didn’t know, so I held her high in the boughs

of my biceps, curled her safe as a spotted egg

in the nest. Held her as long as any father’s strength could stand

her growing weight. The last thing

I ever wanted was to let her

down.

My chromosome

wobbles in her blood stream.

I’m the one with the cousin

no one ever talks about—her hair a frozen funnel cloud,

soiled housedress blooming

behind the coal stove.

They say she’s slow to feel, to spread

full color. Same could be said for me,

this trait magnified in her cells. A lifelong curveball

I’ve served her mother, a field I refuse

to play on after awhile. The proof—

years later, my brother’s son

scales this cliff.

Should have put blame on ice, before it went bad

and stunk up our marriage. I’m not allowed

to say I don’t want to pay

what she will cost us.

I’ll work myself into pulp,

withhold my tongue and practice nothingness.

Cockroach logic: if I don’t move,

I’m not really against this wall,

back gleaming in harsh light.

I won’t hold my wife’s hand and skip words

like stones to relentless tides. I’ll become

a dike of a man, fall asleep in front of the T.V. nightly

until I burst.