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omotarajames.bsky.social
Omotara
@omotarajames.bsky.social
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🌈 NAACP Image Award nominated debut, “Song of My Softening” OUT NOW 🌱 PaD Guest Editor @poetsorg
"Worth the wait." —Ron Charles, The Washington Post 👇🏾
https://linktr.ee/omotarajames/?fbclid=PAAaY1S3Las3Dwvt9XE5-EtE
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Prompt: The Ekphrastic Epistolary (after Dr. Dior J. Stephens)
 
Write a poem that is directly addressed to a known person, dead or alive. Think Elton John and Princess Diana. Whether the subtext of your poem is love lost, or the mortal coil, allow the lyrical intimacy to bloom.
June 4, 2025 at 5:32 AM
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Thrilled share Ama Codjoe’s sensational poem from my Poem-a-Day curation. If you have not had a chance to read the full poem, please make your way to the homepage of poets.org now! Ama’s poetry astounds. I am moved to offer a prompt, inspired by Ama’s poem, out of sheer gratitude.
June 2, 2025 at 10:03 PM
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Celebrate Black history. “BLK History Month” BY Nikki Giovanni
If Black History Month is not viable then wind does not carry the seeds and drop them on fertile ground rain does not dampen the land and encourage the seeds to root sun does not warm the earth and kiss the seedlings and tell them plain: You’re As Good As Anybody Else You’ve Got A Place Here, Too
February 28, 2025 at 6:36 AM
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Celebrate Black poetry. “Paul Robeson” by Gwendolyn Brooks
That time we all heard it, cool and clear, cutting across the hot grit of the day. The major Voice. The adult Voice forgoing Rolling River, forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge and other symptoms of an old despond. Warning, in music-words devout and large, that we are each other’s harvest: we are each other’s business: we are each other’s magnitude and bond. From The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks (Library of America, 2005).
February 27, 2025 at 5:16 PM
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Celebrate Black poetry. Excerpt from “34” (from “Blood Dazzler”).

17.
Wait with me.
Watch me sleep in this room
that looks so much like night.
I’m gon’ wake up, I swear it
to some kind of sun.
February 26, 2025 at 5:15 PM
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Celebrate Black poetry. “Beatitude” by John Keene
Love everything Love the sky and sea, trees and rivers, mountains and abysses. Love animals, and not just because you are one. Love your parents and your children, even if you have none. Love your spouse or partner, no matter what either word means to you. Love until you create a cavern in your loving, until it seethes like a volcano. Love everytime. Love your enemies. Love the enemies of your enemies. Love those whose very idea of love is hate. Love the liars and the fakes. Love the tattletales and the hypercrits, the hucksters and the traitors. Love the thieves because everyone has thought of stealing something at least once. Love the rich who live only to empty your purse or wallet. Love the poverty of your empty coin purse or wallet. Love your piss and sweat and shit. Love your and others’ chatter and its proof of the expansiveness of nothingness. Love your shadows and their silent censure. Love your fears, yesterday’s and tomorrow’s. Love your yesterdays and tomorrows. Love your beginning and your end. Love the fact that your end is another beginning, or could be, for someone else. Love yourself, but not too much that you cannot love everything and everyone else. Love everywhere. Love in the absence of love. Love the monsters breeding in every corner of the city and suburb, all throughout the soil of the countryside. Love the monster breeding inside you and slaughter him with love. Love the shipwreck of your body, your mind’s salted garden. Love love.
February 25, 2025 at 1:39 AM
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Celebrate Black poetry. “little prayer” by Danez Smith
let ruin end here let him find honey where there was once a slaughter let him enter the lion’s cage & find a field of lilacs let this be the healing & if not let it be From Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Danez Smith. Used by permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org.
February 23, 2025 at 6:19 AM
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Celebrate Black poetry. “Ode to the Common Clothes Moth” by Tyree Daye
For De Lissa In these days of less and less sun your love points and I follow like the blind moths you beg me not to kill half-asleep and the sun lesser than a minute before I’ll let you go into the night and you say and I follow your love of winged things to the back door watch you empty your hands into the sky In the morning you will wake before me and walk out into the yard the sun acts like a father as if it never left moths sing of you from wherever moths go to sing
February 21, 2025 at 10:00 PM
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Celebrate Black poetry. “When A Nigga Call You a Faggot” by Jzl Jmz (FKA jayy dodd) aka [Lady Tournament]
When A Nigga Call You a Faggot You gotta laugh at least once. Like the pot calling the kettle A more dangerous thing. When he spits it your mouth, you must swallow the sour, hurt of anxiety. How your lips make him salivate. When he swings his fist, duck down and tackle him to the ground with soft kisses. When a nigga call you a faggot, He’s calling you by his first name. He’s telling you about his-self. His own fault lines splitting his tongue, toxic and tender. He’s crying for help from the bottom of the ocean. When it discharges from his throat, imagine it lands on the shores of which both your bodies washed up. When a nigga calls you a faggot, you still gotta call him brother. You still gotta pray he makes it home at night.
February 20, 2025 at 6:19 PM
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Celebrate Black poetry. “Summer” by Robin Coste Lewis.
Summer Last summer, two discrete young snakes left their skin on my small porch, two mornings in a row. Being postmodern now, I pretended as if I did not see them, nor understand what I knew to be circling inside me. Instead, every hour I told my son to stop with his incessant back-chat. I peeled a banana. And cursed God—His arrogance, His gall—to still expect our devotion after creating love. And mosquitoes. I showed my son the papery dead skins so he could know, too, what it feels like when something shows up at your door—twice—telling you what you already know.
February 19, 2025 at 4:41 PM
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Celebrate Black poetry. “Why I Left the Garden” by Ama Codjoe
After I lost my breast, I became a woman sutured by a kind of knowledge. All day I moved as if walking was no different from falling. I owned the potholes and the riddled sky. I owned nothing at all. Even from far away, I could hear the record skipping. Time was running out of hands. Of faces.
February 17, 2025 at 5:47 PM
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Celebrate, Black poetry.

