This week on the Poetic Resurrection Podcast we have poet/actor Jasmine Di Angelo. 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