Kamilah Aisha Moon
WebsiteYears: 2003, 2004, 2006
Biography
A recipient of fellowships to the Prague Summer Writing Institute, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, Cave Canem and The Vermont Studio Center, Kamilah Aisha Moon's work has been featured or is forthcoming in several journals and anthologies, including Harvard Review, jubilat, Sou'wester, Oxford American, Lumina, Callaloo, Gathering Ground, Ringing Ear, Black Nature: 400 Years of African American Nature Poetry and Villanelles, among other journals and anthologies. She has taught English and Creative Writing at Medgar Evers College, Drew University and Adelphi University. She has led creative writing workshops for various arts-in-education organizations in settings as diverse as libraries and prisons. A featured poet in conferences and venues around the country, Moon received her MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Her poetry collection, She Has a Name, is forthcoming from Four Way Books.
Poem
Don't move this dust— my grandmother's scratched upright, older than all of us, has always anchored this corner. Unplayable, tuned to scales that can't exist, now a weight keeping yesterday’s pages from flying away.
Everything's moving, turning into things we don't want or recognize.
Don't budge our world
or move this dust, don't remind that eventually, everything goes slack and mute as these keys decaying golden brown in the mouth of her piano, stringed mausoleum where we prop our framed pasts.
Sometimes we don't want what's best, we just want what was, for better and worse. Often all we have are banged-up blessings.
Please, don't move this dust that has danced in this air for thousands of mornings, our mingled skins glitter caught in sunlight
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(first appeared in Storyscape Literary Journal)