During break I continued to work (Three Sisters on Hope Street) as well as organize and meet with PARC. Spent sometime with friends who came home from their schools in other states, hung out with the beau, basically just had a laid back few weeks.
I'm taking this class for fun. I am a Gender Studies major (with an Africana 2nd major) but I'm not taking this class to meet a Gender requirement. I heard amazing things about this class from a friend who took it over a year ago and I knew that I wanted to be a part of what sounded like a fantastic experience.
When I'm not in class I work, spend time with PARC, read, and for the next year I will be researching and putting together a substantial piece of work for my independent study project. Not the most exciting life but it satisfies me.
My blog name is fairly simplistic. My last name is Sterling, as noted earlier, and I do a lot of work and study around resistance mobilizations and revolutionary movements. Sterling, other than being my last name, has its wonderful list of meanings that I felt fit well as a descriptor of resistance and was an easy name to pick that wasn't already taken by the millions of people on the interwebz.
The title of this page is from a poem entitled "i had five nose rings' from Ntozake Shange's Nappy Edges. Shange is a masterful poet/author who I adore. In general I love poetry and will also probably post a few of my favorite poems on this blog when I'm not posting for class.
i had five nose rings
i had five nose rings
a gold circle
a silver circle
a star
nefertiti
& a half moon
without these i am unarmed
not ready for arbitrary violence
paris winds in winter
my face chafed/seemingly rouged
a positive response
to poison
my decorations emblems fetishes
gleaming from my cheeks as the sun turns water to diamond
these beauties of mine crawled poison
to the base of my brain
like cocaine is apt to do
vitamin deficiency
a lack
of fresh air & music
the ring on my face/ like a brand
or an emerald
paris snarls her fog & chill thru my veins
throws me to
the outskirts of myself
i had five nose rings
a gold circle
a silver circles
a star
nefertiti
& a half moon
i am no longer suspected of being/ moslem
i am suspected of scarring myself
my one claim to shout abt
my era of myself
becomes a signal of depression
unadorned i march along these avenues
my head darting forward/ down
no one to see the mark
the absence of the jewel
my face betrays me
i frequent corners where men beat each other to death
in the name of
love
i know children who carry knives
to preserve the dignity of their innocence
guns to frighten anyone who comes
too close/ contact
is dangerous here
makes us susceptible to disease
the air in paris warped my visions/ gave
distance & psychosis clearance
sometimes there is too much poison
to attend to beauty
i had five nose rings
a gold circle
a silver circle
a star
nefertiti
& a half moon
they have fallen away
i breathe now
this lack of beauty
& caress the cheek of a child
who imagines no thing
beautiful
no thing
safe
paris new york
linger in the blood
like malaria scarlet fever typhoid
herpes simplex herpes complex syphillis gonorrhea
linger in the blood
like disease
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