soft magic.

by Upile Chisala

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

dark girl, dream all those dreams.

fighting sadness is necessary war.

7. Don’t stay angry at the world too long. Seek out life in little things and move past sadness. 8. Touch somebody, with your hands or with your heart, with your words or with your silence. Share yourself. 9. Celebrate your skin. 10. Be yourself and never apologize for being someone you love.

when your grandmother dies, she does not remain in the ground or in the picture on your beside table. you will find, that when a man kisses new dreams into you you remember to thank her for your face and the lessons she whipped into your skin thank her for making you worthy of good love again and again.

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.

darling, there’s no such thing as a coin with one side. I am honey and lemon.

and today, your bones gathered your skin and said “Come on, let’s do it again”

some days our prayers are twice as loud and thrice as long, some days they need to be.

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.

if someone hasn’t called you brave lately, I will. you are fighting sadness with everything you’ve got and for that you are mighty.

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.

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

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

I 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.

lover, we dug each other out of lonely places tell me that isn’t magic!