New Life

New Life

By: Alyssa Hawkins

I was born out the concrete cracks of poverty my parents slipped through.

My back etched with abandonment I learned trust was a fool’s paradise

And the brand of addiction taught me early that pain was dealt with by numbing.

So I puff puff passed my burdens on to the next moment of sobriety.

Surely I would face them then…

Only with an iron fist to the next chic that even looked at me stupid.

Though I never knew a loss, who knew that I was swinging blindly into

A system that  like the internet was a place my name would never be erased.

the first of many systems I’d fight and I wouldn’t win.

So I started writing

to start making life make sense

Even then I thought I could see

I was the product of dreams deferred and the caged bird singing.

I began to see myself in the invisible man and daydream myself into higher places

Sometimes day dreams come true

Sometimes not even dreams are all that we dreamed them to be

even in the higher places you can be treated lower.

Cause the cost of brown skin is much higher than tuition.

Incase you weren’t listening there were several poems in that statement.

But of all the poems I had written there was still a greater word to be spoken.

That I was just a paragraph in a greater story.

As I was chasing after a false victory, victory was actually chasing me.

There was someone who had the audacity to die and live again for my liberation.

And through him nothing could hold me.

too many times was I left in the old lost found box

With daisies growing around my neck and

The grave keeping my spot warm.

Shame kept blowing up my phone

then Jesus picked up and the line was suddenly disconnected

It was then that I also was raised with him  in his resurrection.

Bringing harmony to me, joy and the things that aint perfect

As I re read my life’s pages I never forget how far I’ve come

Now There is no room for the narrative of destruction.

See The old me had to die, so the new me could stand here living

Now I rest in power as a part of the greatest story ever written.