“Minnie's Lament & Continuous with the water ” Poems by Onyi Ogwumike & Painting by Olha Kravchyshyna

“Dance with a shadow”
oil on canva
80 x 120 cm
2023

While creating this painting, I was thinking about the beauty of courage to face your fear. Meeting and dancing with your fear is like a snake spell, it is up to us to control it. Thus, by meeting our shadow, listening and accepting it in all its true form, we gain strength and our true radiance.
Dance with a shadow by Olha

Minnie’s Lament

Embroider me with sorrow. 
hook ecstatic silks through my clavicles. 
adorn the bone with buttons, 
tortoise shell domes dot a shield 
across my chest. 

Crochet me, crumbling into my blood. 
call the clots stretch stitches: 
nucleic notches denoting 
donated machinery. 

Embroider me with sorrow. 
sow promises through my body. 
pull them up with your teeth, 
spit the thread into my hands. 
quietly, I put them in the dustbin, 
like a very good girl.

Continuous with the water

I wonder if there is 
anything left 
brewing in this body. 
Squeeze it free; 
a pearl from clam’s lips, 
a pebble to build a nest. 

With sound. 
With feeling. 
This time with her choir. 
All the filaments 
of her chest 
pulled up. 

A pure bridge 
strung in music. 
a broad song of pleasure 
to her future 
garden sown. 
Silent statement of faith, 
this time with fruit.

Her’s 
Composed of 
constellations of spectra, 
viscous and ungendered. 
A deck stacked 
with aces and apples 
and nourishing ghosts, 
guiding us where 
the triumphs are hidden.

Onyinyechi Jessica Ogwumike (she/they) is an Igbo-American, Black lesbian poet, collagist and ceramicist raised in Chicago, Illinois. She received a Bachelor of Arts in African American Studies from Northwestern University and a Master of Public Health at DePaul University. Their work has been featured in Foglifter Journal and the 2022 OutWrite DC Literary Journal. Ogwumike attends to embodied memory as both internal and collective archive.
Short Bio about Onyi

Olha (Olia) Kravchyshyna is a Ukrainian contemporary multimedia artist. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1997, now she lives and works as a full time artist between Kyiv and Hamburg. Drawing inspiration from myths and fairy tales, she creates deeply intimate artworks in which she explore the inner world of a woman’s feelings and experiences, based on her personal inner searches and the path of her mental healing. In her works she talks about the completeness and uniqueness of being a woman, her feelings and her invincible strength, the topic of self-love and celebrating woman sexuality.
Olha trained in painting at the Freie Kunstschule Stuttgart, Germany and received an BFA in Political Science in Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine .
Her recent exhibitions include Connected Art at Galeria Zannart.Stydio Warsaw (2023), Pure Collective at Pure, Hamburg (2022), Art4Ukraine at Nobel Peace Centre, Oslo (2022).
Short bio about Olha

Follow them on Social Media

Onyinyechi Jessica Ogwumike – Instagram

Olha Kravchyshyna – Instagram