MONIFA LEMONS is this week's Featured Poet

This week's Poet of the People is Monifa Lemons.  Before there were titles for poets there was Monifa - one name, no title, was enough.  She personifies what it means to be a poet: gracious, mentoring, talented, and selfless. To know Monifa is to experience poetry in and of the Kakalak. I am honored to call her friend.

Monifa Lemons, also recognized as SelahthePoet, began her poetic journey in Columbia, SC in the late 90s, both as a Spoken Word Artist and as a host at various venues. Her work can be found in various publications. She is currently an elementary school teacher, and a facilitator with USC Trio Upward Bound. Her focus is on creative writing and intentional creation with children and community. She is also following her entrepreneurial dreams as Coffee Roaster and Co-Owner at Haiku Coffee 575, a company she opened in Fall 2020 along with her four daughters and has returned to her original art of acting, playing the principal role of Mama in the short film Crooked Trees Gon' Give Me Wings, Directed by Cara Lawson and Produced by Hillman Grad Productions.

After Dogon Krigga

Bouncing lateral
On wind cutting our eyes
At revelations

B Boys spinning like
Dreidels on pointe listening
To scratched petals bloom

No blinking allowed
Instead, a creation stare

Calloused eyes don’t crack   

Letter from my Grandmother 

Monisa, 

it’s still da same. Dem chickens still gotta be fed, even pass dat rooster. You still gotta wake earlier when youra mothuh. You still gotta find dem chaps a home. You still gotta find a job. a real one. You still gotta stir grits, even if you raisin’ chillen that don’t want em. You still gotta do all of it. Ain’t nobody gon’ cayit forya. You still need a car. You shouldn’t be afraida da walk. You still gotta carry da wood in e’en when there ain’t no stove. You gotta wash. He’s still your uncle an’der was nothin’ we could do. You still gotta learn’na sat here an’ stay. Here. Wit’ us. You know howta make dat nana puddin’? Den you gotta teach’em. Still.   

Moon Cycle

I pinch tissue between first second and thumb
Wrap the roll like gauze over and over. Hand

Slide off palm. Fold in half. Reach between legs. Shove cover.
The hole He hallowed. Seeping. Cursed.

With standing we adjust. Loose.
Plugged crazy. Gathered insane. Stuffed.
Granules of sugar in my spoon. Stirred.
Echoes muffled. Hope absorbed. Picked by cotton.
I now walk in the room.

Water Beckons

Water beckons. Step by step I fill
myself. Up my legs. Down my hands.
slap. splash and play.
Wash me
River. Wash me whole.
Twirl my spirit til I know knot.
Cleanse me. Send a smile down.
Stream it tickling past the legs of another.
Call them out
to wade. Join us…
within the wade.

You Look good

You look good. You look good. Yeah good.

You look good. What are you doing now?

What are you doing? You look good.

You look good. What have you been doing?

What.

What have you not been doing? What were you not doing?

When did you care? When did you care about looking good?

When you do that, you look good.

Look.

Look, you are good. You are good. When did you start to care.

When did you start to care about looking? You look like you care.

About looking good, you look like you care.

You care now. We see that. We can see that you now care about

your look.

See. Look. at What. Care.

Care.

You care now. You now care. Care has been taken in your look.

Now.

What could you be doing? What have you done?

You care. We'll care now. To look at you.

We care to look at you. You look good.

Now.

SPOTLIGHT ON POET MONIFA LEMONS BY OLIVIA MORRIS

"When I think about where I was, it was just me, and my daughter, and a hundred flyers," says Monifa Lemons, co-founder and director of The Watering Hole, a South Carolina-based poetry collective dedicated to poets of color. When she moved South Carolina, Lemons felt displaced from the creative scene in her hometown of New York City. Lemons, then a working, single mother of a seven year old, was determined to create the change she wanted to see. She secured an open-mic night venue at the Jamaican restaurant This, That, and the Other in Five Points and Cool Beans Coffee Company. Lemons and her daughter walked down Main Street together, posting flyers for the spoken-word scene she had created. That was 1998.

Today, Lemons directs The Watering Hole (TWH). Started as a Facebook group with just eighteen people, TWH now serves as a safe space to over 500 members. In 2016, TWH was invited to present at James Madison University's Furious Flower Poetry Center, the first center in the nation to be dedicated to African American poetry. This poetry conference only occurs every ten years. Furious Flower has honored nationally revered poets such as Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, and in 2016, Rita Dove. TWH also offers an annual Winter Retreat, where they offer expert education to Southern poets at economical prices. "I don't create it if I can't buy it," explains Lemons.

Lemons has also has recently been published. Her work has been chosen for an anthology of Southern poetry entitled Home is Where, edited by Emmy award winning poet Kwame Dawes. Lemons's poetry, like herself, is incredibly dynamic. In the beginning, she was strictly a spoken word poet. Also an accomplished actress, Lemons would jot down poems between scenes, drawing inspiration from 90s-era hip-hop. Presently, however, she has focused her poetry to reflect the many facets of herself. She writes about motherhood, specifically what it is like to be a single, black mother. She also writes about womanism (a form of feminism that emphasizes women's natural contribution to society, used by some in distinction to the term feminism and its association with white women) and injustice. Her spoken word poetry is ever-changing. She reworks one piece in particular, "For Brown, for Rice, for Garner," every time she performs, putting her poetry in a perpetual state of metamorphosis. In "Black Girls," (below) she talks about her daughters praying over cereal and hoping for decorated pencils. In "B's and H's", she provides a cutting condemnation of misogyny in the music industry. Lemons is a poet who can do it all, and do it all well.

