Unchecked! Nadia Sims and Rev. Josh Pawelek, June 8, 2025

Nadia Sims is the Poet Laureate for the Town of Manchester. Currently, the poet is focused on spreading her message of grace across CT, NY, and MA. The Princeton graduate is the proud author of "A Soft Place to Land," "We Know the Dark" and her newly released collection "Apostle, Interrupted". Her spoken word album, "The Weight of Grace," is available here, here and here and pretty much everywhere else.

Nadia Sims

“A Poet’s Purpose”

©Nadia Sims, 2025

To listen and translate

The murmurings of life

To catch darkness’ secrets

And find the wound

To not just hear the wind at the tops

Of the trees, but to interpret

God’s whisper

To witness rage and terror and call them

Twins by blood and name

To hear the laughter of a baby

And liken it to the birth of joy

To not just see the silver lining

But to sew tapestries with it that bind

The world to a common understanding

To give pain meaning

To give love a fighting chance and

Hope good soil to grow

To say: You were seen

And never created in vain

“Boxes”

©Nadia Sims, 2025

In the census of life,

Poverty was the first box I ever checked

See, I didn’t know I was broke

Until the Scholastic Book Fair

Came in the first grade and I

Had just enough money to window shop

Books are a luxury when you’re scraping

Pennies together for milk

I lived in that box of rice, beans, government cheese,

Boiled water for baths and lights that never stayed

On for a while – but true darkness didn’t come until

My stepfather called gays an abomination

And I found myself in a closet – not because I was

sure of my sexuality, but because being questionable

wasn’t safe in that space – there were already

so many things to hate about me in that place –

I was already fat, lazy and not his child, I wasn’t

Going to give him something else to hate to my face

So, I hid behind grades and a grin that said

Everything was great on my face

I didn’t know what it meant to be Black

Until I went to a university where everyone else wasn’t

And worked 3 jobs to live and still left with debt

Worked twice as hard because I knew half as much

and all I could depend on was myself

A two for one – poor and Black, both boxes checked

And then I found out my body was in danger of being labeled

There are just too many things that I’m not physically able

How can I go about the business of a woman’s work

When the parts that make me a woman don’t really work?

When diabetes doesn’t want me to win?

And I’m half a donut away from needing insulin?

Single, barren, diabetic – check, check, check

Queer, Black woman – check and double check

Well, at least I’m American

I was born here, right?

Even with all my checkboxes, I still have some rights

And maybe if I live quietly, I can hide in plain sight

Except I can’t

Because boxes become targets

My stepfather taught me that –

That boxes become topics

And labels you can’t take back

Become headlines and catchphrases

Become the names on t-shirts

And loud cries asking why

And hashtags

And cautionary tales

And Hollywood films where checkboxes die

And the actors who play them win awards

While we hold the picket lines

And swap out signs to keep up with today’s crisis

Like due process and corruption and is it safe to be where Ice is

It wasn’t until recently that I realized I was broken

And rapidly breaking from my fears unspoken

That there are too many boxes

Too many marks against me

That there’s no safe place to hide

No safe way to be me

And that’s no way to live

In the land of the free

“Checking Boxes”

Rev. Josh Pawelek

[To Nadia:]

Thank you for this poem. And thank you for your next poem, which I had an opportunity to read a few weeks ago when you wrote it, and all I could say was “wow!” Thank you for being here this morning and sharing some truths about yourself. Thank you for your vulnerability. Thank you for your witness. Thank you for coming here with the poet’s purpose in your heart, mind and soul which you begin to describe in your poem, “A Poet’s Purpose,” as listening and translating the murmurings of life, catching darkness’ secrets, finding the wound, and not just hearing the wind at the tops of the trees, but interpreting God’s whisper.

[To the congregation:]

Our ministry theme for June is freedom. In early May Nadia and I had a conversation about freedom and how we might explore it together on a Sunday morning in this space. We landed on boxes. Whether we like it or not, we Americans are a box-checking people. Nadia refers to the census of life. I’m mindful that every decade when the United States census comes around, we check off boxes on the form. We check a box to indicate our financial relationship to our home (owned by you or someone in this household with a mortgage or loan? Owned by you or someone in this household free and clear (without a mortgage or loan)? Rented? Occupied without payment of rent?). We check a box to indicate our sex (male or female are the only options if I remember correctly). We check a box to indicate whether we are of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin. And we check a box to indicate our race. I’ll just say, in my view, given the wide variety of choices and the way they are listed on the page, there’s some profound confusion at the Census Bureau about what race actually is (though that’s a message for a different Sunday). My point is we are invited, asked, expected, required to identify pieces of ourselves by checking boxes. In doing so we, often very innocently, box ourselves in.

It's not just government agencies, and all the other form-using entities with which we interact—health care providers and insurance companies being perhaps the most prominent deployers of forms to gather data. It’s the census of life. We box each other in, often out of ignorance or our own insecurities. We box ourselves in, sometimes without realizing we’re doing it, sometimes very intentionally, to stay safe, to survive. Nadia speaks about the way her step father boxed her in; and how in response, for safety, she boxed herself in further. Again, Nadia, thank you for this sharing, your vulnerability, your translations of life’s murmurs, your catching of darkness’ secrets.

