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Junious ‘Jay’ Ward, performing at @icehousempls5665 in Minneapolis.
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Button Poetry showcases the power and diversity of voices in the poetry community. By encouraging and broadcasting the best and brightest performance poets of today, we hope to broaden poetry’s audience, to expand its reach and develop a greater level of cultural appreciation for the art form.
I mean you're blank but not like blank Blank a joke a slur a co-sign I don't Know quantify I Lumber through time with Words I scissor a hole in my pocket sand Glass trickling down my leg a classmate Feels comfortable repeating in Earshot something plausibly deniable Like wrapping a snoop verse when the jam Is being pumped up and all voices are Meshed into a matted ball of knots or Was there no music at all an unraveling Yarn a retelling of someone else's words With detailed accuracy the complement of Assimilation the percussion of blood Rush vibrating every surface in the room Kathump not blank people blank people Are cool I'm assured during World sieve It's just those fill-in ethnicity and Corresponding stereotype here Hard to look at a blank friend the same After that knowing the fill in the blank Depends on who's present my dad's Playground proverb was if they talk bad About other people to you you can best Believe they talk bad about you to other People Thing is most summers in New Hampshire My grandparents was it was just me at Some point Tyrone Summers were filled With little league bat swinging like any Number of poses from his favorite cards Instead of picking June bugs off the Rhubarb early in the morning swimming in Silver Lake or occasionally traveling to
Conway for a pepper bottom slice of Pizza in a building that looked like a Barn Or was it the baseball card shop that Looked like a barn weird is there a word For feeling safe yet conscious of your Race races at the same time is that word Dependent on your surroundings can I say Something like soft knife and it conjure A vision of me magnetized to my Grammy's Thigh while I catch the manager's eye Tracking me from the door to the Reggie Jackson rookie I joke that Tyrone's straight black hair Which he's kept close for years now Makes him look racially ambiguous But he is discernably blank or at least For certainty not blank we've never Spoken to each other about our Individual navigation of blank spaces Certainly not how I often felt less Blank because I appear to be less blank Toward the end of a speech he's giving Both sides of our family present he Points me out talks about a polarized Nation the instinctive nature of our Code switching Duality all the Mechanisms we taught ourselves I do understand explaining a joke makes It less funny I am a the race races I choose to be or Gravitate toward B the race races others Assume of Me based on environmental Factors C the race races of the relative
I most resemble D neither and all of the Above In contemplating dominant raceness my Mind falls upon Schrodinger's cat Complexity and Nuance are predictions I Am technically both and neither of my Races the cat is dead the cat is alive This is Theory I enter the room Radioactive I Leave the Room a blank cat The room doesn't the shadow bends over The walls the is a soft knife Um can I give every thank you
