Tarnynon (Ty-yuh-nuh) Onumonu was born and raised in the Jeffery Manor neighborhood on the southeast side of Chicago, IL and is extremely proud of and humbled by her southside citizenship and West African lineage. She draws from this experience to produce poetry, which is both specific in its autobiographical nature as well as global in its subject matter of love, trauma and disorientation over the span of time and the reach of Western colonization and global Black femme cultural experience. Currently, she spends her days assisting in an effort to sterilize used N95 masks for reuse by medical institutions fighting the COVID-19 Pandemic. She is also set to self publish her first chapbook entitled, “The Darker Girl: A Collection of Poetry” this May with the assistance of IngramSpark. As a poet with the Chicago Poetry Center, Tarnynon has performed in slam-style performance poetry assemblies and pop-up workshops across Chicago.
From The Darker Girl Series: A Collection of Poetry by Tarnynon Onumonu
Tarnynon Onumonu’s Poet Spotlight: Carolyn M. Rodgers
Onumonu: I enjoy poems that encompass an element of disorientation, of timelessness. This and cultural significance creates space for Afrofuturism, which is a heavy theme in Rodgers’ catalog of work and my own works as well. Rodgers, a Black woman and Chicago native, brings forth so many delicious identity based conversations on blackness and on womanhood and the harmony and warring between both of those places of being. She also discusses love and how identity both allows for and impedes access to it in our constantly changing society.
A member on The Chicago Poetry Center Board, Paula Belnap curates the monthly Spotlight Reading Series.
Paula Belnap
Paula Belnap writes stories, essays and poems and has appeared in AlligatorJuniper, The Briar Cliff Review, Eureka Literary Magazine, Explorations, The Iconoclast, Inkwell, The Ledge, The MacGuffin, No Exit, Passages North, and Raritan: A Quarterly Review, among other publications. She is currently at work on a novel.
If Only the CAT Scan Could Find
The closing line to the nursery rhyme, that dance
all hips and bodies hot like grass that sways
in humid waves of music, where I lost
my keys, the sense of “which” I want, the shades
of blue—lapis, cerulean, the ends
of sentences, and why I stutter each
time I try to say your name. I hid
your rings in the box marked Christmas Six although
Christmas has only five. I meant to tell you
that the oven is on. That I can’t let you bathe
me again. I am so dry it hurts to sweat.
Words leave my mouth all wrong and still I make
my sounds like insects seek the sticky sweet
the prickly skin of the yard helpless as seasons
pass like ghosts of what might have been if I
could remember names for the small bright plants
that grow so well in shade with little light
The closing line to the nursery rhyme, that dance
all hips and bodies hot like grass that sways
in humid waves of music, where I lost
my keys, the sense of “which” I want, the shades
of blue—lapis, cerulean, the ends
of sentences, and why I stutter each
time I try to say your name. I hid
your rings in the box marked Christmas Six although
“Writing poetry makes me feel like I can see myself, like I can see my reflection, but not in a mirror, in the world. I write and I know I can be reflected.” -Oscar S.
“Writing poetry makes me feel free.” -Buenda D.
“Writing poetry is like your best friend.” -Jessica M.