I haven’t written my own poem, my “Boxes” companion piece. I would like to. It would sound very different from Nadia’s, a reminder that some boxes confer privilege—even power—to those who can check them off. My poem might say something about remembering my parents purchasing their first home and filling the shelves around the fireplace with books from their college days. There would be a line in my poem about three square meals a day and those white powdered mini-donuts after-school snacks. There’d be a whole stanza on music lessons, little league baseball, and summer vacations on North Carolina’s Outer Banks; maybe another on our Unitarian Universalist congregation. My poem would veer into confession, would lift up my childhood assumption that everyone lives this way or close to it; would name, with some embarrassment—though I can handle it—that I was oblivious not only to the boxes others were checking, or the way oppression was boxing them in, but oblivious to the boxes I was checking—white, straight, middle-class, able-bodied, college bound—and oblivious to the truth those boxes and others were creating limits and boundaries, shaping and curtailing—dare I say colonizing—my life in subtly pernicious ways, even though I felt free, unbounded, unlimited. It is the land of the free after all. Isn’t that how we’re supposed to feel? My life was real and I wouldn’t trade it; but my poem would call that freedom-feeling an illusion, paid for with the back-breaking, exploited labor of people I would never know. My poem would invite contemplation and struggle. I was four years old when Fannie Lou Hamer took the stage at the National Women’s Political Caucus and uttered those immortal words, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” That would be the struggle my poem invites. My poem might even end with that quote.

My poem would end there, with an implicit, if not explicit, invitation to struggle for everyone’s freedom. And I would have to add a similar invitation to struggle for the earth’s freedom, because she too is boxed in. This would not be an invitation to struggle alone, of course, but to join with people who are already confronting, subverting and redesigning all the ways the census of life confers privilege and power on some and harms many others.

I am mindful there are some boxes we might really want to check. I think that’s what Pride is all about. People check their gay, lesbian, bisexual, polyamorous, pansexual, transgender, gender non-conforming, gender-bending, gender fluid, intersex, 100% queer boxes in a big public way in June—out loud, proud, celebratory. This is who I am! This is who we are! We deserve and claim space in this society. We are Americans too! We are human beings too! Though it's not my identity, I have some sense of how freeing it is to check the Pride box in a moment when the federal government is doing everything it can to erase it.

But ultimately, there’s something utterly inhuman about checking boxes, because each of us has pieces of ourselves that just don’t fit into the boxes we’re offered. Each of us, to quote Nadia, has pieces of ourselves that are questionable. Our lives are much more grey than black and white. Beauty, complexity, mystery and transformation reside in the grey spaces. But when we box ourselves in, we lose that. We lose all the unique, quirky, off-beat parts of ourselves that make us us. In the end, we need a practice of unchecking the boxes.

“Unchecked”

©Nadia Sims, 2025

When I turned 33, I asked God, “what did you make me?”

He answered, “a beautiful misfit.”

Said, “I never intended for you to be like anyone else –

What your family never seemed to like

What your friends couldn’t find a way to love

I designed it on purpose

I designed you on purpose

You are wild and weird and wired a little wrong

How else would you break ceilings and switch lanes

And defy gravity?

You are loud, chaotic, and boisterous

How else would you disrupt the norm and break strongholds?

What is good about a messenger that cannot be heard?

You make mistakes. You stumble. You’re clumsy.

How else would you learn empathy and fortitude?

To keep walking through the wilderness?

To not look down upon those who stumble too.

You love too hard. You give too much.

How else would you learn grace?

I made you to be in the world, not of it

To not be so tied to boxes that you lived in a cage

To not be so busy hiding behind a shield that you make it a barrier to living

I designed you to experience rejection and heartbreak,

Never to test you,

Never to hurt you,

But for you to show others that you can dance on broken legs,

And sing with a broken heart

You can mother with no womb

And make life your canvas

And you can be brave enough

To tell the world how

You are red with anger and there

Are not enough words that don’t

End in less -

You are not hopeless

Or helpless

Or jobless

Or loveless

But it’s close

And you listen to the blues enough

To know you are blue

It’s not quite depression

But it’s close

That tinge of anxiety

Has colored your days

With a purplish hue

You rise royal and hold tight

To your golden crown in a world

That would prefer your brown

Chin be down

As you all come to the

Realization that bootstraps

Are green and there will

Never be enough to go around

For those of you living

In greyscale

The view is 4K HD but you’re still

Afraid of telling the truth in Technicolor

But you are emboldened

In Black – unerasable and here to be witnessed

For others to take

For others to create

Their own canvas of courage

I designed you to rise as the sun does

And you do

I designed you to soar like the eagles

And you do

I designed you to thunder and roar and rage

And you do

I would never put all of that sound and fury

In a checkbox

I designed you to endure, to outlast any shackles

To move forward, to fight the grey

And the grave

And the extermination of your light

I designed you to break every chain

To live a life outside the boxes –

Unchecked.”