What am I grateful for? Who do I stain my face with age for? That furrowed brow for a past that can only be found tucked behind my forehead. I am thankful and it shows up in my walk. The way I sway in this endless swinging. I am thankful and it shows up in my laugh: is the last one I’ll ever have that hits this deep? I am thankful and it reveals itself in the tenderness of my touch. Yet my grip is so loose. I am thankful and it shows in my speech, stains my sheets and leaves a lipstick ring around a wine glass. gratitude, dripping, is what grounds me. So I sing a song only swans can sway to and I tip toe on this earth like she is a respite. I tread light.

I write for You.

Sing for You.

Muse on You.

Get loveDrunk on You.

I get ferocious with You.

I get fierce with you.

I go H.A.M on You

Like I’d kill for You

If I haven’t already killed You

I sleep in with You

Brush the darkness out of You

Fuck the shit out of You

Cry tears with You

Laugh a bellow with You

Hum for You

Dance with You

Win with You

Soar with You

Glide with You

Taste freedom with You

Paint new worlds on You.

I do it all, for You.

allowing my body and bodies to feel a liberation so foreign puts a move on my heart. and it’s the freedom to feel, the freedom to bellow and burn from within. the freedom to be pained. the freedom to rise from that very pain like a Phoenix. the freedom to learn from the pain and fall in love with the sanctity of feeling good. the freedom to feel good. the freedom to walk out on a limb for yourself and call it grace or an awakening but the freedom to self-care yourself right into sovereignty, making your very existence a service, do you hear me? the freedom to declare eons worth of medicine and healing as a mechanism to unchain your heart. you are the remedy. the freedom to soften. the freedom to know the expression of this body, though a temporal resting place, is a temple.. a sanctuary. a freedom to lick the insides of your mouth for the right flavor of truth. dig and find freedom so foreign, it puts a move on your heart. 

Composed at 5:55am.

What is a breakdown without a breakthrough? Who would’ve thought that simultaneously as all fell apart and I took the last of my gasping breaths after all the crying that a piece of paradise was on the other side of utter hopelessness?



I feel as though life has taken a chisel to the hardened edges of my heart and given me an ultimatum. One where we promise each other things I would never dare repeat but I wonder — after the pinky swear was over — if there’s a place in our hearts that is opened when we find ourselves without someone who was once a dear companion?


Someone once said that a heart break and heart opening can be the same thing depending on who is listening.



One day in the near nowness, I will look back with wise and sweet fondness to connect dots I cannot see. Someday this will be an elegy; my own personal swan song and I’ll look back, held up by a strengthening nostalgia.



One day sooner, I will continue collecting gems on this path, looking up at a teal stained sky and I’ll wonder about the girl who cried wolf so much so, she became one.

you ever had a person tell you to “protect your heart”? and the very person you need to guard yourself from is the owner of the lips that uttered the latter? what an insane sensation to live a life of continuous protection. what a strange and yet awful thing to declare –

“I survived, I did not live.”
there have never been statues created in honor of those who just “got by” or “made it through” or “maintained”. God did not honor a soul with a lowly human body to simply allow it the luck of coasting. I am not interested in maintenance. I’m not investing years and time just to get by. forgive me if I want colors and laughter that causes my stomach to turn inside itself. sorry if I want to be so angry with something I feel heat rising from my body. I apologize if I not only demand an equilibrium of peace and love and happiness, but I’ll fight tooth and nail for it. Sade sang about being a solider of love, and I’m one of endless peace and happiness with a love sprinkled all the way through. I am going to earn my existence. so protect myself? I will do, but if the choice presents itself, and I must stand in a shell or stand in the flow of life and allow myself to get carried away - I’m already being swept off my feet.

writing is not a luxury.

coffeetalkxo:

Reading essay’s in Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider - “Poetry is not a Luxury”, where she emphasizes how poetry becomes the voice where women, black women in particular are able to fully contextualize their experience of life without the words of other races or genders (namely white male writes) had me thinking about a lot of things lately. As a black woman who runs a blog with my cousin and writing my own material in my free time, I wonder a lot about my voice. Where it comes from? What does my writing add to the conversation that my fellow sisters and brother’s are writing about in the blog-o-sphere? What do I, a 21 years old college student have to say about my world and how I see it?

