✐ WRITING PROMPT: we is the people by Sydney Mayes and the widened scope of reclamation via migratory poetics

“we is the people” does not take borderlessness for granted—as no rigorous migratory poetics ever should—rather it makes clear to the reader, through a reverberating opening and closing, the fact that borders are a choice deliberately taken in so many acts and utterances of those in current, supposed power. Supposed because power here, too, is questioned, recast, and re-rooted in an ethic reminiscent of Emiliano Zapata’s, “La tierra es para quien la trabaja.” (“The land belongs to those who work it.”) The ‘we’ Sydney Mayes honors in this poem understands power better than any law-making, violent force might, because it is a we intimately familiar with the land and the freedom it inherently, naturally grants us; a power that knows better, that is the calm before, during, and after the tyrannical storm. 

The poem speaks in couplets, a deceivingly stable and marrying structure, to actually heighten the tension between the diering ‘we’s and the ways in which they activate their mouths, which, depending on the power structures that aect them, are either “pried open,” “h[e]ld closed and twisted tight,” “so / open, no sound makes it farther than the front door,” or “milk whetted,” to name only a few of the possible orientations. Through this craftful and methodical structuring of the poem, Mayes holds a magnifying glass up to the mouth as site of precarity, but also agency. How often do we imagine reclamation of power as external to the body? What if the most liberated sense of reclamation exists in the way we hold our mouths open, so open, generously, abundantly, in direct opposition to the exclusionary language and realities that shoot forth from the mouths of empire? Perhaps we should all be so familiar with “the unsafety of the exposed tongue.” How, then, would we move dierent, speak dierent, conjure dierent? I am thinking here, too, of the ways migratory peoples and diasporas hold so much story in their mouths, oral storytelling traditions as well as practical knowledge, sharing them intentionally to entrusted receiving ears and mouths, to facilitate a return, a reclamation, a liberation of people and land. 

Writing Prompt: 

What does liberation taste like? Write from the mouth. Write the dialogue between the backs of your teeth and the tip of your tongue. Write the echoes of your esophagus. Write the alphabets inscribed by the breaths that wind their way in and out. Write from the lineal tongue. Write from the mouth that is in community with the mouths that surround it. Write the harmony, the cacophony, and everything in between. Incorporate at least one instruction/command/invitation. End or begin (or both) in onomatopoeia. When you feel you’ve fully arrived in the poem, read it aloud in front of a mirror. Is your poem as freely embodied in your own mouth as you’d hoped? Ask a trusted friend, a trusted mouth, to read the piece. What does their mouth have to add to the poem?

Below, you can submit your poem to be displayed in our upcoming blog featuring works in conversation with this anthology.