Journal of Writing & Democracy

Tag: Writing

  • Two Poems by Naomi Riggs

    Two Poems by Naomi Riggs

    Beautiful Baby 

    “Mama, do you think I’m pretty?” 
    “No”, she says. 
    “Your teeth are crooked 
    Your hair—too thick 
    A birds’ nest of pussy coils and naps 
    Why yo head so motha-fucking nappy?
    You need a silk press 
    Your skin—too dark 
    You stay out in the sun too long 
    Your nose—too flat 
    A wide animal shape, ya know? 
    Your body—too big 
    You need to drink some tea 
    And matter of fact 
    Watch what you eat 
    I’m gon’ lock the fridge 
    Ohhh yeah, you got that look no one can compare
    The type that makes a person do a double take.
    Ya know, to stop and stare? 
    I can look at you alllll day 
    Like many others do 
    With a scowl 
    With a muffled grin 
    You look just like yo fuckin’ daddy.” 

    Dear Art Thou In “Heaven” 

    i am not your child 

    if the human condition has, is, and always
    will 
    be duality 
    multiplicity in nature 
    then I need not you 
    to flatten me 
    to the first-dimension 

    i need nor want 
    to be ripped out 
    of the nuanced gray of life
    and placed 
    “into the straight and narrow” 
    of your black and white 

    i am a human being who is experiencing the world 
    day in 
    and day out 
    all by myself 
    i need not you 
    to grow and reach beyond  
    this realm 
    or the next

    i need not you 
    to demand me
    restraint;
    my needs, 
    my wants, 
    my desires—they’re mine
    to do with as I please

    I need not 
    fear death 
    or endure the troubling 
    State of Conflict 
    that is the reflection 
    of life’s dizzying end; 
    fire, eternal, or everlasting peace

    i need not you 
    to make me whole 
    i am 
    parts ready—and willing—
    to become whole 
    one day 
    soon 

    i think 
    therefore I am 
    and I 
    am no child of yours

  • In Passing

    In Passing

    It starts with a WhatsApp call to her mother back home in Burkina Faso, Western Africa. 

    “Hello,” answers the sleepy voice. 

    “Hello? It’s me, Alima.” 

    “Of course, it’s you, Alima,” her mother retorts. “Who else is going to call me at 2am?” 

    “Sorry, mama.” 

    “Alima, you’ve been in America for almost a year. How long does it take –”

    “Mama, Mariam died.” 

    “Hello. Hello? I can’t hear you. What did you say?” 

    “I said –” 

    “Hello…hello…hello…” 

    Click! The phone disconnects. Alima dials again. Voicemail. 

    Alima hangs up the phone, takes a deep breath, and tosses the phone on the chipped wooden floor by the heel of her foot. She really wanted her mother to hear that Mariam had died. That her death was sudden. Heart attack. That she died on the toilet while shitting. She wanted her mother to feel the shock as she did. To side with her, this once, and admit that life has no guarantees. That tomorrow is a doubt, not a certainty. Would her mother understand that? Would she finally understand that the actions she took to force Alima out of her old life and into American life were vile and cruel?

    Alima was about to marry Seydou, the tall and elegant mechanic with a gentle touch and kind eyes. They had planned to move out of the capital to Seydou’s hometown in Banfora, a city in the southwestern part of Burkina Faso, where the air was fresher, the trees greener, and life calmer. But her mother had to ruin it. She had to decide that she wanted a bigger motorcycle like her neighbor’s and that her stall at the marketplace was too small and embarrassing. 

    Oh, but why? Why reject peace when it sits at your doorstep? Why summon trouble by wanting a complicated life when you hold a peaceful, simple one in your hands? What’s more important than to love, be loved, and be with your family? 

    But by then, it was too late. Her mother had gone out of her way to borrow money that promised a better life; money, which Alima now understands, won’t be paid back until her hair turns grey.

    “I am not going,” Alima had told her mother when she learned about the loan and the opportunity to go to America. The memory of that conversation, of how she ended up in the United States, is etched in her brain like a bad tattoo–and now she couldn’t help but revisit it. No, I am definitely not going. What was her mother thinking? For the love of God, who would do that to their daughter? Alima was about to get married in a month. Why would her mother borrow money now to send her to the United States? Did her mother not see how long it took Alima to secure a serious relationship?

    At thirty-three years old, with not even an ugly contender at her doorstep asking to marry her, Alima had gone to see the old clairvoyant, who informed her that she was born on an unlucky day and would never acquire wealth nor get married in this world or the next. Frustrated, Alima stormed out of the clairvoyant’s shed that day and went straight to Seydou, the mechanic working in front of the housing complex where she lived with her mother, and asked if he would go out with her.

    “Of course,” he replied with a shy smile. “You are beautiful.”

    What was her mother really thinking? Wasn’t her mother the one who constantly criticized women who have kids out of wedlock? Had her mother forgotten how old Alima was? Could she not comprehend that thirty-three was cutting too close for a woman to conceive? No, I am not going. 

