Each month I tend to gather a curated selection of pieces to feature as my poetry collection for those specific 30-ish days, and poets.org is the hub of my poems in June. June has been an odd month so far as I’ve begun to settle in to my life back home once again and continue searching for employment while I’m here. It’s a strange experience to live in my high school bedroom in the house of my youth with my parents after being on my own for four years, but I’m trying to navigate the best way of existing cohesively as an adult within the confines of my time at home. These poems in June slightly represent the struggle to transcribe events and occurrences through written language, which is also relevant to me in my daily life. Although I’m working through the transition between college and adult life, I’m even more heavily impacted by the injustices that continue to take place across the world. I find that these poems in June use the softest language, but still accurately depict the cruelties of society, especially for people of color. I usually find the majority of my selected poems from the chapbooks in my collection, but the poetry emails I received everyday revealed a different outlet for my poems in June. Mónica Teresa Ortiz’s first piece about executions focused on the cops’ shooting of Oscar Grant in 2009 and how instances of police violence are so common that we can’t help but move on with our lives. The second poem by Devi S. Laskar highlighted many recent and media-worthy stories about tragedies and how they overwhelm us all. The third poem related to me most as its author, Mahtem Shiferraw described the inspiration for the piece as trying to find the balance between living and fighting back against oppression and rampant atrocities in the world. The last selection of my poems in June is similar to the fourth poem in that Rosamond S. King addresses how people of color choose to be both happy and survival-oriented. I hope you like my selections as much as I do.
