First, I love poetry and Nikky Finney is one of my favorite poets. So I was over the moon a few weeks ago when I read her new poem dedicated to Marissa Alexander titled “Flare.” October is domestic violence awareness month and we very much want to keep Marissa in mind. A couple of weeks ago, I emailed Ms. Finney and asked if she would participate in the Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa Alexander’s campaign which is asking people to send video submissions of them reading the poem “Flare” or another poem of their choice. So far, we have received wonderful submissions which you can find here. I asked Ms. Finney if she would participate too. And guess what???? She said yes!!!! So today, I am thrilled to share her video reading of Flare with all of you.

Audre Lorde was right (as usual) when she wrote in the essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” that: “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”

I use poems a lot in my teaching and in my work with young people. When young people see something of themselves in a piece of literature, identify with the work, reflect on it, and undergo some emotional experience as a result of that reading, I consider that to be the basis of a successful anti-violence intervention. For years, I have been collecting poems about gender-based violence that I have used with young women (in particular) in various settings. Some of these poems can be found in a poetry guide that I created a few years ago titled “Giving Name to the Nameless: Using Poetry as an Anti-Violence Intervention with Girls.” A PDF of the guide is available at no cost to those interested in a copy. Details are here.

Life comes full circle as one of the poems that I use a lot with young women & girls is Nikky Finney’s “The Girlfriend’s Train.” I included it in the guide and am featuring it below in honor of DV awareness month. As a bonus, I am including some questions that you can use if when you are discussing the poem with girls and young women.

Note: While the guide was created with young women and girls in mind (I have the most experience facilitating poetry circles with them), the information and poems included can certainly be used with young men, trans young people and also with adults.

The Girlfriend’s Train
By Nikky Finney

“You write like a Black woman who’s never been hit before.”

I read poetry in Philly
for the first time ever.
She started walking up,
all the way, from in back
of the room.

From against the wall
she came,
big coat, boots,
eyes soft as candles
in two storms blowing.

Something she could not see
from way back there but
could clearly hear in my voice,
something she needed to know
before pouring herself back out
into the icy city night.

She came close to get a good look,
to ask me something she found
in a strange way missing
from my Black woman poetry.

Sidestepping the crowd
ignoring the book signing line,
she stood there waiting
for everyone to go, waiting
like some kind of Representative.

And when it was just the two of us
she stepped into the shoes of her words:

Hey

                You write real soft.

                Spell it out kind.

                No bullet holes,

                No open wounds,

                In your words.

                How you do that?

                Write like you never been hit before?

But I could hardly speak,
all my breath held ransom
by her question.

I looked at her and knew:
There was a train on pause somewhere,
maybe just outside the back door
where she had stood, listening.

A train with boxcars
that she was escorting somewhere.
when she heard about the reading.

A train with boxcars
carrying broken women’s bodies,
their carved up legs and bullet riddled
stomachs momentarily on pause
from moving cross country.

Women’s bodies;
brown, black and blue,
laying right where coal, cars,
and cattle usually do.

She needed my answer
for herself and for them too.

Hey

                We were just wondering

                how you made it through

                and we didn’t?

I shook my head.
I had never thought about
having never been hit
and what it might have
made me sound like.

                You know how many times I been stabbed?

She raised her blouse
all the way above her breasts.
the cuts on her resembling
some kind of grotesque wallpaper.

How many women are there like you?

Then I knew for sure.

She had been sent in from the Philly cold,
by the others on the train,
to listen, stand up close,
to make me out as best she could.

She put my hand overtop hers
asked could we stand up
straight back to straight back,
measure out our differences
right then and there.

She gathered it all up,
wrote down the things she could,
remembering the rest to the trainload
of us waiting out back for answers.
Full to the brim with every age
of woman, every neighborhood
of woman, whose name
had already been forgotten.

The train blew its whistle,
she started to hurry.

I moved towards her
and we stood back to back,
her hand grazing the top
of our heads,
my hand measuring out
our same widths,
each of us recognizing
the brown woman latitudes,
the Black woman longitudes
in the other.

I turned around
held up my shirt
and brought my smooth belly
into her scarred one;
our navels pressing,
marking out some kind of new
equatorial line.

Source: The World is Round by Nikky Finney (2003)

SOME DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

 What do you think of this poem? How does it make you feel? Do you like it? Why or why not?

 Are there any lines or stanzas that you can particularly identify with? What are they and why do you feel a connection to them?

 Why do you think Nikky Finney wrote this poem? What’s the message/point of it, if there is one? Who do you think she’s speaking to in this poem?

 Who is the woman who walks up to the poet? Is she real? [Note: As with all points of the discussion, it’s great if there are dissenting opinions, when people can read different things into the context…]

 Nikky Finney opens the poem with “You write like a Black woman who’s never been hit before.” What does this mean to you? How does a woman who’s never been hit before write like? Sound like? Act like?

 What does the poet mean by “eyes soft as candles in two storms blowing?

 Who are all of the women on the train? Why do you think Finney uses the image/metaphor of a train in her poem?

 Are you able to relate to women who have been victims of violence if you have not been a victim yourself?

 Where do you think the woman is escorting the train to? Where are the women on the train going?

 Does the poet get on the train with the other women? If yes, why? If no, why not? Would you get on the train with the other women?

 Have you ever found yourself in a position where you felt helpless to help someone in need? What did you do?

Please remember that CAFMA is accepting video submissions of your readings of ‘Flare’ or another poem of your choice dedicated to Marissa Alexander throughout October. Send your youtube or vimeo links to freemarissachicago.org.