m@ke way

The World is Your Runway (FLY)

DIY Couture (A Bodily Poetics)

The Wearable Audre Lorde:

(props to Wahneema Lubiano for the title idea!)

For Survival

Make your own!

1. Fall in love with a poet. 2. Choose the poetic line that calls you to speak. 3. Write it on some beads with a sharpie. 4. String a ribbon through. 5. Say it like you mean it.

Now
Woman power

is

Black power
is
human power
is
always feeling
my heart beats
as my eyes open
as my hands move
as my mouth speaks

I am
are you

Ready?
(1973)

Do it yourself:

1. take one scrap of fabric (i think someone was trying to make a curtain out of this. 2. cut two holes in it. 3. tie a rope through 4. know that super heroes (are) fly

BlackStudies

Make your own!

1. I bet an organization in your town runs a thrift store as a fundraiser. (This shirt was like two bucks at the Durham Crisis Response Center thrift store.) 2. Paint a lesson that you need to learn…between the lines. (White fabric paint looks just like chalk!)
The Difference Between Poetry and Rhetoric

the difference between poetry and rhetoric

is being willing to kill yourself

instead of your children”

from Power by Audre Lorde

Make your own!

1. Find a poet that redefines every word you know (I suggest Lorde). 2. Find some old opaque pantyhose. 3. Write one word on one leg (in permanent marker). 4. repeat with the other word. 5. Stretch.

or blaze through…. (blazer from the Durham Crisis Response Center thirft store)

(The Black) Unicorn

rare and embattled (if we’re going to make our booties readable…why not publicize black feminist literary classics?)

(vaguely censored)

Do it yourself with: 1 black t-shirt remnant 2. silver glitter fabric paint 3. sacred text illuminated.

Born in June

a tribute to June Jordan

(My Own) Quietly Explosive Here

How to:

1. white fabric paint

2. Hermana Resist! Pins available from Cafe Revolucion

Against the State (of Things)

1. My body is not safe if Palestine is not free. 2. The occupation that outlived June Jordan will not survive us. 3. Cotton rope and sloganed hope tied tight.

(Who) Look at Me

“New energies of darkness

we disturbed a continent

like seeds…”

1. get some scraps of fabric, glitter paint, disperse yourself

“I am Black alive and looking back at you.” (Who Look at Me 1969)

Run This

Do My Ladies Run This (Mother)?

Usually I wear them with Sprints..

Make your own!

1.Find some ribbon. 2. Get that same sharpie. 3. Ask the question that you can’t answer. 4. Stand in the place that you run from.

Waste (the gift of creative pessimism)

A min(e)d is a terrible thing

to waste.

b(lack) girl

Make your own!

1. Find some ribbon at least three inches thick and at least 5 times the circumference of your waist. 2. And yes the marker. 3.Wrap your head, wrap your waist. 5.Hold yourself in contradiction. (As if you were sacred).

reFrame

(start here)

Make your own!

1.Touch the place on your body that you want to reframe. 2. Cut out all the magazine pictures that remind you of that place. 3. Glue half of them to a matting frame. 4. Loop a scrap of fabric through the frame and tie it around you. 6. Make sure the matting frames the place to be made new. 5. Start again.