Sonnet for My Music Preference
My artist search history on Tidal is something like Beyonce,
Ella Mai, Kehlani, 2 Chainz … As if I’m looking for a song
to fit my life into. Black voices with messages like we can
do more than Rap or Go To the League. I think about when it’s
time to get in/formation, how many times a week, a month, a year
I go about doing that. Daily, both knowing and practicing,
keeping it all together until freedom cuts me loose. City Girls,
6lack, Cardi B make these white washed days feel like
South Street nights, lit like the blunts be in rotation. Twerking
my way into spaces where I feel less and less like I belong.
But when history talks about it they will leave these feelings out,
never capturing the music’s truth. That is, I find my center
each morning from blasting the bass of those songs saturated in foul
language, the kind of potty mouths even my mother loves to listen to.
Tiana Wilson is a poet from Browns Mills, New Jersey. She received her undergraduate degree in Spanish with an English minor from Lincoln University (PA), and is an MFA candidate at Temple University. She currently works in Philadelphia and lives in Wilmington, Delaware, and spends her free time traveling, reading, and writing.