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Ashlee C

@adaverna

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Spoken Word Artist. Writer. Author. And Other Cool Shit. "Perhaps love is the process of my gently leading you back to yourself." #writing #poetry

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And just like that, she’s 14.

Happiest Birthday to my beautiful baby girl! by @adaverna

Link in bio.

Check out my birthday project.
#art #creative #spokenword #poet #artist #love #sisterhood #familylife #poetry by @adaverna

Repeat after me:

I’ve broken my own heart many times, refusing to listen to intuition, stubbornly chasing after situations and people that meant me harm.

The desire to belong can be a deleterious thing. The way its brash and loud demeanor demands I forget who I am in the name of occupying space that ain’t mine to begin with.

Let me remember the worth I have. The value it is to know me. Let me understand I first belong to myself and owe myself the honor of saying no to what doesn’t and can’t do me well.

Let me meditate on this truth: I’m not better than you. I’m just beyond you. Therefore, I can’t remain beside you. by @adaverna

Diamond Writing: Heritage

Prompt: Consider an in-between moment in your life: a time when you found yourself suspended between staying and going, holding on and letting go, becoming and remaining.

What decision were you facing? What made it difficult to choose? What was the weight of remaining undecided?

In the ennui of stillness
and the unpredictability of movement
I ask you to quiet your mind
To see me as light
As love
As lace
I fit you like skin
And I know it’s scary
To stay put when everything in you wants to run
To escape
To avoid
Notice the way you glow now
The effervescent smile
Even on a terrible day
With the worst migraine
You’re a special kind of beautiful
That wears a timelessness
And sensuality
I am excited to know
Sit here
With me
Bare your troubles
And lay down the armor
You’ve mistaken for your body
Rest your body right here
With me.
You do not have to decide
Who you will be tomorrow
Just stay long enough
To meet the person
You are becoming today.

#diamondwriting #diamondwritingheritage #writingprompts #creative #poetry by @adaverna

Diamond Writing: Heritage
Writing prompt: Write a poem beginning with:

“Every day I am born…”

Imagine that your body is an archive. Your bones contain names, warnings, betrayals, prayers, desires, scars, migrations, silences, and stories inherited from people who came before you. Use one mythological, biblical, ancestral, or folkloric figure as a mirror for yourself

Every day I am born both
bloody and bleeding
I can’t say this pain will not outlive me
A woman with the issue of blood
Bloodshot eyes begging for reprieve
Pleading for a release from this purgatory
I am both the hurt and the harm
Holding healing in my hands
I do not reach for
Instead, I bathe in my own hemorrhaging
Call this a baptism
Convince myself something holy will rise
From the wreckage
And I might become
Anew again.

#diamondwriting #diamondwritingheritage #erikalsanchez #writingprompts #creative by @adaverna

Diamond writing: Heritage
Writing Prompt:

Using the Cornell 7 Rapists as a framework, explore a moment when a body, boundary, voice, or sense of safety was violated without permission.

Consider:
What does violation take from a person that cannot be seen?
What does it leave behind?

During my college days
I drank like a sailor,
passed out drunk many a time,
waking with no memory
of the night before.

And the one memory
that surfaces beyond the blacked out nights
is that one night

we sailed across the Georgia state lines
into Tallahassee.

His hands fished for my undergarments.
I was barely coherent.
Muttered stop.
Said no.

He laughed in response.

I remember giving into the grab,
not because I wanted to,
but because the water in my lungs
didn’t allow me to protest.

Sometimes I still see my hands,
raisined from that night,
fingers wrinkled from trying
to hold onto something
that wasn’t there.

He took what I didn’t give him.

Because he could.
Because I was drunk.
Because I was barely there.
Because he believed
no one would believe me.

But I remember.

I remember the no
that disappeared beneath his laughter.

I remember the stop
he treated like permission.

I remember my body
becoming a place
he entered
without invitation.

I still blame myself and the bottle.

Still turn puddle at the mention of that night

Shame has a way
of twisting reality

turning the bottle
into the weapon,
turning my inebriation
into evidence,
turning my vulnerability
into culpability.