    “But it’s all done, Alima,” her mother’s voice had quivered with panic and worry. “Everything has been arranged, and the ticket has been bought. You can’t desert the plan now.” 

    “There was never a plan for me to desert, mother,” Alima had said, walking out of their steamy one-bedroom brick house, leaving her mother speechless. Alima hoped that staying at Seydou’s house for a week would help her mother understand that Alima would not walk out of her marriage and go to America. She hoped her mother would find a solution to the problem she had created. However, two days later, while at Seydou’s, she received a call from the scumbag who had lent money to her mother. He informed her that her mother was in the hospital. His voice was as menacing as the eyes of a wild dog poised to pounce. “And listen,” he added. “Next time, I should put a bullet in her useless head.”

    When Alima ran to the hospital, her mother was barely recognizable. She had a broken arm, one eye was so severely swollen that it had closed completely, and when she spoke, all her front teeth were missing.

    It was clear. Alima had no choice. She had to go to the United States to work and pay the man back. She had convinced Seydou that she would be gone for a very short time, perhaps only six months. 

    “Six months, my foot,” Alima breathes to herself now. With a salary of $250 per week at the hair salon and all the expenses she has here, it would probably take her a lifetime to pay back that bandit. She would probably end up like Mariam. Poor, fat, and unmarried. 

    But to think that this is what happened to Mariam is unfathomable. Mariam was once an African beauty – a businesswoman with a comfortable income, desired by men of all walks of life. But they said it all started when menopause hit her early five years ago. They said she lost all appetite for men and developed a big appetite for food instead. She ate and ate and ate and naturally, she began to multiply by the largest denomination. 

    Oh, Mariam, was your destiny inevitable? As Alima ponders this question, she realizes that she isn’t actually thinking about Mariam; she is reflecting on her own life. For the past year, all she has done is work—work and more work. She jumps to her feet and stands in front of the full-length mirror, where she thoroughly examines herself. She touches her breasts; they still feel nice and firm. She examines her skin, noticing that it is still soft and tight, and her face remains relatively youthful. Yet, she can’t ignore that Mariam is only ten years older than she is. Menopause is probably approaching for her soon. Maybe what the clairvoyant predicted is her destiny, and she cannot escape it.

    But what about now? Wasn’t life happening right now? Does she have to wait until menopause catches up to her and puts her on her path to demise? Can she at least live and have some fun in the meantime? 

    With a swift motion, she picks up her phone from the floor, calls Fanta, her Malian coworker, and asks if they can go dancing tonight. Fanta is young, popular, and beautiful, with deep dimples on her round face. She is dating an African man who works as a security guard at one of the clubs in the city. Fanta has always invited Alima to join them for dancing on weekends, but Alima has consistently declined, citing her difficulty in speaking English and her limited interactions outside of the small African community she knows. Fanta has told Alima many times that it doesn’t matter if she doesn’t speak at all while at the club; all she needs to do is find her way to the dance floor and have fun.

    About an hour later, Fanta arrives in her boyfriend’s BMW to pick up Alima. Fanta was already at the club when Alima called her, so now she is surprised to see that Alima is still wearing the same sweatpants and sweater she had on earlier at the salon. “Why aren’t you dressed?” Fanta asks.

    “I don’t have anything to wear,” Alima replied. 

    After searching through Alima’s wardrobe without finding anything suitable for clubbing, the women decide to swap clothes. Fanta will then drop Alima off at the club and go home to change. They are about the same size—both women wear a size 4—though Fanta is petite while Alima is taller. When Alima puts on Fanta’s metallic black mini skirt, it sits just below her curvy buttocks. The sleeveless off-white top that pairs with the skirt fits snugly above her belly button. Although the high-heeled black boots are slightly smaller, Alima insists they are comfortable enough to wear.

    Fanta pulls out her makeup bag and embellishes Alima’s face with foundation, eyeliner, mascara, and lipstick that is as red as blood. She freshens Alima’s long braids with mousse and gel and pulls them into a ponytail. Just before spraying perfume on Alima as a last touch, Fanta removes her large gold earrings and puts them on Alima. 

    “Watch out, ” Fanta says, turning Alima to face the mirror. “Here is my femme fatale!” 

    “I look…beautiful!” 

    “You are ravishing, Alima!” 

    Fanta gives Alima a pill, assuring her that it will help her calm down and relax. When Alima expresses her uneasiness about waiting alone at the club while Fanta goes to change, Fanta takes her inside, sits her at the bar, and orders her a gin and tonic. “Drink,” Fanta says with a reassuring smile. “I promise I’ll be back before you know it.”

