soft magic.

by Upile Chisala

I want to think that God smiles when a black woman is brave enough to love herself.

now that I know the soft magic of your laugh and how your body moves like art, why would I ever go back? what was before you?

sweet child, dance into the light. happiness is waiting for you.

people who only wish to stifle your bloom, do not belong in your garden.

you are a woman after your own heart, darling, that is the bravest thing you could possibly be.

my mother tells me she raised herself. see…. she has always been both sunshine and rain for me, I am in awe of how she survived and became a flower with neither.

I was intended for you, lover, what does the ocean matter?

I write you poems because God spoke the universe into existence, so don’t ever let me hear you say that words are just words. that words don’t leave a mark, make a change, create where once was nothing.

Do not accept the love of a man who makes you feel small, the universe is already so vast.

Boys are boys and men are mean, tell them apart.

the trouble is, some of us are terribly tender and god-awful at picking lovers! and it can feel like we want love more than it wants us.

please….. feed your sons the same softness you feed your daughters.

(for the moon-high baby boys of color who are still growing into their warrior bones. You are little. You are loved)

darling, wherever you find yourself you are foreign.

you should’ve written for me. all the poems I should’ve written for myself.

I remember the first time you feel in love. you said even the water tasted funny, and taking in air felt like sipping galaxies. you looked at everything like you’d never seen it before. this is the first time I realized that love for a moment or a season, can make an entire universe seem like it was just created.

you seldom know how to share yourself , you are used to men half-loving you and not saying please, so when he was all knees at your kiss all plea in your arms you didn’t understand that a man could coil so pretty carry such softness in his voice and ask you so sweetly for a portion, for a place wedged beside you and all your thoughts, you didn’t understand that your love was worth the beg and how beautiful it was for a man to become just bones and skin until you kiss hope into him.

darling, remember to run from men who promise you completion. you are already whole.

get in the habit of celebrating yourself from skin to marrow, you are magic.

His kisses are love letters addressed to my soul.

consider this: your body is a blessing. where it curves, sags, wrinkles. where it was scarred burnt, touched, all of this is a map of your life. your body is memory some sweet some sad but memory nonetheless your soul is living in a house of stories. your body is memory.

dear mother, I hope to inherit all your tenderness and the thorough way in which you love.

don’t let the first time your daughter hears you’re proud of her be at her wedding.

Loving someone who doesn’t love you back is thankless heart work.

darling, your strong bones were formed in a womb. you started from softness. you came from gentle, please remember that when you love.

Fall for yourself, shamelessly.

home is my mother’s voice.

save some soft poems for yourself, you need your love just as much as the next person.

try your best not to love empty men, they are ugly in the mouth.

darling, your body is not a burial ground for the insecurities of others.

women who were ready to be less than enough. she said there is nothing brave about a woman who asks of a man what men haven’t been made to give. she told you that respect was in movies and kind love was only in poems. and you almost believed her.

Lover, bring all your honey and all your hurt.

I am mine every time.

Trust me, I know how to fix myself, how to: mend and burn and bend and shape. I know how to make myself something new, so don’t stay around out of pity, leave me broken and I will find my way back to wholeness.

honey, you need to say the thing before it forms a storm in your chest. you can’t keep carrying anger in your bones because you are too afraid of letting poison out. freeing yourself from the thing won’t make you serpentine. you mustn’t keep anger tucked in your skin like that. please darling, say the thing you mean to say. say the thing before it builds a home in your blood. say the thing before you become the thing itself.

choose happiness every morning like you would an outfit.

feeling deeply does not make you weak. showing that you feel deeply does not make you weak. admitting that there are parts of you that still smell like men who walked into your life and laid their sadness on your palms and drove their empty fingers through your hair and kissed you with their mistakes and wrote you poems about nothing and snuggled up to you with their insecurities, does not make you weak. they weren’t the easiest to love, these men, they tried to comb out their problems over the sink of your happiness.

my darling, you are the color of the earth you inherited holy, let no one silence the glory in your bones let no one make you doubt that you are indeed important.

don’t cheat yourself out of happiness you deserve all the damned chances all the damned tries, so darling please stop thinking of new ways to die.

I was planning to offer him just isn’t enough.

she said: “You deserve a full meal of love. Stop snacking”

I now know that you’re a wild thing, I am sorry I tried to love the forests out of you.

darling, your body is not a burial ground for the insecurities of others.

Find a lovely thing and respect it.

poems, like bodies, carry blood and water and bits of everyone who’s ever loved us.

sometimes I won’t be honey-sweet or love you with my softness but please remember that these bones have crossed oceans to find you and they’d do it again.

Why are you so afraid of loving a strong woman?

I don’t want to be less of me if that’s the only way I’ll get more of you.

a thousand poems have been dancing in my chest since the first time you kissed me.

because I am trying to prove that I can break his heart again and again from thousands of miles away and still be the girl of his dreams.