Everyone is entitled to an opinion especially in the age where all you need is a smart phone and an outlet, having a voice isn’t the most difficult thing to obtain, but what I worry about is the intent of these voices and what inspires them. I didn’t even know, until recently, about the copious amount of blogs out there dedicated to the black voice and our black experiences. I love it all! The natural hair blogs, the blogs who specialize in talking about relationships in the African American community, blogs dedicated to music in our community, the movies, television shows — the list is endless but something I want to reaffirm here on coffee talk is not only my purpose as co-owner of this multifaceted and ever-developing outlet, but my purpose as a black, Muslim, woman, writer. 

I feel as though I have been a part of this dialogue, be it in my highly biased classroom environment or within my own peers, about the role of race and gender in the artistic and expressive space. Some may disagree with me and that’s perfectly fine, but I am here to say that there is no way to subtract the core of your existence, especially as a black woman writer in your art. What Sister Lorde is tackling in her works and the above essay particularly touches on that, even in it’s title stating boldly that poetry is not a luxury and I wholeheartedly agree. I’ve taken just about every Brit Lit class there is to take and all Romantic writers agree that poetry is about the spontaneous flow of emotions and though it may be, I believe that not only poetry but all literary works, even a blog, have a much higher calling than just the pleasurable spewing of emotions. Poetry is the documentation of the life and it’s participants. I don’t believe writing is a passive form of expression alone. It is concrete and complex and it is active and participating in the dialogue that is life.

With the passing of one of my favorite writers last week, the late Great Amiri Barka, may he rest in peace; I wonder greatly now more than ever about my purpose as a writer and what my message is. Remembering his play The Dutchman, which is an immensely dense, compacted two act play with only two characters, but speaks volumes on race, racism, jazz, slavery and even sexism — I am drawn to why I decided to write in the first place and it was not because I had nothing better to do. I decided to write because like Audre Lorde’s brevity, I am called to be brave in who I am, where I came from and my pure pumping black heart with all of it’s stories and tales. Lifetimes have lived behind my eyes so I don’t write to pass the time, I write to live. I write not for a luxury but because my situations and how I see the world is important because of who I am as a black Muslim woman writer. That voice, not only from me but for so many others like me, with my skin color, my curly hair, my wide hips and full lips, my attitude and corn bred fed body, are needed desperately and consistenly for the discourse of life.

with love,

Hoda. xo.

i love a man that rains.

as a man

he ain’t never been much

for sunny days.

so i found myself

in love with a man

that rains. –

with his city slicker’s sadness

and country singer’s sorrows

loving me on your own accord

up and around your hip hop re-cords.

no matter how much

my affections towards you

may relate

your ways will never

match the colors of my drapes –

maybe that’s why i’m crazy about you

i become a shell of my former self

when our lips stumble over each other

in ecstasy and innocence.

our love was meant to be calm

and quite.

and maybe just as peculiar.

with a loveliness

out stretched

tumbling into your greatness

to find your weakness

and smell your tastiness

inhaling your senses

in all of this senselessness.

i have discovered a World

in your bedroom

and a universe in your bones.

maybe our love is meant to be calm

and quite.

of all the dyes in the world

i look at you

and fall in love with

the many facets 

and hues of blue you exude.

Life is filled with infinite moments, both good and bad, but my favorite moments are those when one pushes their ego aside, and rests upon the hands of God to summon love and gratitude in order to extend that to others. Something in me moves when I see a humble gesture from one individual to the next out of pure unadulterated kindness and sympathy for just being human - knowing that everyday we fight our own battles. it’s a beautiful thing, truly.