UNTIL TODAY1

All my poetry has been di- 
Agnostic: a [swamp of self-
Deception] best described  

As [beautiful and ugly], withal I
Have never written the word "Dys-
Phoria," have not trekked its pink

Pink [wound] about this [land-
Scape of myself]. My [mind], a black  
Gash when called "[man]."

       A tradition, 

It is: my grandmother, committed
To [suicide], took her [grief]
To the streets— 

       Oncoming traffic, they say.  

No one talks about it. How 
It, too, was a protest.  

       How it, too, was [brave].


1 This poem would not exist without Solmaz Sharif's "Desired Appreciation," after Ovid's "Ibis," from Look (Graywolf Press, 2016). The bracketed words or phrases are cribbed from Iyanla Vanzant's Until Today: Daily Devotions for Spiritual Growth & Peace of  Mind (Simon & Schuster, 2000). On diagnostic & curative poetry, see "Empathy is an Endpoint: Solmaz Sharif & Rickey Laurentiis in Conversation" published at Sublevel.

Jada Renée Allen is a writer, educator, and two-headed Black woman from South Side Chicago, IL. She is the recipient of fellowships, scholarships, and support from Tin House, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Community of Writers, The Frost Place, and VONA (Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation), among other organizations. Her writing either appears or is forthcoming in Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-a-Day,” Callaloo, Chicago Reader, Gulf Coast Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Logic(s), Virginia Quarterly Review, Wildness, and elsewhere. She is the founding executive director of The Frances Thompson Arts Foundation and she is the editor-in-chief of Bodemé. Allen lives in Phoenix, on occupied O’odham and Hohokam lands.