I was drunk.
I was vulnerable.
I was drowning.

And he took my intoxication
as invitation.

#diamondwriting #diamondwritingheritage #PabloNeruda #writingprompts by @adaverna

@adaverna takes over second Sundays featuring @sahnthepoet !!

#charmcityslam #poetry by @adaverna

Diamond Writing: Heritage

Writing Prompt:
Write about the parts of yourself that existed before you did.

Think beyond physical inheritance. What did your ancestors, parents, grandparents, community, culture, language, traditions, faith, food, music, names, struggles, or survival leave inside of you? Stretch yourself to also consider what you have become because of where you come from.

I am the scream that would not go silent.
A lineage of war in my throat.

I am insomnia,
awake at all the wrong hours,
prayers uttered for a certain deliverance.

I am the dough rolled into bonyon,
hands remembering what mouths desire,
a fixation that always leaves you coming.

I am knuckles deep in trauma,
generations of heavy
stitched into spine.

I am no man’s daughter,
yet every woman’s sorrow.

My grandmother’s tired hands.
My mother’s swallowed, please, stay.
My aunt’s retribution.

I am sos pwa,
a hearty meal,
simmered low
because good things
take time to soften.

I am a hard thing too.

A mortar and pestle passed down.
A woman who learned the difference
between taking a beating
and doing the beating.

I am every door my mother
was afraid to close
and every window my grandmother
opened anyway.

The accent they told us to lose.
The mezanmi
they expected us to abandon.

I am an accent wrapped in Bondye,
a benediction of forgetting
and remembering.

I am the daughter who asks why.
Who says, it ends with me.

One screech at a time.
Over a stove.

Still fighting sleep.

#diamondwriting #diamondwritingheritage #chelseaguevara by @adaverna

Meet Ashlee Connors!

⭐️Master Poet
⭐️Community “Slam-er”
⭐️Artist Support Grant Recipient and More!

Read more link in our bio & Follow for more work @adaverna
#theacgg #greensboroartist #acggcreativecloseup by @adaverna

Writing prompt: epizeuxis or anaphora is a repeated phrase. In this poem, Elisabet repeats professional Spanish and explains its characteristics. Take a moment to consider a word, phrase, or expression that you hear or use often. What does it mean to you beyond its literal definition? What memories, people, places, expectations, or emotions are connected to it? Like Velasquez, repeat your chosen phrase throughout your poem and use each repetition to reveal something new about it. What does your phrase represent?

#diamondwriting #diamondwritingheritage by @adaverna

Diamond Writing: Heritage

Prompt: Using Yesika Salgado’s “My Depression Has Questions” as inspiration, personify a mental health struggle or emotional burden you carry. If it could speak, what questions would it ask? What would it say about your relationships, memories, fears, or hopes? Let the struggle become a voice of its own.

My Anxiety has Inquiries:

What if they find out you’re a fraud?
That your faith is as fake
as the smile you plaster on?

Don’t you think they all can see you struggling?
You wear the stress like a bodysuit
and you’re busting out of it.

Aren’t you tired of the lies?
Isn’t that a pet peeve of yours?

How do you live with yourself
when so much inside you is dead?

What’s the point of living?

You’ve faced enough worry
to wage a war
between your mind and spirit.

When will you give up?

Don’t you see
this trying is pointless?

Isn’t your lineage filled with losers?

Haven’t you lost yourself already?

Isn’t this barrage of questions
a heavy betrayal
against the deception
you force yourself to believe?

And what if you never find the answers?

#diamondwriting #diamondwritingheritage #yesikasalgado #hispanicheritagemonth by @adaverna

Alert ‼️ 🚨The Cash Prize 🏆 is now $1,000! 🔥
📍Use code: AccessGrant50% for $15 entry

Raleigh is the City of Oaks and for 14 years, the Raleigh Film & Art Festival has celebrated the power of spoken word to tell our stories, amplify our voices, and bring our community together.

Now, we proudly present our annual signature poetry competition:

🎤 OAK CITY SLAM 🎤

15 poets. Three rounds. One winner.

The mic is ready. The stage is set. Who will rise and claim the crown? by @adaverna