Translating Her Cadence

Planting Birds of Paradise as soon as you get

yourself a garden. Escaped out back to tell the

Pullman Porter to take you to the Golden State.

Put your hand on your waist and throw your head back, just

a smiling. What do you like best? His uniform

or his triceps or his mama’s sweet potato

pie? She told you call her Mama Jennie, didn’t

know you been lookin’ for a mama to call your

own. Find yourself on front yards and parks and gardens

anywhere green and growing and open. Find your

self free. Find yourself falling in love. What you know

bout love? I be lovin’ you from a brownstone stoop.

LeConté Dill received honorable mention in Small Orange Journal’s 2019 Emerging Woman Poet Honor. She was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, the granddaughter of sojourners of the 2nd Wave of the Great Migration. “LeConte” literally means “The Fairytale,” so she listens to, documents, imagines, and create stories of safety, healing, wellness, and justice. She is a scholar, educator, and a poet in and out of classroom and community spaces. LeConté holds degrees from Spelman College, UCLA, and UC Berkeley, has participated in VONA Voices and Cave Canem workshops, and was a 2016 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop Fellow. She is the Director of Public Health Practice and a Clinical Associate Professor at NYU. Ever transdisciplinary, her work has been published in a diverse array of spaces, such as Poetry Magazine, Mom Egg Review, The Killens Review of Arts & Letters, Journal of Poetry Therapy, and The Feminist Wire. She and her husband Umberto are creating a homeplace in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.