March 2010

This weekend I’ll be reading from my book and talking about the intersections between politics and poetry with many poets I admire at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival in Washington, D.C. It will be good to see Lita Hooper, Curtis Crisler, and Antoinette Brim, especially since we’re all “press-mates” at Willow Books/Aquarius Press. If you want to see snippets of the last festival’s readings, visit their youtube channel.

There will be workshops, panels, and readings, but I’m also looking forward to checking out places that I’ve grown accustomed to-as if the capital could be home-Eatonville, Ben’s Chili Bowl, U Street (which keeps changing, changing, changing), and the Howard University campus. I’ll get to talk to old friends and make some new ones.

These days I look forward to trips, but I also look forward to what I call “nesting”. I want to cook vegan meals and garden. I want to re-organize my house and read the books that I’m falling behind on reading. I want to knit some days and others leave me just wanting to walk around my neighborhood or listen to records like I did when I was a teenager, dreaming of what it would be like to leave Kankakee, Illinois and be a writer. Well, I did both, so how do you transplant a sense of home? How do you create it?

I’m heading back to Kankakee at the end of April to read at the public library. I know I’ll see people I went to high school with. I’ll meet some of their kids, and the house where I used to live is empty. The tavern that I lived above when my parents were still together is empty, and with my grandparents gone, heir house is nearly empty too. My brothers are in the places that moved them. One is making music. Another is building decks and planting dreams of orchards with my nephew (and another to come).

I will be home with a fine brush of memory to dust so many familiar things. One of the B&Bs in my hometown was a beautiful, old house that was boarded up for years. As a teenager, I saw them renovate that home to its former glory. My fiance says that’s why you want a porch and a garden. This is what I knew, what I grew up with during part of my youth. Even when we lived in Section 8 housing, I lived between a highway and a cornfield. The large Kmart, where my mother sent me on countless errands, once stood in front of those apartments and is now long gone. I walked across the busy intersection to attend junior high when we lived there.

When my mother got a house, I made sure my brothers were ready for school, then caught my bus at Chicago Avenue and Station Street to go to high school. One of the sisters I rode the bus with introduced me to R. Kelly & Public Announcement on her headphones there. If we had only known then…We’d be dropped off there, me, Lonell, Marshall, Stephanie, Angie. There were trees on our block, and sometimes in the summer, shootings. I grew tomatoes on the side of my mother’s house, clipped the hedges, and mowed the lawn. I would walk to work when the library was still at 306 S. Indiana. Working at the public library was my first job and my safe haven.

It’s funny that now, I find myself going to different cities and meeting new people. Some of them who have never heard of Kankakee, and others who will probably never see it, unless they pass Exit 315 or those same apartments where I lived, just off I-57. When I go to other cities or even when I go to one of the places I call home, I feel like I am picking up bright, soft ribbons or shiny beads like a mockingbird looking for something to treasure. I am hoping each bauble helps me remember what the place might be like or what it was.

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