About Ms. Shirley’s House

Ms. Shirley’s house is a very unconventional poem I recently had published in Arrow Rock, my school’s literary journal.

Ms. Shirley’s house began with me recounting a story of something that had happened when I was younger, during our first year after moving to our new house. I had never experienced racism in that way before. I had been bullied before, called names and such, but it was always because I was weird and nerdy, and always from other children, never from adults. We were pretty young at the time, I was around 11 and my older sister was 13, the younger ones were 8, 5, and 3. I can’t imagine we looked like we had any ill intent at all, riding on a tricycle and pulling the youngest along in a wagon, just childlike joy. It was such a strange event, one of the first times we experienced racism in that way, and it has stuck with me all these years. The end of the poem is true, we never went back to her house. Whatever magic had blossomed when we first came died after that officer showed up. It was also hard to not feel like we were at fault, despite doing nothing wrong. “Simply existing while black is dangerous” is what I got from the event at the time. I think most black children in America have experienced something similar, and given that we lived in a neighborhood consisting primarily of old white retired couples, I’m not shocked such an event occured in our first year there.

Writing the actual content was very easy, but the form was what I struggled with the most. I started by trying to write it as a story, something more like a creative non-fiction piece. It just seemed a bit too bland, too straightforward,but it was good for just getting the story down on paper. I next tried both prose and lined poetry. I was in a creative writing workshop class, so I shared both versions with them. Most of my class liked the lined version better, but my friend and my professor both prefered the prose version. Before sending it to Arrow Rock, I tried really hard to make the prose poem work, but the lined version just felt right, so that’s what I sent.

I was very intentional about the way I split up the lines. Even though it is a lined poem, it’s very prose-y in nature. I hope to take a break from it for a while, then reread it with fresh eyes. Everyone that I have shared it with seems to like it a lot, so I suppose it does it’s job. That death of the childhood magic is something I feel I could have emphasized a bit more, but it’s an extremly difficult feeling to put into words. I may attempt to delve deeper into that concept in the future, we’ll see.

Thanks 👍🏾