Partially exposed ass on the curb
I sat in some of the warmest weather I had ever experienced in my life.
Bootie shorts.
Tank top.
My body weight freakishly low.
Change in hand:
Two dimes.
A nick.
This was my new awakening.
This was my NEW dawn.
Someone told me
that this would be
the most promising time of my life
But they never finished their sentence and told me how to live it
I figured if I kept moving
I’d get it.
But that was the best that it got at that time.
Blind with the confusion soon to lead my heart into the fire that pressed this diamond,
I floated into my own success without consciousness.
You swore I was so conscious though.
Headwrapped
and detached
from my reality I burned incense because it smelled good and not because I thought I was Erkyah Badu.
You used to call me that though.
To be cute.
Looking back now its not so cute.
That moment, as I crouched in that hot street
looking for the remnants of my shit I got on sale and couldn’t find no receipt
I realized that the ancestors would not have my back if I didn’t protect my own.
And that being a strong black woman wouldn’t mean shit to anyone
if I never flexed on niggas.
Revealing the biceps of twenty something years of yard style exercise-
Chin ups to see my horizon
Push ups to get my ass up off the ground
Sit ups to reinforce that when I touched myself
(or when someone eventually would touch me)
they’d be touching something that felt better on the outside than it did on the inside.
I thought i was so slick with that shit.
“Working out.”
So I kept workin it out.
Taught partially by the greats…
The women who worked it out without ever working it out
Or talking it out
Or sorting it out
But made that shit look fly.
The value systems that women who looked like me before me adapted so that
You
never
saw
them
sweat.
That’s how we rolled, us Queens.
In that moment I was one hundred and nineteen poudns of all the things that I remember historically made me the woman I am today.
Back then they had so many names;
titles, genres, disorders, conditions, emotions, dispositions…
But true to his mantra time makes you forget the details
and I just remember those moments as
“As good as its gon’ fuckin get”.
- Aunt Flo
((Ps - Keep in mind that I’m an artist… and I’m sensitive about my shit)).
