Joi Miner
I Found My Black Girl Magic in the Magic City
They call you The Magic City. I didn't
get it. Didn't feel anything magical in my hundreds of visits
over 15 years when you'd allow me to grace your stages &
give verbal edification I'd cooked up in my mind's kitchen
to your citizens.
It wasn't until I uprooted this self from the empty soil I'd known
as home & relocated to your garden that I was born.
You charged my Black Girl Magic like crystals lit by full moons
& sent me out to gleam in the streets, a radioactive
rainbow-colored disco light of purpose.
Replaced my throat chakra with megaphones to tell the tales I breathed in
your present, daily—like I'd never breathed a day in my life
& got high like hookahs in lounges on Saturday nights
while vibing to music penned by your children.
I drank your rain to replenish my empty cup.
Danced barefoot to the music that is your construction & expansion.
Told secrets over wild-picked mint juleps on front porches in
homey shacks cradled in cul-de-sacs & sucked the stingy
stems of honeysuckle hidden coyly amongst less appealing
vegetation kissing dilapidated gates on alleys & side streets.
I found myself here. In your darkest, dankest corners.
My pasts and presence emerged as yours—
my reason for being clarified, my reflection more clearly
seen than through vanity mirrors. And then,
when you’d satisfied yourself with washing away my preconceptions, you blessed my saplings that were just becoming,
making my fruit sweeter than what they should have been
if they'd grown just from me, from this life's tree.
You fertilized me with tools to raise futures, on my branches–
your soil feeding them purpose, your air
teaching them their limitless worth. They
are growing greater than the skies I ever dared to imagine
because of you.
And as homage, I call them by your name.
Call this their home & they know,
much sooner than I, why
They call you The Magic City.
They know through pain, through past, through growth
what I didn't—
why they, too, are Black girls
keeping the Magic
in this city. In what I am
& what we do.
Joi Miner, 40, is a mother of two beautiful daughters from Montgomery, AL (currently residing in Birmingham, AL). She is a full-time author-preneur: editor, performance poet, storyteller, sexual assault and domestic violence activist and is a proud and active member of the LGBT community. Author of 35 books and counting, she writes and publishes in the genres of African American urban fiction, urban paranormal, lesbian fiction, lesbian paranormal, psychological thriller, and poetry. Joi was recently chosen as a semi-finalist in America's Next Great Author.