{m}33 artist spotlight: Des Jackson

desmarie (they/them, he/him, des)

instagram @poetediable

Desmarie (they/he) is an Afro Latinx nonbinary queer, and a second year student at Cal majoring in Comparative Literature with a minor in Education and African American studies. Des enjoys writing poetry, prose, and performing spoken word at open mics and slams. Des has written since grade school, loving the ways words crafted and fashioned worlds of escape from the rural, isolated life they were growing up in. In middle school, he discovered the power of poetry and spoken word, and since has used the landscape to explore themselves and be liberated from the confines of the world we know and live in.

Des is interested in the ways writing poetry and prose makes space for joy and liberation, which to des is community, radical love, and the legacies we produce to live and breathe beyond us, into the futures we dream of.

His works “cracks in the sidewalk”, “i am scared to touch the world”, and “my poems are a map you see” are featured respectively in the Blood Moon, Waning, and New Moon chapters of “Babae(x)”.

“cracks in the sidewalk”

Feb 12 2020

Through cracks in the sidewalk

Of my skin and my bones

I push

With these arms with a power with

The pressure pushing me outward

It has always been dark

Buried far far far under

Torn asunder in an immortal sleep

The sun bakes the ground above

Warmer than ever ive been touched

Calling out to me to join the space above

To break through the surface

To bloom and to blossom

Reaching for the sky reaching for the sun

Reaching for the blue reaching for the clouds

Reaching for more until ive used all the inches

Through the walls I can hear birds

Finches singing and laughing and crying

Until im no longer crammed and jammed up

And sprout up

Through cracks in the sidewalk.

“i am scared to touch the world”

9 February 2020

i am scared to touch the world because what if it crumbles under my fingers. what if it burns. what if i learn it’s all a dream. what if it swallows me whole and burps me out and i get lost and never found. what if it makes me realize that this me i pretend to be was never really me no matter how hard i tried to be. i am always living in and through a fear, something, deep and petrifying and tainting this world so that i hide away from it. if i blossom and bloom will i be picked or crushed or take up too much space and water and root too deep just to keep myself grounded. if i blossom and bloom am i allowed to grow up and outward and take up space in this world? i want to feel, i want to let move in me the energy the emotion that needs space to breathe. i reach out into the world, shakily yet surely and warmly love reveals itself in my life, with hearts and souls and company and laughs and smiles that hold me when it’s cold and dark and empty and lightless. when it’s not. there is light in this world that touches me too. there is warm in this world that i deserve to feel in me too. i am scared to touch the world but i do anyway and this is the result

“my poems are a map you see”

10 31 2019

My poems are a map you see

I’m on a journey of self-discovery

I know it sounds corny but bear with me

My identity has been the first and last thing I’ve come to know

From shaving my head to using this voice that comes from deep, from low

Learning to speak as I watch my hair grow.

Traumas are the seeds I sow each season

The growth of each yield the fruit of my youth

A life I lived veiled in rose and protected by thorns

So far removed from what I see now is my truth

With shattered and stolen words on a broken tongue I named myself so I could become

But become what?

That was the anomaly

Who could I be when the only options were here and she?

Love had to be reserved for a him or he

Daddy made it so that all you’d ever be is

Some mans washed up property

Who ripped the petals off my flowers when they were in full bloom? An inviolate meadow sprinkled with the doom of the looming fear

Fear that being queer and being brown and being here did not compute with the status quo

Who could I be if I was a glitch in the system?

And where were the others?

I must’ve missed em

When I was a child all I needed were mothers

Brothers

Others

Just to know if I was the sole bad code

If this life of side eyes and slurs

Slick comments and saviors

Stakeouts by security with my dad while buying salad at the store

Was it just us? Was it just me?

Had I had someone other than my reflection to ask

Forsaken and alone and lost without a home and my own

A community to reconcile and call mine

Maybe then I could’ve embarked on this journey sooner

Instead of having to find it line by line

My poems are a journey you see

Doodlings of my self-discovery

I’ve been lost

I’ve been found

But always I’m searching for new land to see

Pretty shells washed up on a pretty beach

That’s where I imagine the real me will be

Until then at least I have material for my poetry