just gonna call it ex-factor

it probably has a lot to do with where i'm at right now--processing old friendships, relationships, sifting through experiences now that i'm in this transitional phase after having uprooted many things to move to california, but imani tolliver's "mudcloth" really got to me today. when i first began, the first half of the opening stanza turned me off and i made a judgment about the poem i was getting into. i thought it was going to be cutesy and sentimental and cliche. but then it wasn't, for me. nostalgic, yes, but not sentimental.

to be honest, i decided to move away from reading straightforward poems and have been looking a lot at poets that are doing weirdo things with craft, voice, grammar, form, as a way to challenge and push my own writing into new directions. last year, i had been frustrated with the poems i'd been producing, wanting to move away from the narrative, lyric poems i'd been writing, so i've been wrapped up in other stuff. and it was nice to read this today and i value it.

but i really love poems that make me sad, or are relatably sad. and, even more, i guess a guilty pleasure of mine is the sad-lost-love poem. like i've been reading and re-reading sandra cisneros's collections loose woman and my wicked, wicked ways for half a year. and also i frequently listen to "ex-factor" on repeat. what i think really affected me about "mudcloth" was its intimacy, vulnerability, and emotion. i really saw this in the specificity in the poem, like "when our bracelets chimed our footsteps" and "as we blessed each other / anointed our locks with frankincense / making pungent crosses on our foreheads."

i could relate to the feeling of loss, yearning for someone you've parted from, and that impossible feeling of wanting to reach out, but knowing it's inappropriate, but still feeling that inward pull to the person, that "feeling call, spirit call." and also, however long it may have been since you've seen them last, that instant palpable rush of every feeling, all of the love coming back and feeling present between you both when you run into each other again--it's a lot. i love how she captures all the complex feelings you have in these situations: the appreciation of the love, the yearning for it, the re-emergence of feelings, the confusion around all of it (what to do? i wanna call, i can't call), the questioning (whyyyyyy?), the knowing that this is how it needs to be, etc.

i also love how rooted in place the poem is and how it speaks to places being memory landmarks, how when we think back to love lost, we remember the places we've been and the feelings and senses that surrounded that particular place and time. the african marketplace will never be the same. and we hold these stories of love and loss not only in locations, but in our bodies and they continue to resonate well after the relationship/experience ended. "notice the soil finger painting / of how we found each other / how we loved / how we forever stained a story / we are still telling" it was really nice to see these feelings come out in a poem because i've been there. and i admire it, too, because trudging up feelings and memories like these is hard to do.

there were also little things that made it different to me than other lost love poems--like the line "life is harder without the lusty affirmation of my body / there was a time you loved my pliant and full brown more than i." i think of how hard it is for women and female-bodied people in general to feel comfortable in their bodies, to love and cherish them, to feel sexual and to own our sexualities in the face of all we have to measure ourselves up against. and honestly sometimes we only begin to see ourselves through other people. and even when we do listen to or believe in our lovers' appreciation of our bodies, we often continue to experience that inward struggle and have a hard time finding ourselves worthwhile and beautiful.

i admire this poem because it isn't just any sad break-up poem, it feels more important than that. because it means something that the love is between two brown women and there is a moving affirmation throughout the poem of the specificity of that love, the strength and beauty of it. romantic relationships can often feel very charged and political, because expressions of brown love, lgbtq love, love for and between marginalized folks is undermined, undervalued, seen as threatening. negative realities pound at them and there are often obstacles to survive through (or ones that have been survived through already), which make these connections feel even more meaningful, so when they turn out to not be indestructible, it's extra difficult. but it's still important to tell the story of them.