tichaona chinyelu
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Writing a novel is harder than I ever conceived! I’ve written and published books of three books of poetry but those books are full of personal poetry arranged chronologically. They’re linear rather than a cohesive whole like a novel. When I first got the idea of writing a novel, I spent years typing down whatever…
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Indigo indicates topaz retreat and I am summoned to a repast of blue treats A birthstone blue kind of night a sapphire surprise sky Nonviolent violet amid surrendering slivers of yellow I would claw my way back from ten thousand deaths just to witness these blues © 2018 Photo and text by…
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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I be holding beauty when I glance upon them theoretically shaping the future into an afro centric sharpness that shook the white power structure into confronting black consciousness organized and mandated to dismiss that old time religion that said everything in its place especially the black…
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Freestyle #1, 2018 Stymied by the weather words coalesce and collect like dust, like soil. I am an archaeologist unearthing her hidden story. A grain of sand, a paragraph is all that history provides. To the victor belongs the spoils I guess…
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Everyday, the street sweepers’ contempt swept us, nothing and nobody exempt. The whites of their eyes forecast doom in their matrix soundstage of a room. They insisted on incising my rights with a language full of curses and slights. You won’t catch me on the front line being one God says is all mine. It’ll…
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The crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition, that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us as tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway. – George Washington Slave prettily pretending on the promenade. A…
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I was tracked as a kid. My mother, an immigrant, assumed that the educational professionals knew something she didn’t know about her troublesome girl child and let them put me into “special” ed. As painful and contradictory as that decision was, I don’t blame her. I understand, now, that she didn’t understand the context in…
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I Represent I represent the oppressed black womb penetrated too early in its development. No one takes the time to explain abortion before I am strapped in the clinic gurney to have the baby he planted scraped out. One day, I was watching Dora and the next day my teacher said I was a statistic.…
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Here, I eat the chips of childhood; salt in the air and salt and vinegar in my mouth. Salivating stillness after the turtle-like triumph of treading to the top we put a period on the promenade. Proudly private people we prostrate ourselves in lounge chairs designed for that express purpose. This is one of…
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(Originally posted on my book review blog, Diary of a Mad Reader) I am someone who reads books that break my heart, time and time again. The Book of Night Women broke my heart. Apparently, A Brief History of Seven Killings, which I’m 14 pages away from finishing, is going to do the same. And…
Tichaona Chinyelu 
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