[When I come home they rush to me, the flies] by Aracelis Girmay
[When I come home they rush to me, the flies] by Aracelis Girmay When I come home they rush to me, the flies, & would take me, they would take me in their small arms if I were smaller, so fly this way, that way in joy, they welcome me. They kiss my face one two, they say, Come in, come in. Sit at this table. Sit. They hold one hand inside the other & say, Eat. They share the food, sit close to me, sit. As I chew they touch my hair, they touch their hands to my crumbs, joining me. The rim of my cup on which they perch. The milky lake above which. They ask for a story: How does it begin? Before, I was a child, & so on. My story goes on too long. I only want to look into their faces. The old one sits still, I sit with it, but the others busy themselves now with work & after the hour which maybe to them is a week, a month, I sleep in the room between the open window & the kitchen, dreaming though I were the Sierra, though I were their long lost sister, they understand that when I wake I will have to go. One helps me with my coat, another rides my shoulder to the train. Come with me, come, I say. No, no, it says, & waits with me there the rest whistling, touching my hair, though maybe these are its last seconds on earth in the light in the air is this love, though it is little, my errand, & for so little I left my house again.
February 16, 2025 at 12:04 AM
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Celebrate Black poetry.

All My Friends Are Sad & Bright

after Richard Siken
by Cameron Awkward-Rich
I think door & there is. Open & here’s a room where everything you’ve lost is washed ashore. We’ve seen the news. We know the story. How even our bodies hurt us sometimes so much. Room of broken mirrors. Room of salt. Room of marigolds & it’s your party, baby. Here’s a crown, here’s a gown & no man just around the corner, all your eyes on you. I think gunflower & here’s a field. Here’s a room where every bullet planted blooms. Boy with flower. Boy with metal rose. What’s done is done. What fire fords you. I was a child once. Anything could be my kingdom, all I had to do was say— Here’s a room of water & gold & nothing else. A room in which a man takes back his blood. Goodbye blood. Goodbye stars. Goodbye dead light troubling the dance your body does all by itself. I was by myself once, beside myself, breath fogging up a window & what’s on the other side? Only everything you wanted & here’s a room of everything you wanted. Think peppermint & myrrh. Think loved & you don’t even have to die. Copyright © 2019 by Cameron Awkward-Rich. Originally published in Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019).
February 12, 2025 at 8:49 PM
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Celebrate Black poetry.
February 11, 2025 at 6:04 PM
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Celebrate Black poetry. “Duplex” by Jericho Brown.
“Duplex” by Jericho Brown. I still believe in God. What else keeps me From slaughter? Who else holds the butcher’s hand? Sweet slaughter. Though I’d pray, Give me butcher’s hands, Matthew baked me cakes as if I could be saved. He baked spice cake, humming as if we were safe, As if this weren’t the land of milk and money. We can’t survive this nation of white money, Says the black man as his excuse for malice. What black man needs an excuse for malice? Why mask the salt? No sugar is that sweet. My pressure’s high. No sugar could make me sweet If he came back today, if he forgave me. Since he won’t come back, won’t forgive me, I believe in God. Who else would keep me?
February 10, 2025 at 7:42 PM
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Celebrate Black poetry. My Phone Autocorrects “Nigga” to “Night” by Karisma Price.
My Phone Autocorrects “Nigga” to “Night” My nights play cousin to their mothers’ favorite kettles. My nights won’t consume their reflections so they pour milk in their coffee. My nights never rest so they sing their shadows to sleep. Sometimes they don’t remember any words. My nights have frogs stuck in their throats, no light soul, every bit of pain, my nights all Louis Armstrong minus a trumpet, and my nights play chicken with the train. My nights both shoe and polish. Both Sambo and Bruce Leroy. We all little pretty medallions on our grandmothers’ nightstands. My nights are mistaken for other nights that bear no resemblance. I saw the sinew of the oldest night in the neighborhood on the floor, his saint pendant missing. All the small, down-feathered nights scatter from the groan of pig sirens. My nights don’t know their history. My nights are pecans without the trees that grow them. My nights instruct all the people in their head to weep. My nights hate the firefly cutting their darkness. My night, did you see them? They just walked right past us and didn’t even speak. My nights are ordinary, wear ruffled socks, have the best belts. My nights don’t always go to church but my nights are lambs worthy of the