I unfold on blank sheets of paper
When the sheets of my mind are crumpled balls of scratches and eraser scuff marks.

I’ve become pages floating on seas, where waves whisk words away from me,
They float like letters in alphabet soup
but free
Back then I would create waves with a spoon to give voice to the silence
‘Stop playing with your food’’ rippled a marginalization of words,
A swallowing of fragments
That continued
past the soup bowls of my childhood,
Nicking veins and arteries,
Bearing butterflies with glass wings in the pits of my stomach.

I. Need. To.
CREATE a suitable space for their release…
I struggled
on and off paper.
And why wouldn’t I?
With its box-like shape, I never thought I’d find liberation
But flat white boxes are illusions of space and all Art needs is the illusion of space.

Today I turn a fresh leaf, creating waves with a pen
For like a blank canvas to an artist, a blank paper to a writer is limitless.

  • Racquel Griffith is a young Barbadian poet currently pursuing a M.A in International Relations at Zhejiang University in China. She was the joint winner of an Irving Burgie Award in Barbados and a recipient of a Canada-CARICOM Leadership Scholarship which granted her study at Concordia University for her B.A in Literature. She has dreams of promoting engaging literacy and literary art projects internationally.

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