When ask if her poetry is confessional, Lemons responds, "it is confessional, but it speaks for a sect of people who are not represented well." Lemons has dedicated much of her time and craft to bringing to light what much of the poetry world ignores. Lemons is continuing the adroit work of her inspirations, Nikky Finney, Patricia Smith, and Roger Bonair-Agard. Though Lemons is a New York native, she also has a bracing Southern perspective in her work. In her youth, she spent her summers raising hogs and feeding chickens at her grandmother's farm in Camden, South Carolina. "I've always been a kindred spirit to South Carolina ... when opportunities came up to move back to New York, I never would," she says. With Lemons's recent publication, she is adding to the rich literary legacy of South Carolina, while also providing her own idiosyncratic commentary on motherhood, hip-hop, and injustice.

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Two Poems by Monifa Lemons

Black Girls    

I know Black Girls

Black girls running around in panties.

Black girls praying. Even over cereal.

Black girls bouncing. or sitting on stairs.

Black girls lit at the gift of notebooks and decorated pencils.

I know black girls

Black girls who hug with the wholeness of their arms

Fast black girls. Free.

Black girls who smile at no one.

smile

I know black girls who pass mirrors and do their own hair.

Black girls showing off.

Black girls screaming.

I know black girls who silence when grandmothers speak.

I know them.

Black girls.

I know black girls who arch backs to drum beats and sax who make it truth because they say so they told them on the way here to us black girls who believe in their sisters hood who don’t ask for black dolls they expect them black girls who strut through your space and whip their hips passed newsstands they know they know they know they know black girls who blow and hush and hum and rhythm and concoct and draw and spell and conjure up you and you and you and you. i know them. I know them black girls and they comin’ for you.

Weight

You look good. You. Look good. Yeah Good. Looking good. What are you doing? Now what are you doing? You

Look good. What have you been doing? What. What have you not been doing? What were you not doing? When did you care? When did you care about looking good? When you do that, you look good. Look. Look, you are good. You are good. Now. You care now. You now care. Care has been taken. Now. What were you doing? What have you done? You care. Now. We'll care now look at you. We care to look at you. You look good. Now.

Poems Flow with Your Cup of Morning Joe via River Poems from One Columbia and the office of the Poet Laureate

 

Local poets come together to create coffee sleeve poems about the historic flood and rivers of Columbia for national poetry month this April.

In conjunction with One Columbia for Arts and History, Ed Madden, the city of Columbia’s poet laureate, has created a project titled River Poems. This project will focus on bringing poetry to the people of Columbia during the entire month of April. Since 1996, April has been national poetry month, and one of the tasks of the poet laureate is to promote the literary arts. “As a project for the poet laureate, last year and this year both, we put poems on the buses. We had already decided the theme this year would be the river, because it is the theme for Indie Grits, but I think the flood added additional urgency to the theme,” says Madden.

Along with the bus project, the second project this year was to put the poems on coffee sleeves. “We’ve been trying to think of ways to promote poetry in unexpected places, so coffee sleeves felt like a really obvious place to put poetry,” says Madden. “You can drink your morning cup and read beautiful literature.”

Seven local writers came together for this wonderful opportunity to spread literature around the city. The writers include, Jennifer Bartell, Betsy Breen. Jonathan Butler, Bugsy Calhoun, Monifa Lemons Jackson, Len Lawson, Ray McManus, and Madden himself. After sending out a limited call to those artists to create a piece of poetry eight lines or fewer, each poem was then stamped on thousands of coffee sleeves that will be distributed at independent coffee shops around Columbia. Including both Drip locations, and the Wired Goat.

“I think the idea of the coffee sleeves is so smart. Columbia has a healthy relationship with the arts, especially the performing arts. But the city gives a lot of love to the fine arts, the design arts, and the literary arts that has thrived here for quite some time.  You’d expect that from a capital city to a certain extent. But what is unique in Columbia is that the art scene is so diverse, and there is a growing respect for that diversity. The literary scene is no exception. There is a little something for everyone here. I hope that resonates,” says Ray McManus, poet and author of the poem Mud.

Each of the eight poems centers around the idea of the river that runs through Columbia. This idea ties in with the theme of this year’s Indie Grits Festival, which is Waterlines as well as The Jasper Project’s multi-disciplinary project Marked by the Water, which will commemorate the first anniversary of the floods in October. There are also a few featured poems that represent the voices of people effected by the historic flood which ran through the city last October. Overall, each poems creates a sense of what the rivers mean to each poet, and how in many ways people are still mending together the pieces almost six months later.

When writing her poem titled What Stays, Betsy Breen was thinking back to a particular image she recollects from the flood. “I was thinking about the flood in October, and all the debris that washed up during that time. I have a particular image in my mind of a part of Gills Creek that I pass every morning on the way to work. The week after the rain stopped, it was filled with both keepsakes and trash. I was thinking of that when I wrote this poem,” says Breen.

It was almost opposite for McManus, who says most of his inspiration almost always comes from books and projects. “I love exploring directions that I didn’t otherwise intend. I’ve always been drawn to rivers; the way they perform; the way they’re always moving. And we depend on them more than we realize, especially in the most basic of functions. We grow from rivers, from the mud of rivers. At some point they become a part of who we are,” says McManus.

National poetry month begins on April 1. Columbia is sure to be celebrating all month with something to read as people drink their coffee and travel to work. “We are always looking for more ways to promote the arts, and I believe this year that includes a pretty unique project,” says Madden.

Don’t forget to pick up your cup of morning joe this month to feel the inspiration of poetry. Breen reminds us that “National Poetry month is much larger than this poem or project, of course, and I do hope people pay attention to all the different kinds of poetry around them.”

-- Alivia Seely