Soilis-Ten

I remember my first time being at The Brotherhood/Sister Sol (Bro/Sis) and participating in their writing program, The Lyrical Circle. It was held in the space where we would be sharing and creating art for years to come. We met in a small room on the second floor of a beautiful brownstone in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Harlem. The walls were radiant with bright yellows, and beautiful West African art decorated the room.

Bro/Sis created The Lyrical Circle with two youth poets who told facilitators that they wanted a space where they could write and share poetry.

Based on my friend's description of Bro/Sis, mixed with my Hip-Hop fantasies, I expected to find myself in something out of a Wu-Tang Clan video: a house full of rappers, protecting notebooks that armed them with battle raps, who were ready at the drop of a beat to jump into a rap cipher and compete to determine who was the best emcee.

This image was fueled by my fascination with Hip-Hop, a wild imagination, and actual rap battles that I had participated in on street corners, schools, pizza and fried chicken spots, and anywhere folks would gather in the Bronx to share and compare rap verses or bet money on who had the best bars (measures of rap phrases). Though I constantly felt fear and danger, it was normal for me to walk through the borough exploring new neighborhoods and finding new people to have rap battles with. All I wanted at that time was to have someone to share my lyrics with and to feel heard, even if at times, I unknowingly put myself in harm's way in search of this.

To transmit a bit of what the Bronx felt like during my childhood, I reflect on when my mom was finally able to buy us a house in the South Bronx. I was eleven years old at the time, and I knew that we were finally moving on up!

Although I was a “good church boy,” I already knew at that age that they sold crack cocaine in the small blue house to the immediate right of our new home and that there was