the problem

Poetry
Written By Jordan Honeyblue
 

i am ≈

∞ of ocean-bottom phantoms or my past
    lives waving the Atlantic

        x
751 black toe tags stacked on my forehead mole

        +
every strand of Gabrielle’s firebrand halo

        x
5 bullet holes lingering to decay
    on Breonna’s corpse

        +
Nana’s aged metal pot sloshing hot
    stewed tomatoes

        x
Nikki Giovanni’s Ego Tripping
    (there may be a reason why)

        +
1 silk yellow dress breathing How Great
    is Our God? around a black woman’s waist

        x
3 pandemics

        -
1 Congolese river to trace
    a route back home

        x
pounds: 200 < 124

        +
^that ain’t none of your damn business

Jordan Honeyblue

Jordan Honeyblue is a writer from Baltimore, MD. She graduated from Morgan State University in 2018 and obtained her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Kentucky in 2021. Her writing and poetry manuscript on "Heartwork" explores what it means to be a (un)healthy Black girl and woman in America. She recently served as a 2021-2022 Antiracist Science Education Research Fellow for LabXchange, an online science learning platform created by Harvard University. Jordan has also received fellowships and/or participated in writing retreats from the following organizations and universities: The Furious Flower Poetry Center Fellowship for The Living Truth Legacy Seminar on the Life and Work of Nikki Giovanni (James Madison University, 2018); The Poets and Scholars Summer Writing Retreat through Rutgers’ Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice (Rutgers 2021); The Watering Hole (2021), and The Wild Seeds Writer's Retreat (CUNY 2022). In 2021, she was nominated for Best New Poets and Best of Net. Poetry by Jordan Honeyblue has appeared or is forthcoming in the New Orleans Review, The Common, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Inverted Syntax.

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