This is for Barbra Harris, the founder of the ‘Project Prevention’ program, a foundation based around paying poor, drug addicted women to sterilize themselves.

I have lived 18 years, and I’ve never been angrier.
I was raised to believe that white is an absent of hue, a lack there of, an identity that pigment hadn’t given me.
A sense of self, who was still running from me.
But today, I think I finally found my color.
A shade, an identity the color of gritted teeth and hell fire, jaws snapping, I haven’t stopped seething.

I was brought up inside the walls of narcotics anonymous meetings, on stale oatmeal cookies and burnt coffee.

I have seen scalding cobalt, empty indigo, and every single color of self destruction the spectrum has created, wrapped in ultra-violet - nick name them disaster.

Torrential rains and hurricanes, volcano hearts with lungs made of wildfire.

No one chooses to be a drug addict.
No one decides, as a child - that their spines were meant to bend backwards into question marks, body contorted around chasing something that will destroy them.
Born to slit ivory in two, and bleed black like the stars do.
They were children once.

Daughters who were beaten by fathers, and sons who watched their mother’s commit suicide,
children who were too young,
whose skin bruised around the fingerprints of trauma.
They were shaken, born vibrating, their bones have never stopped craving silence.
So if a needle brought it to them, or a pipe, a second of stillness, it became the only thing that mattered.

Using, drinking, snorting, shooting, swallowing, smoking, inhaling an answer to the questions their spines were asking.
Maybe you’ve never heard the sound of a body betraying itself, but this is it.
There will be a skylit shades of remorse they will turn themselves waiting for the answers.
An explanation for all the
“whys”
and “yous”
and the “I would quit if I just could,
but I can’t,
and I don’t know how not to,
when the only time the world stands still is when I’m high enough to look down on myself.”
Drug addicts use because they are broken people trying to mend broken pieces, swallowing shards of broken glass that end up slitting their own throats.

If you have these shattered shrapnel pieces wedged inside yourself for long enough, its hard to remember existing without them.

I watched my mother, break in and out of sobriety like a jail cell she had swallowed the key to.
No one realizes the cage we’re all trapped inside of, is our own ribs.
She created me, took all the best piece of herself and made me. Like a patch work quilt, my edges didn't always come together easy.
But I thank God, every single day for it.

Each Christmas spent in a homeless shelter,
every hour I spent shoving notes beneath the bathroom door, begging her to come out,  
every relapse, recovery, overdose, hours waiting by the phone for a hospital call, every midnight I couldn't sleep without her by my side,
Every twelve step program, a serenity prayer for seven days sober, key chain necklaces and chips she'd always kiss and say “this ones it, baby”.
Every ****** up, angry, starving, man and woman who carried a story in their lungs, and let me hear it,
Every plate full of co-dependency she fed me,
Every ounce of anger and sorrow she gave me,
Every time I asked her, why,
Every moment she disappointed me.
Every time she'd say she was sorry, and tried to mean it,
Every time I wore her mistakes like battle wounds
She destroyed me
But ******* it, I am so ******* grateful she did.  

Because she broke me, into a thousand pieces.
But its true what they say, bones always heal stronger the second time around.
I’ve been given this opportunity,
this legend in my blood, this authentic, “I’ve been through hell and back” mentality,
this dedication to myself.

And I will not let you, or anyone else take that away from me.

I’ve got a born and bred monster, asleep in my esophagus, brimstone and fury, I am whole-heartedly dedicated to my own ambition.

And this climb, upward through the wreckage of my own existence, has given me more than you will ever understand.

Allowing privileged white people to discuss the nature of poverty, doesn’t find answers.

But I have mine. And I will tell you, there is value here. Inside of me.
I am that child,
I am that statistic,
Alive still born and still screaming,

You can not get rid of me.