The Poets We Return To is a Wednesday series on Ethical ELA, featuring writers reflecting on the poets whose words they return to and the ways those poems continue to work on their lives, teaching, and writing.

We continue today with Ryan Burns’ essay on Aja Monet and Donte Collins.

What Aja Monet and Donte Collins Taught Me About Writing Childhood

by Ryan Burns

Lately, I have been writing about a boy I knew in middle school.

I remember being in awe that I was invited to his birthday party. The invitation was a piece of blue paper folded into a card, with an alien printed on the front from a home computer. I remember the new shirt I wore, a gift from my godmother. I remember being at his house, looking around and wondering how I had ended up there. I felt small there, but I also remember feeling seen. He had golden skin and spiked blond hair. I remember looking at him in a way I didn’t understand yet. I didn’t have the language for being queer then. I only knew there was something about him that held my attention.

I have been trying to write that memory. Or maybe I have been trying to figure out what else is inside it. The more I write, the less the memory seems to be only about him. I find myself thinking about what I understood about being a boy and what I thought masculinity looked like. School shows up. So does my neighborhood. Somewhere in all of this, I started thinking again about Aja Monet and Donte Collins.

I first put Monet’s “Jungle Gym,” from 2017’s My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter, and Collins’s “Old Rondo – Age 16,” from 2017’s Autopsy, beside one another in the early days of the pandemic, when I was teaching a dual-enrollment literature course for high school seniors. We first encountered both poems through videos of Monet and Collins performing them before turning to the printed texts. Seeing and hearing the poets perform their own words made the personal in these poems feel immediate. Then we went to the page, moving back and forth between what we heard and saw in the performances and what we noticed in the writing. I remember thinking almost immediately that the poems belonged together. I have had trouble thinking about one without thinking about the other ever since. At the time, I was interested in a question that still interests me: How do we narrate childhoods?

The political and social commentary in these poems was part of what drew me to them in the first place. My students and I talked about police brutality and curfews in urban communities in “Jungle Gym,” and the destruction of Rondo in “Old Rondo – Age 16.” Reading the poems alongside Audre Lorde’s “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” gave us another way into those conversations. We kept coming back to what children understand about the worlds they are growing up in, including what they might not yet have the language to name.

The question followed me outside the classroom, too. I was writing my dissertation at the time, which included personal vignettes about my own experiences as a student and teacher. I was trying to understand how those stories could sit alongside the larger questions I was asking about education, literacy, and identity. Reading Monet and Collins helped me see what that writing might look like. Their poems could stay close to a moment and then move outward into everything surrounding it. A scraped knee could exist alongside the realities of policing. Candy eaten as a child could lead into the destruction of a Black neighborhood. The personal and political weren’t separate parts of the poems. One was already there inside the other.

I began to think about my own vignettes that way, too. I could zoom in on an experience before pulling back to consider the larger context around it. And when I zoomed back in, the experience didn’t necessarily look the same anymore. Their poems also made me think differently about writing from my own experience. I was learning that these experiences mattered, that they could be more than a way of getting to an argument. The personal could be part of the thinking. I could pay attention to image and language, letting a moment unfold on the page before deciding what I thought it meant.

As I return to Monet and Collins now, I’m paying attention again to how they zoom in and zoom out, moving between a moment and everything around it. “Jungle Gym” begins so close to childhood that I can almost feel it. There are “swollen mosquito bites and scraped knees” and “dirty band aids.” Kids wash pit bulls with a hose and drink Pepsi with ice from the freezer tray. They climb fences. Later they cruise on handlebars and take chalk to the sidewalk. Then the poem shifts. These children are “careful not / to die too young.”

From there, Monet keeps pulling back. East New York opens into Manhattan and eventually the Hudson River. Apartments and bridges come into view. Near the end, pigeons fly over “asphalt rivers” before Monet asks, “who records the bird’s eye?” The poem that began among scraped knees and backyard laundry ends on tenement rooftops “overlooking / overlooking the millions.”

Collins moves differently. “Old Rondo – Age 16” begins with children who are “ferris wheel watchers” and “firefly fighters.” There are water balloons and street lamps. Later there are first kisses, Mike & Ikes, and Now & Laters. Then the poem turns: “i guess, before they built that freeway, there was a colony of houses.” Suddenly the ground beneath those memories has another history. Collins writes that “the largest black community in Saint Paul was cut down.” The bridges the children hide beneath take on a different meaning once the poem brings that history into view.

But Collins doesn’t leave the reader there. He comes back home, returning to “front door keys” and “collard greens.” A mother sends her child down the block to Golden Thyme with enough money for coffee and a Krispy Kreme. If the child remembers “four creams, four sugars a stir,” she responds with a wink. That wink takes us back to “the ferris wheel peak.” Monet keeps zooming out, while Collins eventually brings us back in.

There are mirrors and windows for me in these poems. There are parts of these childhoods I recognize and others that take me into experiences and histories different from my own. What keeps pulling me back now, though, is how Monet and Collins move between a moment and everything around it. I’m no longer writing about my childhood primarily to understand how those experiences shaped the teacher I became. I am trying to spend more time with the kid who lived them.

I start with a boy. I remember his hair. I remember the shirt I wore to his birthday party. I remember the way I looked at him without understanding yet why I was looking. Then I start pulling back. What comes into view is middle school and everything I was already learning about being a boy. I was tall and broad, which seemed to suggest things about me before I had the chance to suggest anything about myself. I wasn’t interested in sports. I was shy. I knew enough to notice which boys seemed to move through the world easily and which ones didn’t. I knew enough to watch. I can call that attention attraction now. I can call myself queer. Those words help me understand my past, but I also know more about where my story goes than the kid standing in that house ever could.

I first came to these poems wondering how we narrate childhoods. I return to them now because I am trying to narrate my own. I don’t want everything I know now to tell that kid what his story was. I want to go back to the story first. Where was I? Who was there? What was I paying attention to? What did I want? What did I understand, even if I couldn’t yet say it? For now, I think I need to stay there a while. 

The Poets We Return To continues each Wednesday on Ethical ELA. Explore the series or write about a poet you return to.