Location: Doha, Qatar
Originally from: McBean, Trinidad
Contact: lalalaloca@gmail.com
Creative Interests: Writing and its intersection with every other art!
Title of Work(s): "Ash Wednesday","How To Speak Of Home", "The Hardest Love Poem"

More about Lauren...
Lauren Kizi-Ann Alleyne is a native of Trinidad and Tobago. She left for the U.S. in 1997 to attend St. Francis College in New York, where she majored in English Literature and Communications. In 2002, she graduated with a Masters degree in English with a specialization in Creative Writing from Iowa State University, and in January of 2006, was awarded the Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing (Poetry) and a Graduate Certificate in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Cornell University, where she also taught Creative Writing and Freshman Writing. She is currently the Writing Center Coordinator at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar.

Ms. Alleyne's work has been published in many anthologies and journals, including Gathering Ground, Growing Up Girl, The Bellevue Literary Review, The Banyan Review, 2 River View, Black Arts Quarterly, The Caribbean Writer, The Hampden-Sydney Review, Sexing the Political and Caribbean Tales, among others. She is co-editor of From the Heart of Brooklyn, an anthology of undergraduate prose, poetry and drama.

Lauren's advice to young artists...
There are many possible paths to happiness; We can overlook them if we are too afraid to explore opportunities that might lie ahead or too distracted by ambition to find fulfillment where we are. Pray for God's guidance, then walk in trust and in joy.

Awards & Achievements
2002 Gival Tri-Language Poetry Award Finalist
2003 Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Prize
2003 International Publication Award, Atlanta Review
2004, 2005, 2007 Cave Canem Fellow
2004 National Poetry Slam Competitor
2005 Robert Chasen Graduate Poetry Prize, Cornell _________________________________________________________________

Ash Wednesday

This is where the journey begins: at the end
of a thumb blackened: imprinted: set apart:
sacrificial: hairshirted: mea culpa & I'm sorry,
Lord, so sorry: surrender: reconciliation: a pact:
the body reviled: the body denied: the body
transformed to holy hunger: the temple
sealed for a necessary restoration: gutted:
these the stripes: this the desert: the constant
question/confession: despair: this is where
the journey begins: on the knees: supplicant:
eyes desperately shut: give me a sign:
& is this even prayer: I mourn a simpler faith:
the mustard seed: the certainty of ashes: mass
the sun piercing the window: its stained glass

How To Speak Of Home

Do I speak in dialect?
String the colorful shards
of broken words on a thread
of island music - say yuh and mih
and allyuh for you and me
and us; What about bacchanal,
liming, ' oman , and fete, and free
up true true Trinidad style ?
Talk 'bout de sunshine , and how
lunchtime de heat does rise up
from de asphalt in a shimmering
wave. Talk bout de breeze, stir up
fresh from de sea, how it ruffles
de cane fields in a carnival dance,
bend de tops of de coconut trees.

But there is no Trinidadian
for winter, or snow, for cold
so cold that breath breaks it,
hangs it from lips in clouds;
no idiom for ice-storms, for
blizzards, or hail, or sleet.
And there is no word for winds
that slip through zippers and
buttonholes like needles, turn
even dark fingers blue.

How, then, shall I speak?
Do I translate?
Tighten those wild, open-
mouthed vowel sounds; clip
the consonants, say - wadder
instead of waat-ta, and mengo
instead of maang-goh ; flatten
the sing song undulations, tame
the arms yearning to break free,
to shape each word in air?

But meng-o does not mean
what maang-goh does, cannot
hold the sweetness of a doux-doux
or a calabash, or the lingering flavor
of a long mango , the pungent
smell of a Julie.

Mengoes are not lusted after, felled
from trees and washed, do not know
the edge of teeth biting
stringed flesh from warm seed,
or the dribble of juices tickling chins
and flowing like calypso
from mouths filled with a thousand stories.

So how then, shall I speak?

The Hardest Love Poem

I will speak of you my islands
seal your fiery sun in my words bolt your wildness down
in Time's New Roman, size 12 font, one-and-a-half inch margins, single spaced.

I will to crack your heart open ma patrie catch the rhythm of your limbo,
the beat of your calypso your steel your soca.

I will make this poem your poem madre mia burn:

hot like kutchela like anchar like chow, like asphalt steamed in sun, like Carnival like the twitch of broad hips;

red as cherries as hibiscus blooms as the balisier, as the wing of the Ibis
in flight;

white as the break of Las Cuevas waves, as Maracas sands;

and black as the land's blood deep drilled and plenty, as the fields of earth
at the root of your sweetness.

I want your spirit to haunt this house with your magic your melody La Trinité
With your music that drives my singing.
_________________________________________________________________

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