The poetry club was one of my favorite things in high school. We performed all over Arizona — Sedona, Flagstaff, Bullhead City, North Phoenix, Scottsdale, ASU Main Tempe campus, ASU downtown, and underneath the jellyfish structure at the train station in downtown Phoenix. We also traveled to Albuquerque, Chicago, California, and New Mexico for competitions and showcases. We made the semi-finals at Brave New Voices in Chicago and performed in Pomona. I’m still in the intro of the HBO Brave New Voices special.
Those trips weren’t only about poetry. There were all-night freestyle ciphers, dance parties, fashion shows, and live sets from established poets. Artist, celebrities and poets were scattered all over the area.I saw Common Going to the restroom, awkward but still cool.I hopped on stage with Mos Def when he was performing. I watched Pharoahe Monch in a park during one of the Chicago festivals. We stayed in the South Loop, tried deep-dish pizza, and ate Harold’s Chicken. The year before he died I met Gil Scott-Heron and ended up playing bouncer outside his dressing room. Later we opened for Umar Bin Hassan of The Last Poets. Seeing adults actually listen to what young people had to say felt surreal.
Our coach, English teacher Corey Bush, was one of the best teachers I had at South Mountain. When he got engaged he did something that surprised both me and my mother: he bought me a plane ticket to Minnesota so I could write a piece and perform it at his wedding. It was my first time flying alone and traveling alone.
I landed in the Twin Cities and spent the first day with his brother and sister-in-law. The next morning Mr. Bush drove in to pick me up. We took the long ride in his dad’s old stick-shift truck through rolling hills. I saw wheat growing for the first time, wildflowers, and whitetail deer moving through the fields. He asked if I wanted to try driving the stick. I was too nervous and told him to keep going.
His parents’ house looked like something out of a movie — tucked into a hill, almost like a hobbit hole. Coming from stucco and adobe in Phoenix, I had never seen anything like it. They even had a basement, something you almost never see in the Valley. I slept on a couch down there that felt as big as our living room back home. His parents were easy and kind. I tasted scones for the first time and still love them.
His dad told me I could pick berries in the backyard but to put on a hat because of the biting flies. I thought he might be joking until I stepped outside and found out he wasn’t. The bushes were full of blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, and boysenberries — fruits I had never even heard of. I ate them right off the bush, half wondering if I was allergic and not really caring.
Mr. Bush was still a kid at heart. We pulled bikes from the garage and rode the dirt roads through cornfields. That same feeling of being outside the city came back strong. In the evenings there was always dessert, conversation, and fireflies flickering outside the windows. I had been stuck on the poem for days, crumbling every draft. After a couple of days in that countryside the words finally came.
My friend Yolanda, the one who first brought me into the poetry club, was also in the area for school. She made it to the wedding. Out of all of us she shone the brightest. The way she opened her heart on the page was something I always wanted to reach. Any time she gave a piece of mine a quiet nod, it meant more than a perfect score at a slam.
Mr. Bush and his family opened their home and showed me a version of the world I had never seen. They made it a little bigger.
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