morning. My nights are revised constitutions, crypt keepers, my nights are a congregation of alligators on a rumpus bayou. My nights hiss into themselves. No one hears. Their blood rolls its eyes. My nights chew gum and sunflower seeds. My nights eat pork. My nights get the itis and slur their speech. My nights protest protests. The government watches. My nights live in Brazil Botswana the Congo Cuba the D.R. France Grenada Greece Honduras Ireland Liberia Lithuania Nigeria Venezuela Zimbabwe. My nights live in America to remind you of me. Some people think my nights are better with their eyes closed but my nights have beautiful corneas. My nights wash clothes that don’t belong to them and won’t look their bosses in the eye. My nights know necessity. My nights oblige. When my nights die, I wash them on my kitchen table. After my nights are washed, I throw away the table. My nights have names. My nights smell of sage. My nights smell of the muddy rivers they will never swim in again.
February 9, 2025 at 5:01 AM
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Celebrate Black poetry. “philosophically immune by Evie Shockley.” Split This Rock
Celebrate Black poetry. “philosophically immune by Evie Shockley.” Split This Rock philosophically immune can i deduce the nature of humanity from the relationship of american and multinational pharmaceutical corporations to african women with hiv? ~ is it natural to test pharmaceuticals on people who are citizens of less powerful nations, members of a devalued gender, representatives of a maligned race? ~ is it logical? ~ is it cost-effective? ~ is the nature of the relationship of american and multinational pharmaceutical corporations to african women with hiv economic or human? ~ economic or humane? ~ are african women with hiv human? ~ are african women human? ~ are africans human? ~ are american and multinational pharmaceutical corporations human? ~ are american corporations human? ~ are americans human? ~ are american corporations citizens? ~ are africans american? ~ are african americans multinational? ~ can humans have a relationship to american and multinational pharmaceutical corporations? ~ are corporations corporeal? ~ are corporations real? ~ are corporations corpses? ~ are corporations gendered? ~ are women representative? ~ are humans incorporated? ~ are humans pharmaceutical? ~ is hiv pharmaceutical? ~ is nature pharmaceutical? ~ is nature humane? ~ is nature natural? ~ are nations natural? ~ are nations raced? ~ are nations corporations? ~ are nations cost-effective? ~ is nationality a test? ~ can i deduce the humanity of the reader from the relationship of the reader to american and multinational pharmaceutical corporations? ~ can i deduce the nature of the reader from the relationship of the reader to african women with hiv?
February 6, 2025 at 10:39 PM
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Celebrate Black poets. “blessing the boats” by Lucille Clifton
poets.org
From Quilting: Poems 1987–1990 by Lucille Clifton. Copyright © 2001 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted with permission of BOA Editions Ltd. All rights reserved.
Celebrate Black poets. “blessing the boats” by Lucille Clifton (at St. Mary’s) “may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that” poets.org From Quilting: Poems 1987–1990 by Lucille Clifton. Copyright © 2001 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted with permission of BOA Editions Ltd. All rights reserved. Black and white photo of Lucille Clifton, wearing glasses and smiling through closed lips: her chin leaning on her hand, her index finger pointed across her chin, her thumb resting on her jawline.
February 3, 2025 at 2:01 PM
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“Flirtation” by Rita Dove
February 2, 2025 at 8:03 PM
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Forgot to post this here yesterday:
Celebrate Black poetry.

“For everyone who tried on the slipper before Cinderella”

By Ariana Brown

after Anis Mojgani and Audre Lorde
February 2, 2025 at 7:42 PM
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January 22, 2025 at 5:34 PM
omotarajames.bsky.social
Love > hate. What’s simple is true. Inclusion > exclusion. Truth feels difficult to come by, but abounds.
January 20, 2025 at 8:36 PM
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Staff pick at White Whale Books in Pittsburgh PA. ♥️🌱
January 20, 2025 at 6:55 PM
omotarajames.bsky.social
My debut poetry collection will be published on February 13th, a significant day for many reasons. Barnes & Noble is currently running a discount on preorders until January 26.
www.barnesandnoble.com/w/song-of-my...
January 25, 2024 at 4:53 AM
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I've been away too long! I'm mainly on IG, but came here to say I'm putting together a book tour schedule with winter and spring dates. Please reach out to me if interested at omotarajames@gmail.com Thanks. Happy Holigays!
December 15, 2023 at 10:13 PM