Most of the poem spilled out of Yex Diaz in five short minutes — faster, even, than its eventual recording would go viral.
But something was missing. It would take six more months of searching for Diaz to find the most personal lines, the ones she’s come to love the most:
The first man to mistake my body for bait made a carcass out of my consent, left me to rot. But I be more revenant than roadkill. I learned the quickest way to rock a threat to sleep is to teach him a Smith and Lesson. Now I always exercise my right to bear arms…
The spoken-word poem — entitled “Man vs. Bear” — responds to the 2024 social media debate over whether it’s better as a woman to be alone in the woods with a random man or a random bear.
“I am a wilderness survival expert,” Diaz declares by way of opening. Over the course of four minutes, the New Haven-based poet morphs from prey into predator, then from predator into hunter.
A clip of the poem reached a million people on TikTok, garnering over 242,000 likes and over 1,300 comments. “I’ve gotten messages from people as far as Ireland,” Diaz said.
“SHE SPEAKING FOR ALL OF US 1 IN EVERY 3 OF US HAVE FELT THIS.… I AM 1 OF3.….” wrote a TikTok user called GoddessAmanteCreame.
“I’ve never understood poetry until this video,” wrote a user called JKo.
The viral poem is part of a streak of successes in Diaz’s career as a spoken-word poet. She made it to the finals of Baltimore’s Charm City Slam this July, one of 12 poets selected out of over 100 potential competitors. For the last two years, she has competed as part of the Connecticut slam poetry team Verbal Slap — a five-person team coached by New Haven Poet Laureate Sharmont Influence-Little. The team won national acclaim this summer, placing first place at the 34th annual Southern Fried poetry slam in June.
As Diaz finds national recognition, she’s also growing deeper roots in her home city of New Haven.
Diaz has lived here almost all her life. She moved out of town temporarily around the age of 20, “running away” from “heartbreak,” she said. When an injury brought her back, she knew that New Haven would be her permanent home. She has worked at a variety of local nonprofits helping young people develop professional and service skills. This summer, she has taken on a new role as the development manager of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. Now 35, Diaz is a birth and death doula, an educator and group facilitator, a mom of four and an unofficial mentor to many other kids in Newhallville.
And a rising poet.
New Haven, in turn, has become a part of her creative process. Prior to joining Verbal Slap, Diaz said, “I never shared my work” before knowing the poem was complete. But while writing “Man vs Bear,” she felt comfortable for the first time asking her teammates for feedback in the middle of her process. She recalled her teammates’ words of encouragement — and their suggestion that the poem was missing something personal. It was their advice that prompted her to go deeper, to let those darker and more vulnerable words percolate, until finally they flowed — and made the poem into one she’s particularly proud of.
She fell in love with poetry as a child at the age of 9, after hearing her cousin’s spoken word poem about a friend recently diagnosed with AIDS. She didn’t necessarily know the full weight of the poem, but she knew that the words had power.
One day, her mother brought home a collection of Sylvia Plath poems she’d found at a thrift store. Diaz assembled an education in poetry from both canonical writers and the mentors and family members living amongst her. “I just started imitating the things around me,” she said.
Diaz doesn’t typically write by putting a pen to paper. She speaks the words out loud as they come to her, usually in a sudden flood of inspiration.
She’s learning how to recognize and vocalize the darker sides of her poetic voice, which she connected to her being influenced by Plath and Emily Dickinson, both women unafraid to speak their own unruly thoughts. “I wrote a dark piece a few days ago and a shared it with a teammate” on Verbal Slap, she recalled in early July. It was the kind of poem that might once have felt too dark and vulnerable to share. But Diaz said she knew she could trust her teammate to know, “This is just a poem,” not cause for alarm.
“He wrote a really good poem in response to it,” she said.
She’s found that there’s power in speaking the taboo. “You normalize the discussion of things that should be normalized but aren’t often normalized,” she described, whether it’s bodily experiences or sexual assault or a family member’s suicidal ideation. “People battle with those in private. When we talk about it in public, it creates the invitation for people to say, Me too, Me too.”
She experienced such an outpour of stories from listeners in response to the first poem she ever wrote, a poem called “God Body” inspired by the story of someone else’s stillbirth. The poem opened up conversations with other Black and Brown parents who experienced traumatic births, Diaz recalled. “A lot of us didn’t realize our birth stories were horror stories.”
Diaz’s first birth story starts when she got pregnant with her oldest child at the age of 15 — an experience that altered her life forever. She was placed in a New Haven high school classroom specifically for student moms. “I didn’t play beer pong until I was 30,” she said with a laugh. Even at a relatively young age, she loved being a parent. She now has four kids and has trained to become a foster parent. Her children are “really well-rounded, well adjusted, just some of the greatest kids ever.”
But “I had my own difficult birth stories,” Diaz said. She gave birth to her first baby at the age of 16 by way of a cesarean section, which her doctors had pushed for but which she no longer believes was necessary.
“I lost so much blood,” she described. “On the floor of the operating room, it was like a sea.” Long after the surgery, “the scarring was so thick it literally looked like a rope,” she said. “It itched and it hurt for years afterwards. I thought, This is just my new norm. And you could sneeze and cough and it would feel like you were just gonna rip open.”
Now, Diaz has context for the way medical practitioners seemed to disregard her pain. Black women have a maternal mortality rate over three times higher than white women nationally, she noted. “For a developed country, it is outrageous.”
In the years since her own birth/horror stories unfolded, Diaz became a birth doula through the local coalition Dada Zuri, a group of Black and Brown birth and health advocates and caretakers. She studied the Indigenous roots of many midwifery practices and the role of enslaved Black doulas in keeping both white and Black babies alive on American plantations.
When she then gave birth to her fourth child outside of Yale and New Haven, in North Carolina, she advocated for her pain and preferences to be taken seriously. “I was able to say, ‘I want skin to skin immediately, I want to breastfeed immediately.’”
Diaz has since also become a death doula, assisting both the dying and the grieving through both logistical and spiritual dimensions of acknowledging death. While many death doulas focus on palliative, “end-of-life care,” Diaz said, she intentionally prepares to help families process death at a too-young age. “A lot of the death that we experience in Black communities is sudden death,” she said. “We need death doulas who understand that kind of death.” She helps families with everything from estate planning to funerary arrangements to the daunting task of coping with horrible grief.
Across both roles as a birth and death doula, Diaz sees her role as “education” for her clients, “advocacy” on behalf of her clients, and “pain relief.”
That last responsibility — to bear witness and ease the pain of the human life cycle — is one that feeds directly into her poetry.
When she used to teach Common Ground high school students, Diaz recalled, she would tell them: “Turn your pain and plight into purpose… You have to find something to turn that pain into.”
Poem by poem, Diaz turns her own pain into pain relief. Listing “wilderness survival” skills in “Man vs Bear,” she declares, I teach women how to extinguish wildfires without stifling their own flame.
