Iyanla “Fix My Life” Vanzant Thinks I’m Like This Because My Mom’s A Hoe with a line from Dionne Brand

Poetry
Written By Edil Hassan

The great interrogation room is the stanza. There is the mother outside

 the poem— forever changing the curtains to better escape the morning light— and the one

here who is knocking. The one who steps inside. If she

is not the same, does it matter?  If she is a meter of the person she once was, don’t her wrists still look divine shackled, the silver

stuttering: XX | XX—? O Memoir Dearest, if I am the good cop, then I will ask: won’t you

give me everything? If the bad cop, then I will say:  give me everything. If God, then I give

you this memory: when I first heard the word ineffable I heard inevitable. I mistook a silence

so extreme it stood, like you, outside the door of language for a certainty; isn’t need the miner,

plumed and singing, of invention?  This was always going to be hard. That I have a face only

a mapmaker could love doesn’t mean I’m heartless. After all, you and I are like murmur, like

 doubter. No. Like maker, like daydreamer. No. Like mourner,

 like deerstalker. No— O Holy Myrrh, what have I done to myself?  


Edil Hassan

Edil Hassan is the author of Dugsi Girl (Akashic Press, 2021) which was selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the New Generation of African Poets series. A finalist for the 2022 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, her work has appeared in Poetry magazine, the Academy of American Poets, Guernica, and is anthologized in Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019). She is a graduate of the MFA at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is the senior poetry fellow.

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