One of Somali-American poet Ladan Osman’s favorite curses involves telling someone to wear their internal organs as a decoration.

“May your stomach fall out of your body and wear it like swag to the market,” she said.

She used the theme of curses for one of her poems that she read Thursday night in the Black Box Theatre at the Doudna Fine Arts Center.

The African American Heritage Month Committee co-sponsored the Women’s History Awareness Month event and invited Osman to perform her acclaimed poetry.

The event was pushed back an hour because of weather complications, but resumed at 6:30 p.m. once Osman entered the silent theater.

Once she went up to the microphone, she did not move from her spot throughout her hour-long performance.

She stood and read poems from her book titled “The Kitchen Dweller’s Testimony,” because these are the poems she said gives her a sense of liberation.

“Poetry gives me the most freedom and is the closest to my sense of heritage and my sense of my own voice,” she said.

The intensity of the poetry progressed along the night. Osman led the crowd into her poem called “Invocation” that she said is indeed a curse.

“Invocation is directly a curse, and some of my darker poems are just what’s true in the content,” she said.

Although she admits her poems have an edge to them, she said she does not believe they are horrible.

“I don’t think that they’re especially dark or terrible, but I feel like everyday life is creepy so there is bound to be poems that feel dark.”

The idea of curses is all too familiar with Osman; she said many people in Somalia place curses on one another and their own children, which she said is incredibly offensive.

During the breaks between poems, she made comical references to the way she constantly needs to adjust her microphone stand by comparing herself to actress Angela Bassett in the Tina Turner movie “What’s Love Got to Do with It.”

She later attempted to lighten the mood with a contrast to her previous poems and recited two love poems.

The two love poems intrigued Ashley Harris, a freshman kinesiology and sports studies major, and Essence Chatman, a freshman communication studies major.

“The love poems were pretty good; that was one that I was really listening to,” Harris said.

Chatman agreed with Harris and said the love poems were more understandable than her other poems.

“It was my favorite probably because I understood it more than the other ones, because I didn’t really understand the other creepier ones,” Chatman said.

Despite the poems’ tones, Harris was able to see Osman’s shining personality during the breaks between each poem.

“Her poems weren’t funny, but her personality was,” Harris said. “It seems that she doesn’t take life completely seriously and I really liked that.”

Osman said she believes poetry gave her a “ravenous appetite for people’s words” and she really hopes everyone else can adopt the same fixation for words as she has.

“I want people to feel encouraged to participate,” Osman said. “I would hope there’s an image that will invite them to meditate and enjoy the sensual nature of the world that surrounds them.”

Darronté Matthews can be reached at 581-2812 or at dqmatthews@eiu.edu.