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In this week's episode of the Get Lit Minute, your weekly poetry podcast, we spotlight the life and work of poet Krysten Hill. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she currently teaches and is the recipient of the 2016 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award and 2020 Mass Cultural Council Poetry Fellowship.

Do you LOVE poetry? Check out our monthly Free Verse Membership Club for the opportunity to network, collaborate, and just hang out with fellow artists/poets. Also make sure you watch the movie "Summertime" featuring 27 of our Get Lit Poets and directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada, in theaters on July 9th. More info at http://www.getlit.org

"Nothing"
I ask a student how I can help her. Nothing is on her paper.

It\u2019s been that way for thirty-five minutes. She has a headache.\xa0

She asks to leave early. Maybe I asked the wrong question.\xa0

I\u2019ve always been dumb with questions. When I hurt,\xa0

I too have a hard time accepting advice or gentleness.

I owe for an education that hurt, and collectors call my mama\u2019s house.\xa0

I do nothing about my unpaid bills as if that will help.\xa0

I do nothing about the mold on my ceiling, and it spreads.\xa0

I do nothing about the cat\u2019s litter box, and she pisses on my new bath mat.\xa0

Nothing isn\u2019t an absence. Silence isn\u2019t nothing. I told a woman I loved her,\xa0

and she never talked to me again. I told my mama a man hurt me,

and her hard silence told me to keep my story to myself.\xa0

Nothing is full of something, a mass that grows where you cut at it.\xa0

I\u2019ve lost three aunts when white doctors told them the thing they felt\xa0

was nothing. My aunt said nothing when it clawed at her breathing.

I sat in a room while it killed her. I am afraid when nothing keeps me\xa0

in bed for days. I imagine what my beautiful aunts are becoming\xa0

underground, and I cry for them in my sleep where no one can see.\xa0

Nothing is in my bedroom, but I smell my aunt\u2019s perfume\xa0

and wake to my name called from nowhere. I never looked\xa0

into a sky and said it was empty. Maybe that\u2019s why I imagine a god\xa0

up there to fill what seems unimaginable. Some days, I want to live\xa0

inside the words more than my own black body.\xa0

When the white man shoves me so that he can get on the bus first,\xa0

when he says I am nothing but fits it inside a word, and no one stops him,\xa0

I wear a bruise in the morning where he touched me before I was born.\xa0

My mama\u2019s shame spreads inside me. I\u2019ve heard her say\xa0

there was nothing in a grocery store she could afford. I\u2019ve heard her tell\xa0

the landlord she had nothing to her name. There was nothing I could do\xa0

for the young black woman that disappeared on her way to campus.\xa0

They found her purse and her phone, but nothing led them to her.\xa0

Nobody was there to hold Renisha McBride\u2019s hand\xa0

when she was scared of dying. I worry poems are nothing against it.\xa0

My mama said that if I became a poet or a teacher, I\u2019d make nothing, but\xa0

I\u2019ve thrown words like rocks and hit something in a room when I aimed\xa0

for a window. One student says when he writes, it feels\xa0

like nothing can stop him, and his laugher unlocks a door. He invites me\xa0

into his living.

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