- To the aquarium that charge a $40 admission fee.

If I wanted to pay that much just to see a creature trapped in captivity I'd fill up my own tank and visit my brother in prison.

I'd recount our family history, a middle passage drowning in the genetic pool.

I'd track both of my brothers, the one in prison and other dead.

I'd track my sister's five children each beautiful black and smooth inside of the foster care system.

They are an awe spill and no one takes accountability.

I'd track all of my family, the living, the dead and even the bustards lucky enough to never have learned of thickness of our blood.

The way that it lays in wait to claim us.

I'd track all of my family, only as far back as my great-grandfather, a blue eyed black man said to have had an angry tempus for eyes and a hatred of his children, including my grandfather an alcoholic that placed everything under healed and his cap size liver and in a blooded bludgeoning of my grandmother.

My grandmother's gun empty in an ocean of death sprawled across my grandfather's face, washed over each of their children.

My mother submerged her trauma beneath her addiction.

Birth each of her children into this world, just as wet with grief, they say that blood is thicker than water.

It's probably why so many of us drown.

And while I find it hard on most days just to say float.

So maybe, just maybe that $40 will be best used on teaching my children to swim.

To celebrate my husband's graduation, we sardine pack in a rental van.

We backen in bloodline black bodies before us to bend his name into chant.

Real rave enters the vacuum of silence as he walks across the stage with Cardinal cool that only Detroit men bear in their bones.

Pride swells across our smile.

We prompt our bodies back into the van.

Congratulations consume chatter left roadside.

Breaking news shatter's joy, tells us of the Buffalo shooting.

Tragedy is a school graduation that black people attend way too often.

No one wants a cookout invite when we dress it as a funeral, how quickly blackness loses his stock as culture vultures faint grief yet lurk over death, apologizing for history soiling our present centuries too late.

An apology ain't never revived a body.

An apology ain't never rewinded a eulogy.

We exhaust approstrating our sorrow for the world's gaze.

A cobra was strike only after it's alarmed is victims.

Must we continue to be rattled up out of our flesh before this country revokes the bounty on our bones.

We tire of teaching that we too are human, a hymn falling on deaf ears when we sing.

What is a new world where blackness is safe.

Sin finds us praying in churches and shopping for our families.

We drag bloated grief, unfurl our body into lovers grasp.

Then our patience over the word again, again, again.

Soak our shock and rage in gin.

Imagine a world where our skin frees innocent before guilty.

When we are protected more than we are surveilled.

Where jazz clings to her family in the swelter and then before June celebrating her husband.

Mass murder the furthest thing from my mind we wrap ourselves in mourning that day and refuse to die, for moralizing the mini soul gone too soon.

- We just come from the stage and have seen Jassmine perform two very powerful pieces of poetry.

Welcome Jassmine.

It's my honor to be here with you.

- Thank you.

My pleasure.

- Jassmine, can you just tell us the names of the two beautiful pieces, powerfully beautiful pieces that you share today?

- Absolutely.

The first one is called Aquarium and the second one is called the Golden Shovel May 14th, 2022 and it's after Gwendolyn Brooks in Terrence Hayes.

I saw a poem from Terrence Hayes called the Golden Shovel and it blew my mind.

He took Gwendolyn Brooks, We Real Cool.

And he formulated a poem where he would take every word in that poem We Real Cool and put it at the end of each line.

And so it reads within my poem, like, it's his own story but you can read Gwendolyn's entire poem, like if you go straight down.

And it was just like, oh yes, thank you ancestor for giving me this.

- What inspired you to write the first poem?

I think it was Aquarium paying $40.

How creative is that?

- Yes.

So Aquarium was actually a poem that took me a few years to write and the reason why I needed to get it out of my body to write it out of my body was I'm adopted and being adopted there's always been that curiosity about my roots, about where I come from but I'm also adopted within my family on my maternal side.

And there were a lot of hushed secrets and people didn't wanna talk about things.

So it took me many years and it's still taking me years to uncover things that happened within our family.

Intergenerational trauma is so real within like black families.

And what happens in this house stays in this house is like a black adage that I do not like to adhere to because I really feel like whatever you experience within your home, within your family, you do take it into the world with you, you take it into your body, you take it into your mind, you take it into your spirit and you walk out into the world and you interact with the world with all of that weight.

And for me to not perpetuate a cycle, I have two children.

And even though my children aren't close in age I want them to be able to come together through a healed version of me, where I wanna see myself as a conduit to connect.

I had to do the research.

I had to talk about it because I wanted to break the cycle.

But yet I also understand that some people within my family they didn't have the resources.

They didn't have the support.

They didn't know where they can get help to talk about challenges, including mental health or other forms of trauma that they experienced.

But I just knew it was necessary for me to thrive.

- What is your vision for your work, for you for the future?

- I've been really thinking about like where do I wanna see my artistic practice?

And of course I'm adapting some of my stage performance to the page and working towards a manuscript called worth the weight, weight spelled W-E-I-G-H-T.

And this manuscript will be focusing on race, sexuality, gender.

It will be confronting motherhood, like again coming from a woman's perspective outside of that role and from a daughter and from a parent perspective.

- Thank you so much, Jassmine, for your generosity, the power of your words.

It's been an honor and a pleasure.

- Thank you.