You Are Seen: Võ Thị Như Mai Reflects on Lavonnie McManus’s “The Water Poem”

01 • Identity

The First Thing a System Can Take Is Your Name

Reading The Water Poem, I kept returning to one idea: a human being can be surrounded by records and still remain unseen. A system can know a number, a date, a risk level, a charge, or a history without knowing the person who is carrying all of it.

That is what makes Lavonnie’s poem reach beyond incarceration. Her earlier KVI piece, Still I Rise (For My Son), also speaks from lived experience shaped by motherhood, faith, recovery, and resilience. Many of us have experienced moments when one fact about our lives became larger than everything else—our mistake, our illness, our job, our family role, our grief, our reputation. The poem asks what happens when a label begins to replace a name.

03 • Faith & Service

When the Person Who Needed Care Becomes the One Who Gives It

The poem’s deepest movement comes when memory becomes service. The speaker is no longer only remembering being cared for; she becomes someone who offers care to others. The past has not disappeared, but its meaning has changed.

Lavonnie’s professional work gives that movement another layer. Her public biography describes years of reentry, supportive employment, supportive housing, peer counseling, homelessness services, and economic mobility work. That does not make hardship necessary or good. It does show how lived experience can become a form of knowledge that helps another person find a way through. KVI has explored that same principle through its “Incarcerated” Writing Prompt Competition recap, where writing becomes a way to make experience visible rather than reduce a person to a record.

There is something powerful in that transformation: the person once processed by a system becomes someone capable of helping others navigate one. The number becomes a name again—and then becomes a voice.

04 • Emergence

Why This Belongs in June — Speak

The June — Speak chapter of Issue 3 is about voice after silence: truth spoken after suppression, identity reclaimed after reduction, and lived experience transformed into language. The Water Poem belongs here because it refuses to let a record have the final word about a person.

Lavonnie’s poem speaks from the place where names, dignity, memory, service, and faith begin pushing back against labels. That is not only survival. It is emergence—and part of the larger living Issue 3 journey from awakening to becoming.

Reflection Prompt

Who Are We When the Label Is Removed?

What name, role, mistake, diagnosis, expectation, or record have you allowed to become too large in your own story—or in the way you see someone else? What changes when the person comes before the label?