Self-Exposure / Breadth / Shaking Hands and Inside-Out
by DESTINY CROCKETT
in Fall 2024
Trey Campbell, from Room Service, 2024
Self-Exposure
After Audre Lorde
Nothing is more vulgar to me than the demand that
I accept indifference or disregard as a way of going
about an undoing of
myself, or of my sensitivity or secondariness, which
can be
used, always,
against me.
Breadth
for Hydeia Broadbent
A roiling-raspy cracking up, and then a grin
Cinnamon oil, a sister, Chrysalism-feel, presence under light
Forget-me-not black tea on the February calendar
Speeches, beschaulich and sharp—
she got breath.
Shaking Hands and Inside-Out
After Lucille Clifton
I made myself up and,
Obviously
Learned not to hide when I was very small as
Long as there is somebody to fight outside
And sometimes they’re not there
Made myself fragile with shaking hands and inside-out
I do not need to be told how to care for
Myself I
Weep whenever I want to
And take too long to
Realize when I have gotten lost somewhere
I asked what the rules were since the sister
Said my speech-breath and bad mood was
Breaking them but no one would
Say where they were written it wasn’t about
My willingness to read them if I could peel
Them up from somewhere I
Listened to me and then made up
What the archivist said and
What the grandmother said and
What my lover said and
What the poet promised
Dr. Destiny Crockett is a scholar, artist, teacher, and poet who is originally from St. Louis, Missouri. Her art practice in Philadelphia has situated her within deep intergenerational community of Black visual artists, especially women and queer artists. Her main visual media is handcut paper collage, as it allows for a meditation on Blackness and being: collecting, compiling, reclaiming, and storytelling. Her visual art practice has been supported in part by The Colored Girls Museum, where she works through an artist incubator program, and where her original handcut collage works are part of the permanent collection. Some showings of work in the community have included the University of Pennsylvania’s Critical Museum Studies Group’s group exhibit titled Partage: an Exhibition on Scars and Sutures of the Colonial Museum, and d’griot gallery in Germantown, who held her first solo show in fall 2023. Published visual artwork has been featured in online magazines Aunt Chloe and Lesbians are Miracles.
She earned her PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania with certificates in Africana Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in 2023, and her B.A. in English from Princeton University in 2017. She currently works as the Mellon Humanities Post-doctoral Fellow of Childhood Studies and Racial Justice at Rutgers University-Camden, where she is working on her first respective academic and poetry book monographs and teaches undergraduate literary and cultural criticism courses situated in Black feminist and Girlhood Studies. Her youth-oriented work has centered on culturally relevant literacy for Black children in working class communities and political education through literature and visual art for Black youth.
