MY FIRST...

In this moment, I imagine (I am) an Olympic [torch] relay runner. I am gangly, stalwart, muscles warmed by months, if not years, of training and witnessing. Face forward, palms, heart upward, open to the horizon as the brilliantly blazing torch is passed.

I have read "Zora" under Metta Sama’s direction, and I am grateful to have been entertained by it and learned and grown from her eloquence and generosity. I pray that my journey with Zora possesses its own love/magic.

It is timely that this changing of the guard comes now, when I find myself back in Oakland, where many firsts happened: my first open-mouth kiss (which was memorably gross); my first realization that more Black children than a handful could inhabit a school at one time; my first coming to terms with the fact that Black people are a brilliant people; my first hair show; my first cuss word … my first memory of poetry.

In the early eighties, AC Transit, the local bus system, had a campaign to increase poetic awareness. Each bus was equipped with a rectangular poster to and from school. Most vividly, I remember boarding the 51 at 14th and Broadway to coast and bobble to Oakland Technical High School, situated on five sprawling blocks between Piedmont – an affluent community at Oakland’s north edge – and the dubious hoods of North Oakland.

I don’t know if I became conscious of Gwendolyn Brooks' "We Real Cool” on the day it was first posted, or if it had been there long before. But, at some point, I remember the comfort of seeing it, like the bus driver, in the same place every day. At some point, I remember searching every bus I boarded for the words it held, remember reciting them aloud. “We real cool. We / left school. We / lurk late. We / strike straight. We / sing sin. We / thin gin. We / jazz June. We / die soon.”

The more I read it, the more I saw Oakland in it. It was the first time I connected my real life existence with poetry. I loved it.

I thought long and hard about how to come into this beloved space, even started a few projects that I am choosing to use for future posts. Like any good first experience, I've chosen to keep it intimate. Stay tuned in the months ahead for interviews and conversations, video, articles and book reviews. For now, I am paying homage for the roads crafted for my getting here. To Gwendolyn Brooks, to Ntozake Shange, to Amanda Johnston and Metta Sama… Thank you.