soft magic. Read online

  how to:

  mend

  and burn

  and bend

  and shape.

  I know how to make myself something new,

  so don’t stay around out of pity,

  leave me broken

  and I will find my way back to wholeness.

  tell me

  all the stories that start in your smile

  and

  end in your eyes.

  honey, you need to say the thing before it forms a storm in your chest. you can’t keep carrying anger in your bones because you are too afraid of letting poison out. freeing yourself from the thing won’t make you serpentine. you mustn’t keep anger tucked in your skin like that. please darling, say the thing you mean to say. say the thing before it builds a home in your blood. say the thing before you become the thing itself.

  choose happiness every morning like you would an outfit.

  if someone hasn’t called you brave lately, I will.

  you are fighting sadness with everything you’ve got

  and for that you are mighty.

  To the men who loved me inconsistently,

  I survived you.

  feeling deeply does not make you weak.

  showing that you feel deeply does not make you weak.

  admitting that there are parts of you that still smell like men who walked into your life

  and laid their sadness on your palms

  and drove their empty fingers through your hair

  and kissed you with their mistakes

  and wrote you poems about nothing

  and snuggled up to you with their insecurities,

  does not make you weak.

  they weren’t the easiest to love, these men,

  they tried to comb out their problems

  over the sink of your happiness.

  some folks are just cruel for nothing.

  my darling,

  you are the color of the earth

  you inherited holy,

  let no one silence the glory in your bones

  let no one make you doubt

  that you

  are

  indeed

  important.

  how wild it would be if

  we could actually make each other happy !

  don’t cheat yourself out of happiness

  you deserve all the damned chances

  all the damned tries,

  so darling please stop thinking of new ways to die.

  darling,

  my blush alone

  my blush!

  my blush in itself is a hundred poems.

  imagine

  how much my body would write

  if you loved me.

  you will find that I have my grandmother’s coloring

  and my mother’s heart.

  honey,

  I am inhabited by praying women.

  you were the first thing outside of myself that I looked at and felt connected to,

  do you understand this?

  He has found galaxies

  in between the thighs of other girls

  and suddenly the world

  I was planning to offer him

  just isn’t enough.

  she said:

  “You deserve a full meal of love. Stop snacking”

  you

  and I

  and all our vices.

  what we give the gods in prayer we get back in people.

  your mother was a myth

  your father was a story

  but that never kept you from

  loving mightily.

  even absence is a teacher.

  I now know that you’re a wild thing,

  I am sorry I tried to love the forests out of you.

  darling,

  your body is not a burial ground for the insecurities of others.

  Find a lovely thing and respect it.

  poems,

  like bodies,

  carry blood

  and water

  and bits of

  everyone who’s ever loved us.

  love,

  you wouldn’t believe all the places

  I thought I would find you.

  he said:

  are you sure you don’t carry the ocean in your chest?

  mountains in your eyes?

  the sky in your hips?

  because

  you are starting to feel like the whole

  world to me.

  being this ebony.

  having this name.

  carrying this language in my mouth.

  there were times when I only wanted

  to blend in

  to sit unnoticed,

  un-special,

  but blending in is fading out.

  sometimes I won’t be honey-sweet

  or love you with my softness

  but please remember that

  these bones have crossed oceans to find you

  and they’d do it again.

  Why are you so afraid of loving a strong woman?

  maybe we carry our mothers’ faults

  in our bones too,

  maybe our fathers’ sins

  are stifled in the blood.

  I am sorry,

  maybe we inherited some of their pain.

  (what they carelessly gave us. what they’ve been trying to take back)

  kiss me all ways.

  kiss me always.

  when your quiet starts clashing with your lover’s loud

  and all their patient love is spent

  and you’re as much stay as you are go,

  hold your tongue.

  take a breath instead,

  stop.

  read your favorite book again

  or

  go for a walk

  or a run

  or a smoke

  or eat something sweet,

  rest your heart a bit,

  and for a moment

  let love worry about love.

  I don’t want to be less of me if that’s the only way I’ll get more of you.

  darling,

  I am a country you shouldn’t go near.

  I am at war with myself.

  a thousand poems have been dancing in my chest

  since the first time you

  kissed me.

  he says that

  I add distance to distance

  and am the reason why the ocean feels infinitely wide.

  time differences and seasons are all contraptions of my hands,

  because I am trying to prove

  that I can break his heart again and again

  from thousands of miles away

  and still be the girl of his dreams.

  my mother’s hands are tired,

  you can almost tell when she hugs you,

  she leans in and rests her fingers on your back

  sharing a tiny weight in secret,

  unburdening, almost.

  I am still learning to make language

  out of pain,

  to write out all the ache.

  I am still teaching my fragile

  and my strong

  that they can co-exist.

  when he offers you thin love,

  don’t take it just because you have thick skin.

  say no to loving a person more

  than they love themselves.

  I am still learning

  the art of

  give

  &

  take

  &

  rejoice.

  lover,

  we dug each other out of lonely places

  tell me that isn’t magic!

  sometimes it feels like I dreamt you up

  darling,

  like I closed my eyes and created you.

  Denial, it walks in the family.

  be careful with how you choose to love people,

  don’t destroy them,

  don’t destroy yourself.

  current hobbies:
<
br />   1. Loving the wrong men rightly.

  2. Loving the right men wrongly.

  bwenzi,

  I know depression kicks you hard sometimes,

  keep rising up from it,

  you surviving thing you

  you thriving thing you.

  too many of us are oceans

  with lovers that never learnt to swim.

  the first time you saw him

  you lost your language,

  you swallowed your name,

  and couldn’t remember a damn thing about yourself,

  this is when you should’ve ran.

  you should’ve made for home

  before you spent

  what felt like lifetimes

  forgetting yourself in a man.

  here we are,

  black and in love with ourselves

  and they spite us for it.

  A final note

  dear sisters in melanin,

  we need each other.

  Upile is Malawian. She was born in 1994 and grew up in Zomba. She lives in Baltimore where she takes pretty pictures, listens to music and plans little adventures over tea.