Colors of Life - Jasmine Di Angelo

This week on the Poetic Resurrection podcast, we have poet/actor Jasmine DiAngelo. We discuss and she reads her poem “Halves of Halves”. The poem reflects on being multicultural from Denmark and coming to Los Angeles at a young age. Check out this unique discussion on identity and acceptance.

Jasmine was born along the North Sea and learned how to walk under a Scandinavian sun (aka Denmark). She then made a quick, twenty-year pit stop in Los Angeles where she was raised acting on sound stages, in casting offices and sparring boys at her parents’ Taekwondo studio. Once baked until golden brown in the heat of the San Fernando Valley, she headed east and is now proud to call herself a New Yorker.

Jasmine has been writing poetry since age 11 and is the author of a one-woman play called S.T.A.T. (or, Stop Talking About That). Currently, she is compiling her first book of poetry to be released in late 2022. Jasmine also posts stories on her blog at jasdiangelo.com. Instagram: @jasdiangelo

 

“Halves of Halves”

 

Hum hum

Where are you from?

Stay out of the sun, stay out of the sun.

Small feet stretch and leap

From Nordic flatland to Californian heat.

 

Hum hum

Where are you from?

Strange sounds folded my tongue

Into halves of halves, splintered DNA wide

So I don’t look how I feel inside.

 

Hum hum

Where are you from?

Where there’s hygge and chocolate pastry with rum

Black licorice whiplash made syllables unsweet

And my soft consonants were rounded with concrete.

 

Hum hum

Where are you from?

A deep weaving of words came loose and undone

Replaced by hard R’s and confused faces

And all the wrong checkboxes naming all the wrong places.

 

Hum hum

Where are you from?

She gave him a daughter, but he wanted a son

Kicking and punching and dancing and screaming –

Multicolored horrors printed in all my dreaming.

 

Hum hum

Where are you from?

My skin is adjacent but cannot fully become

The flags in my cells, the spice in my blood

Many shades of soil heavy with flood.

 

I go slipping in the mud —

 

And my hands and feet won’t plant because

I am from everywhere and nowhere

Crossing bloodlines and flood lines  

And lies

And lines and lies and lines

Pressed in the corners of my parents’ eyes.

 

The forward pitch

The needle stitch

Wove countries and more countries together which

Bent themselves into the shape of my body  

Tucked cultures into the ridges of my irises–browned

Identity at once lost and found.

 

And in the mixing there was

Erasing

And in the erasing

Came something new

Brilliant in its Namelessness.

 

Hum hum

What are you?

And who are you from?

Someplace suspended between the moon

And the sun

Where freckles stretch footprints across the bridge of my nose

Where a new color quietly grows

Where many faces merge into one

And languages lay languid under my tongue

 

2022 © Jasmine Di Angelo