“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”

Love and survival merged and twisted into a tornado, stagnating in the eye. 

As a six-year-old, my grandmother called me to her front porch, which overlooked the Chesapeake Bay area, a place whose beauty I never took for granted.

Terra cota 

Slabbed cacti 

Bobcat claws 

Coyote teeth 

Thousands of teenage eyes

Are looking everywhere

Searching curiously for a focal point.

The ground was dusted with snow, shining bright in the warm sun, like a thousand specks of stardust.

Hope is hardest to kill

When you give a small smile

Where once you would scowl

You are forgiven 

Swallowing your pain like a horse pill 

Gnawing my stomach from inside 

Until i am just the viscous honey of my soul 

Dripping slowly onto the ground 

“You oughta quit that,” Jason mumbles halfheartedly, sighing and pointing lazily at my lit cigarette with his index finger.

I squeeze my foot into the shoe 

The shoe I had seen in the movies that seemed too good to be true 

It felt okay at first, uncomfortable at the worst

But I looked beautiful in the pink satin 

As the girl padded down the tree-eaten trail,

the sky dim and dank, thick with a cloud veil,

the path become quiet, no persons in sight,

leaving merely a fox to linger amongst the brush.

Candles burned brightly behind the entrance to the room; determined flames keeping souls alive.

Billy squints as golden sunlight pours over the wide brim of his pale straw hat. The gentle hum of his father’s tractor, accompanied by a cacophony of clucks and scratches from the tall grey barn next to him, leaves Billy unable to hear the wind whistling through the waves of green cornfields in Billy's corner of the Kansas countryside.

Do i belong here?

In a place drowning in pink heart shaped lips— while mine are African?

In an area where my Gele is not a crown, but a (costume)?

i don’t belong here.

You don’t have try to convince me that

i will never fit in.

Before i was myself i was myself 

Still i am myself 

Every second i am a different self

photograph by Steven Valladares Orellana

I could barely sit still in the cramped airplane seat—from outside the small window, the ground was finally visible again. I was finally in France!

The teenage years, a concealer a shade too bright

Masking the struggles that lurk in the hot and humid night

Outwardly a front of confidence, of grade, and of grace

Inwardly, a battle to find one's passion, talent, and place