Featured Reader
Virtual Event on January 14th, 2024–6:00 P.M to 8:00 P.M.
Live stream will be available on our YouTube Channel at the time of the event!
Stacy Dyson
Stacy Dyson is a poet, acapella vocalist, playwright specializing in the life and times of the Black woman. “Someone has to sing for my sisters. Their lives, loves, philosophy…I’m lucky enough to be one able to make those voices heard.”
She has done program design, residencies, workshops, and live performance all over the United States, and dozens of shows virtually.
Author of 7 poetry collections, plus five CDs of poetry and spoken word, she is
former Poet Laureate for Imagination Celebration (Colorado Springs) a nominee for Poet Laureate for the State of Colorado, Founder/Lead Poet of DragonsWing (Colorado Springs), CoFounder/Lead Poet for Page to Stage: Womens Words (San Diego), a Colorado Women’s Playwriting Festival winner for her play FANNIE’S GIRLS: A 4-1-1 IN -5PART ATTITUDE, and a TEDx speaker.
Her poetry collections LOVELY AND SUFFERING and FOLLOW ME ON THIS focus on her life as a Black woman during the pandemic, and her ten years living in San Diego.
Currently, she is writing a new collection BECAUSE THE SUN WOULD NOT MOVE, preparing to launch a women’s writing/performance workshop series called FIRESCRIBE, and building her international women’s poetry network TESORO “one firesinger at a time.”
SMALL DARLINGS
A blue whisper in the fog
cold and blurry with frost
the small darlings come to play
dancing along my windowpane
to tease me like naughty children
with vengeful fingers
Snap, snap, crack
as the iced air chases shadows round the room
my head aches with the chill and too much wine
The small darlings traipse careless and bold inside my head
wanton, proud, and brazen as whores on a miner’s payday
they make my stomach beg for more wine
they pound on the inside of my skull
til my fingers curl in pain
they taunt me to thoughts blind and vengeful as angels
No fire can warm me
they steal the heat from my soul
no bribe of love nor money nor ease
will soothe them, that is not what they came for
they demand tribute, night after night
willfully given or not
It requires a fool or a visionary
to vanquish them forever
and I am neither
simply a poet whose diamonds lie buried in
a well of devilsoul-black ink
Heaven’s truth and bare, sharp, angry prayers
meet and dance bandy- legged in the sky
the tears fall into the center of my pages
I stretch fingers toward my pen
and my small darlings leave off, diminished
they have no place here, now.
END OF DAYS
My hands mainly
I cannot get the smell of bleach away from my nostrils
It’s resident on my clothes
The house clings to it, it mixes with last meals and
The last of my comfort for a while
But mainly it’s on my hands
Cleaning, scrubbing
Incessant, unceasing
Uncaring
It only wants to make things clean
It doesn’t care what this move is costing me
It doesn’t mind that I am wiping counters and scrubbing floors
With thoughts and feelings as acrid as any corroding fume
I wouldn’t mind so much
But even my Lavendar soap
Can’t get the smell off of my hands
And I begin to worry
I have been worried
That there is some chemical composition bound together by tears
And betrayal that makes a scent too angry, too hungry to forget to exist
Clings itself to every fingertip
I smell it in my sleep
Eating
Walking through newly empty rooms
I smell it in my sleep, on my hands
The lavender will not wash it away
I cannot wash it away
the pain and regret and
Very real anger I am feeling right now
Salt water, bleach, pain
What does that combine into?
Is it the chemical composition for despair?
For grief?
For some mutt amalgam of everything I am feeling right now?
I want to smell flowers and yeast bread and the soup I simmered last night
A smile in my throat, my words
And hope
I want to smell, I need to smell a least a mist of hope
What is the chemistry, the composition of this loss, what does it make,
this heartbreaking?
My heart breaking
Because all I can smell is bleach.