About a month ago, while reading Lucille Clifton’s collection of poetry I began to weep. Quite honestly, I fell over myself crying in a way that condenses a person into weak and silent body heaves. Sitting yoga style, my body folded over at the waist and I laid my head down on my notebook and deeply cried.

Over and over I kept thinking and feeling, I’m sorry, I didn’t know, I was not ready. I was not me—yet. I was still growing.

Death hits me in the back of my knees, swiftly, and always lurches me over. It has been that way since my father died, and one morning, while listening to A Ribbon in the Sky on KJLH, I fell out crying on the way to second grade. He had been gone just under two years, and only then did I consider my mama’s grief.

We had no time for crying, Mama chastised me. “You need to stop crying and clean yourself up,” she said over her right shoulder while driving. What she didn’t know was that I was not crying for me, I was crying for her. At seven I had no clue what it meant to be without a father. I knew nothing of what was going to come, but in that moment I knew that my Mama had been rendered without. And it hurt.

That is the weeping I fell into while reading Lucille. The aching that comes when you realize something you love has been left without, and there is no undoing. There would be no more Lucille poems and the void of that, dark and cavernous, undid me. We in the world need a poet like Lucille to give us growing, pushing words, that reach beyond what we have made room for in our own minds. We need her ruminations on such things as greens and her prayer for her sister Josephine in heaven:

may heaven be filled

with literate men

may they bed you

with respect.

          -from “here rests,” The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010

Lucille left less than a month after Granma, and just three days before my birthday. We had just laid Granma to rest and I, struggling to make sense of my life without her, was still mourning, unable to get out of the bed most days. My eyelids and cheeks were continuously puffed and red, and my skin, wearing the glow of saltwater, was pale from being constantly bathed in saline.

I cried in the shower, in my sleep, while eating, while daydreaming, while schooling the kids, while shopping in Target, and while E loved me. All the time, I cried.

There was no up or down, just without. But at sometime, as I sat staring out the window wrapped in Granma’s blankets, still perfumed of her, a voice inside said write. It came sometime in February and would resound itself gently until it grew stern, shouting Write in late Spring.

Do you know what it is like to have your insides shout at you—to write? To realize that the only way to untwist and unfurl and unknot your guts is through marking meaning on a page.

And so I listened and started becoming who you know now.

Weeping into the spine of my journal, it was not just for Lucille and Granma and Big Mama, Aunt Sister, and Aunt Bey-Bey, my womanfolk that I cried. I was also crying for me. At that moment, nothing could ever be the same, in me, again.

Never.

And just like that, the whisper to write, was there. Gentle, knowing, guiding. Not just fiction, but poetry, poetry of folk and living, plain folks lives. No matter how much I cried, I cannot, I am not ready, the words refused to settle. Like the winter of 2010, all I could hear was write—write it all, be fearless and run.

I wrote over wet and drying tears, blurred words, carved out fragments and listened.

I am no longer pursuing an MFA solely in fiction, but also poetry. I am scared and inspired. Adapting and relearning. Acquiring and shedding. I am fighting through the cloak fear and self-doubt lays on you to see the other side of me.

Where ever else can I go if I follow life?

Oh, it is hard. So hard. It is so painful and monstrous at times. I find myself crying in the middle of the night, or alone in the shower, wondering how and why I will tell all my truth. I eat words and cook poems. I wish that I didn’t need sleep and could stay awake waiting for a poem or a sentence to come running towards me. I freewrite our meals, oscillating between cooking and writing in person or in my head.

All that fear and angst is why this is real. I am in love with becoming me, even though at times she scares me. But then I think of Granma and how unapologetic she was. Georgia never apologized for Georgia. No, no. She was not only her, she was always the concentrated version of her. And this is what she would have wanted for me, her Baby Ki. To take naps, take some of my irons out the fire, stop worrying, cook only when I’m filled with love, and give her something to talk about at the Dialysis Center.

And so, I ask Lucille, before I open the spine of her words, to teach me, take a break from the clouds and light my path.

I hope you have come for Vegan, Gluten-Free, Triple Chocolate Almond Twinkies with Walnuts.

Vegan, Gluten-Free, Triple Chocolate Almond Twinkies, with Walnuts

adapted from Great Gluten-Free Vegan Eats, by Allyson Kramer

Ingredients: 

• 1 C. Brown rice flour
• ¼ C. Tapioca starch
• ½ C. Cornstarch
• ½ C. Teff flour
• ½ C. Special Dark Cocoa powder
• 1 tsp. Xanthan gum
• ½ tsp. Baking soda
• 2 tsp. Baking Powder
• ½ tsp. Sea salt
• 1 1/3 C. sugar
• 2 Tbl. Coconut Oil
• 1 ½ C. Chocolate Almond Milk
• 2 Tbl. Apple Cider vinegar
• 1 tsp. Almond extract
• 1 tsp. Vanilla extract
• 1 C. Vegan Chocolate chips
• ½ C. Rough chopped walnuts

Chocolate Icing:

• 1 ¼ C. Powdered Sugar
• 2 Tbl. Special Dark Cocoa
• 2 Tbl. Chocolate Almond Milk
• 1 tsp. Vanilla Extract
• 1 tsp. Almond Extract

*Add more milk in ½ tsp. increments to thin, or more powdered sugar in 1 Tbl. increments to thick. Stop at desired icing consistency. For the record, I prefer mines thick, and that's what's pictured.

Directions: 

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Prepare a twinkie (or muffin) pan by lightly oiling with coconut oil and dusting with cocoa powder or brown rice flour. Set aside.
3. Combine the milk and vinegar, set aside to curdle.
4. In a large bowl, sift together the flours, starches, cocoa powder, xanthan gum, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and sugar. Whisk until all ingredients are thoroughly combined.
5. In a separate, smaller bowl, stir together the oil, milk mixture, extracts.
6. Add the wet ingredients into the dry by making a well in the center of the dry, and pouring the wet inside. Mix until smooth.
7. Fold in the chocolate chips and walnuts.
8. Fill the pans three-quarters full.
9. Bake in the center of the oven for 25-28 minutes, checking often after 20 minutes (depending on your oven).
10. Let cool in pans for five minutes, then turn out and let cool on cookie rack.
11. Make Icing while twinkies cool. After 10-12 minutes, when they have cooled enough to touch but are still warm, pour icing over the tops. Serve.

I hope you will be brave and courageous and stretch yourself to try and do things you are afraid of. It is often those things that we fear the most that shed the most light on who we are.

But most importantly, dare to believe you can and you will.

Peace and Love,

Kiandra