The Garden Behind the Door: A Night at Plumbum x BXWriters

Sat. Feb 21st. Boogie Down Grind Cafe. Hunts Point Ave. The kind of place where the walls remember things.

The Plumbum x BXWriters Workshop brought writers into a room with one mission -- sit with Etheridge Knight's "For Malcolm X" and find what it unlocks in you. Sol Emiliano facilitated. The room held. And the prompts did what good prompts do -- they didn't ask you what you thought. They asked you what you felt.

Three questions were on the table:

Anger is... Keep it somewhere than toss it.

When is grief enough to show yourself love again? What does the obstacle look like?

Describe the conversion of anger through gardening -- to grow love in the world.

I was fasting that day. I stayed as long as I could, then slipped out early to pray and complete my religious duties. But before I left, the "Anger is..." prompt had already done its work. What came out of that room became this:

ANGER IS...

Anger is the second prayer. The one that comes after the asking didn't work. The fist that forms when the open palm got nothing back but wind.

Anger is my father's silence at the dinner table — not the quiet of a man with nothing to say but the quiet of a man who said it all once and nobody moved.

Anger is the F train stalled between stations — the whole car holding its breath, every passenger a country with closed borders, every delay a visa denied to the version of your day you were promised.

Anger is the brother outside the masjid who knows every ayah about patience and still punches the steering wheel in the parking lot before Jumu'ah. Don't judge him. His sabr has a body and that body is tired.

Anger is what they call it when a Black man raises his voice. When a Muslim stands firm. When a woman doesn't fold. They have softer words for when other people do it — passion. conviction. leadership. But when it's you it's always anger.

Anger is the tea kettle nobody takes off the flame. Not the whistle — the whistle is release. Anger is the five minutes before the whistle when the water is screaming inside a closed mouth.

Anger is love with nowhere to land. Read that again. Anger is love that knocked on every door and found them bolted. So it kicked one in. And they called it violence. And they wrote it in the report. And nobody wrote down what it was before it became the kick.

Anger is the poem that won't let you sleep. The one that grips your pen at 2 AM and writes itself in a hand you don't recognize because it belongs to every ancestor who swallowed the word so you could finally spit it.

Anger is not the opposite of faith. Anger is faith with its shoes off. Prayers done. Hands still raised. Asking God the question every prophet asked at least once:

How long?

And the silence after isn't absence. It's the answer loading.

Anger is a door you were told never to open.

Open it.

There's a garden behind it that only grows in heat.

Knight wrote for Malcolm. I wrote for everyone who ever got called angry for standing firm.

That is what good workshops do. They don't teach you to write. They create the conditions for what's already inside you to surface. Even when you have to leave early. Even when you're fasting. Even when the poem finishes itself without you in the room.

Plumbum x BXWriters. Boogie Down Grind. Hunts Point. February 21st.

I was there.