Iggy Azalea Wants Me to Teach Her How to Pronounce Wilding by Simone Person
Associate poetry editor: Lisandra Perez on today’s bonus poem: In this poem exploring the exploitative appropriation of Black culture, Person resurrects and elevates the Black women who have been pushed to the margins by their famous white counterparts. "Iggy Azalea Wants Me to Teach Her How to Pronounce Wilding" suspends you with its emotional gravity—a must read.
Iggy Azalea Wants Me to Teach Her How to Pronounce Wilding
has the whole fucking world & still cries
about scorched palms when she struck the match
says it with hard consonants flusters when I correct her
& when I don’t a journey through her long bestiary
Iggy just wants & wants & why can’t I respect that
women have to stick together pretends she won’t
always make me the mule she rides into the room
Simone Person is a Black queer femme and two-time Pink Door Writing Retreat fellow. She is the author of Dislocate, the prose winner of the 2017 Honeysuckle Press Chapbook Contest, and Smoke Girl, the poetry winner of the 2018 Diode Editions Chapbook Contest. Simone grew up in small Michigan towns and Toledo, Ohio. She can be found at simoneperson.com.
