MANSFIELD — EbaNee Bond smiled, took the microphone and poured out a piece of herself. Her voice swelled like ocean waves – starting softly and crescendoing into powerful declarations.
“Words are my art, words are my way to healing,” she read. “Words are my way of breaking through the ceiling.”
After Bond finished reading two original poems, she grinned as a small crowd snapped its applause.
Approximately 30 people attended the What’s your Narrative? Poetry Slam hosted Friday by the North End Community Improvement Collaborative at Idea Works in downtown Mansfield.
Brown is a New Washington native interning at NECIC for the second summer in a row. She came up with the idea for a poetry slam after her supervisor suggested she take charge of either an event or class.
Brown studies environmental sustainability and political science at Arizona State University, so she decided to incorporate her passion for the planet into the event.
After securing donations of coffee and tea, she advertised the event as “bring your own cup.” She also had information on display about how to reduce plastic use and an optional pledge.
“We’re here to have a good time, we’re not here to preach about the environment. But you’ll get a little bit of it,” she said.
Brown opened the evening with a poem about pollution and the environment and encouraging attendees to consider their own plastic consumption.
“Forty percent of all plastic produced is single use and the average life lifespan for single use plastic is six minutes,” she said. “So we’re producing all this plastic, it’s being used for an average of six minutes, and then we’re throwing it away where it takes 400 years to decompose.”
Other participants read original poems or works by well-known poets like Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou.
Jeryn Reese spent the first hour and forty five minutes of the event building up her courage in the back of the room. With each person that presented, she felt a little more motivation.
“I don’t like public speaking at all, but it really felt very comfortable,” Reese said. “It really felt like an open space to say whatever you needed to say.”
Reese read a poem by Rupi Kaur in an effort to lift women in the room.
“With the Roe v. Wade stuff, saying something on behalf of the women and girls in America period — I felt like it needed to be said,” she reflected.
Nyasha Oden, social service coordinator at NECIC, took the mic to perform “Phenomenal Woman,” a poem by Maya Angelou.
While she doesn’t write poetry, Oden said Angelou’s works served as an inspiration for her during her teenage years.
“’Phenomenal Woman’ is what kind of propelled me and this gave me that extra push that extra fuel and strength to kind of get through,” she said.
Bond believes healing can come not only in writing, but in sharing written work.
“I think expressing yourself is truly important,” she said. “A lot of the times we just have so much information that we’re putting in our brains. Sometimes we think that’s how we think or feel about something, but we actually haven’t taken the time to really process things for ourselves.
“I just think writing in general is very healthy. It’s a therapeutic thing.”
