Poetry and playwrighting are my primary modes of expression. What follows are excerpts from my upcoming book of poetry Something Like a Mixtape, which will be published in 2020.
POETRY
In Response to Clive Barker’s Demon
If things are treasured for their rarity
then for something in such grotesque abundance
how precious then are words?
They slip from the tongue like night and day.
To rise and set with the arbitrary nature of the flippant human condition.
I say to you authors and librarians,
note-takers and keepers of the law - playwrights too -
why struggle to safeguard a gift
(nay a burden!) such as language, manuscripts,
or the prophet’s idiot ramblings?
You slave over arguments and craft defenses to hold sacred…what?
Marks and scratches on parchment
or the clicks and clacks pushed forward on large paper weights!
I petition that we burn all books post-haste
and make pens, pencils, and the quill illegal in all 50 states.
Revert to our baser selves, using grunts and groans,
pushes and shoves to express every need and want.
Perhaps then, when the entitlement of speech,
the ability to record one’s thoughts and a nation’s history
are relegated to memory and heart,
words in all their richness might mean something again.
-Nina Yarbrough
Does the Mountain Disappear
I want to be made of tougher stuff than this. Steel and diamonds and venom dipped barbed wire – oh! to be an unshakable, immovable thing.
How envious I have grown of stone.
A bone deep jealousy I cannot explain.
I want to be as carefree as a boulder!
Only cut down and shaped by wind, water, and time.
I want to revel in my rough edges and sigh into my smooth ones.
Oh, to be a small pebble among millions and care only about being one of the many.
What cares do the cliff sides have?
Except to stand watch over oceans as they dry into deserts just to fall back into the ocean.
Does the mountain disappear when you can’t see it?
Is it still a mountain?
Am I?
Do I?
I want to be made of tougher stuff.
So that I may survive and move forward despite the ever present emptiness.
Does a stone feel empty?
Is it aware of its own loneliness or does it fold into the silence the way broken women do?
The way I have?
Oh to be an unshakeable, immovable thing.
To be made of such sediment that whole cities spend lifetimes trying to carve you up.
Does the mountain disappear when you can no longer see it?
Or does it simply wait?
-Nina Yarbrough
