Aurielle Marie

Award winning poet, essayist and Freedom Fighter Aurielle Marie is a child of the Deep South and an Atlanta native. She received her bachelors in Social Justice Strategy and Hip-Hop Theory from the Evergreen State College, and is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama. Aurielle has received many awards for her political activism, including being named one of Creative Loafing Atlanta’s 20 People to Watch (2015), being a Kopkind Colony Journalism/Activism awardee, and a Roddenberry Fellowship Finalist. Aurielle’s poetry has been featured or is forthcoming in the TriQuarterly, Southeast Review, Black Warrior, BOAAT Journal, Sycamore Review, Adroit Journal, Vinyl Poetry, Palette Poetry, and Ploughshares. She's received invitations to fellowships from Lambda Literary, VONA Voices, and Tin House. Aurielle is a 2017 winner of the Blue Mesa Review poetry award, and a Write Bloody Book prize. She’s the Lambda Literary 2019 Poetry Emerging Writer-in-Residence. She won the 2019 Ploughshares Emerging Writers Award for Poetry. As an essayist, Aurielle traverses subjects of justice, Blackness, bodies, sex and pop culture in a timely and urgent voice that pulls from a Black feminist lens. She has bylines in The Guardian, Bitch Media, Allure Magazine, Essence, Wear Your Voice, NBC, and Teen Vogue. Source

pantoum for aiyana & not a single hashtag

look!

There go a Black gxrl

body still tethered

to her head

There go a Black gxrl, shirt still dry

no river of marrow or tears

following her up the block

no bile from her head

Can we call her into form? not a river of marrow & small tears

of sweaty fabric, but manna & honeysuckle

from her skull no bile, but beatniks

in bloom. Can we celebrate the child on this side of the grass?

her sweat fabric, honeyed & unmanned

the gxrl young, a fresh world of gardenia

bloom-ing. Can’t we celebrate? The child’s on this side of the grass!

Open the window & usher in a new god! A breeze

gardenia-young, the gxrl a world made fresh.

in her hands—piano keys, sticks of cinnamon gum,

a window into the new. God, an usher opening

a psalm, free to be the thing she was truly made of:

piano keys. In her hands, cinnamon sticks like guns

in the wrong light—never mind that. Today she lives.

A thing to be freed. Made of psalms, & truly

holy. The gxrl will turn flowers into wine. Spills herself no more

wrong. & today, she lives. Never mind the light

offering summer halo. it is a myth, that we die, anyway. We too

holy. No more spills, no more flowers. From wine, gxrl churns herself a will.

Rises from the concrete, her arms full of clove. Her mother’s yard a throne.

Anyway, the myth is that we die. We too, summer offering. Halos

like birds on our shoulders. The gxrl, gardenia, & we planted her

full of clove & her mother. She raises a throne from the concrete, a yard of arms.

The gxrl, a god king. The gxrl, a map of good. The gxrl, a thing worth trending, after all. Just

look!

Published:

2021

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Poems of the Everyday

Poetic Form

Womanhood