Maura Alia Badji
Auto(immune)
My bones sing red,
Lift half-notes blurred
Beneath flame-lit rooms.
My jangled joints leave
Word of warrior songs I bleed.
Unstuck, accordion-fanned blooms
Chase time through impatient veins.
My bones sing red,
Bending blue notes
Around smoked edges
Placed end to end.
My joints spark bright,
White-hot stark runes
Flared, thrown against night.
My joints sputter, stutter-step
Sparks. Read white-hot rumor spent.
Stark, lines redefined, repurpose despair.
My bones sing red.
Maura Alia Badji
Maura Alia Badji is a disabled poet/writer/artist/energy healer. Her poems and prose have appeared in Cobalt Review, Welter, The Delaware Review, Pirene’s Fountain, The Skinny Poetry Journal, The Good Men Project, This City Is a Poem, Barely South Review, Red Flag Poetry, Liberated Muse, Yellow Chair Press, The Phoenix Soul, The Buffalo News, The Haight Ashbury Literary Journal and others. Maura holds an M.Ed. in Migrant/Special Education from SUNY New Paltz, and an MFA from the University of WA, Seattle where she served as an editorial assistant for The Seattle Review. While in Washington State, Maura taught poetry classes to public school students in grades 4 to 12 and served as a Mentor to a gifted high school student. She was an Early Childhood Special Education teacher in Title I public schools in Virginia for almost a decade. Currently she teaches ESL online to children in China. Maura is a member of The Watering Hole, an online community for poets of color. A NY state native, she lives in Virginia Beach with her son, Ibrahim.
[Image Description: A head/shoulders shot of a smiling woman with olive skin, wavy purple hair with visible silver/black roots, and purple lipstick. Her hair partially obscures one of her dark brown eyes. She wears a black/white adinkra-like abstract patterned top and two silver necklaces, including a personal talisman—a mermaid—and an amethyst quartz. Behind her is a purple/fuchsia batik tapestry, and an abstract metal and glass angel ornament.]