soft magic.

by Upile Chisala

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.

To the mothers who fed us poems till our bellies had no room for self-doubt, thank you.

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

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.

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.

you are beautiful, and your wings are made of the things they threw in your face, the things that were meant to make you even smaller in a universe so vast. but you wove them together, those treacherous old things, and made wings. what a beautiful creature you are! what a beautiful creature you’ve always been !

sir, for nine months you too swam in mother blood. tell me, how do you manage to hate a woman with every bone in your body?

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

Fall for yourself, shamelessly.

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

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.

To the men who loved me inconsistently, I survived you.

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.

love, you wouldn’t believe all the places I thought I would find you.

Why are you so afraid of loving a strong woman?

am still learning to make language out of pain, to write out all the ache. I am still teaching my fragile and my strong that they can co-exist.