No Room For Gray

Kamilah Aisha Moon

Between is a hard place to live in.

She shuns wheelchairs and
mongoloid faces, mad that her mind
will fight to keep her
quarantined
from her own car, yard,
babies.

You are. Or you are not.
You're sick. Or you're well.

Between is a hard place to live in.

Bi racial,
Bi cultural,
Bi sexual,
Bi polar...
halves of wholes.
But it's never that simple
like breathing nuance
should be.

Each morning,
she stretches her fingers toward a life
just out of reach,
and grudgingly squeezes into a seat at a table
that bumps her knees.

Kamilah Aisha Moon is a Cave Canem fellow, a Paumanok Award semi-finalist, and an Emily Dickinson Award Honorable Mention. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Mosaic, Bittersweet, Open City, Phoenix, bum rush the page, Warpland, Obsidian III, Toward the Livable City, Essence, Bloom, and Gathering Ground. A native of Nashville, Tennessee, she is currently working on She Has A Name, a collection of poetry themed around her sister's journey living with autism. A 2006 Prague Summer Writing Institute Fellow and a featured poet in various conferences and venues around the United States, Moon received her MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College.

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