    Quickly, Alima finds it hard to ignore the infectious energy of the crowded nightclub. The laser light displays, the pulsating music, and the vibrant, nonjudgmental crowd all fill her with a sense of joy she never thought she would experience. She begins to nod along to the beat, allowing the music to seep into her very essence. Turning to take a sip of her drink, she realizes her glass is empty. Fanta hasn’t returned, and Alima has no money, nor the ability to communicate in English to ask the waiter if she can charge her drink to Fanta’s card.

    Alima glances at the man who has just sat down next to her at the bar to place an order. Their eyes meet and hold for a moment, but neither smiles. Eventually, the man’s gaze shifts to the empty glass in Alima’s hand. “And whatever she is having,” he says as he places his order. The bartender promptly refills Alima’s drink. After siping her newly refilled drink, Alima watches the man return to his table in the club.

    What Alima doesn’t know about this man, besides that he is white, tall, and thin, is that his name is Paul, a twenty-two years old native of Pittsburgh, who stole money from a law firm he was working at to come to New York City, a city he has long been dreaming about visiting. Paul is obsessed with art, theater, and music. He hates being born poor and dreams of becoming wealthy. He came to New York City and lodged at the Waldorf to be among the rich and to feel like he was one of them. 

    After finishing her second drink, Alima feels too much energy to contain. The dance floor looks appealing, and the music calls out to her. She sees Paul on the dance floor and makes her way over to him, where she flirts and dances with him, forcing away Paul’s dance partner, who couldn’t maintain Paul’s diverted attention. 

    As if hypnotized, Paul only follows Alima’s movements and lets her touch his body however she desires. His heart beats faster. He is sweating. He is feeling it. A feeling he has not felt before. It is curious. Strong. And he does not want it to stop. 

    After dancing to a few songs, Alima begins to feel lightheaded. She leans on Paul for support, thinking that perhaps the pill that Fanta gave her has started to kick in. Soon she is doubling over to puke. Paul helps her outside. But it is cold. Thirty-three degrees. Paul takes his blazer off and puts it around Alima as she continues to vomit. Liquid. Only liquid. Alima did not eat anything all day. She has been drinking and has taken a pill on an empty stomach. Now, her head is throbbing. Throbbing so hard, she might faint. She feels like she wants to lie down. She grabs Paul’s hand and says, “Go home.” 

    “Sure,” Paul says. “You wanna go home? I’ll call an Uber.” 

    She grabs Paul’s hand again and shakes her head. “You. Home.” 

    It takes Paul a moment, but he understands what she means. Go to his home. Alima sleeps in the cab driving to Paul’s hotel, and Paul has to wake her up upon their arrival. 

    Upstairs in the luxury hotel room, Alima heads straight to the mini fridge, where she grabs some salted potato chips and a large piece of gâteau de crêpes au chocolat. She devours them so quickly that Paul fears she might throw up again. To prepare for that possibility, he places a wastebasket next to her. After finishing the snacks, Alima walks directly to the bathroom, and Paul hears the sound of the shower running.

    Paul breathes. Turns around. His hand grips at his hip, then lets it go. He does not know whether to sit or stand. He does not know what the girl’s intentions are. Does not know how to communicate with her. Knows he is deadly attracted to her. Then, the shower stops. The bathroom door opens. And the girl walks toward him naked. Paul swallows. His throat is dry. 

    Damn! That is all he could think of. Damn! 

    The girl moves closer. Paul is not sure if he is still breathing. 

    “You want me?” the girl asks. 

    Paul nods. “I want you.” 

    The girl takes Paul’s hand and cups it on one of her pear-shaped breasts. 

    Paul pulls in. 

    Nothing can stop him now. 

    Not even death. He is all in. 

    It is around six o’clock the following day when Paul hears the sound of a door. Still dazed, he smiles with his eyes closed and reaches out his arm to the other side of the bed—it’s empty. As he opens his eyes, he realizes that the sound he heard was the girl leaving. He quickly jumps out of bed and hastily puts on some clothes. He doesn’t know her name. He has to know her name. He can’t let her go without knowing her name. He rushes out of his hotel room, takes the elevator down, and hurries to the lobby, where he asks the receptionist. She informs him that the girl he is describing has just left.

    Paul hurries toward the revolving doors of the hotel lobby and slips out. He sees her across the street and shouts “Hey,” but she doesn’t hear him. He tries to run after her, but he is hit by a freight truck that is making a turn. His brain splits open. He is dead. 

    The sudden screeching sound of a truck makes Alima turn. She sees traffic congestion forming around the area. She doesn’t know someone has been hit. She hears the honking and beeping and yelling, but that is normal because this is New York City. She turns around, her mind going back to her adventure last night. She smiles. Menopause, I am ready for you!

  • The Sweetest Sorrow

    The Sweetest Sorrow

    I remember falling in love with you. It was fast and easy, like taking a jump down a ledge on a cold winter night. It happened the very first time I met you. The grass around us sat under thick mist, and the trees sang a haunted song. I didn’t know where I was going, but then I found you. You were standing near the edge of the stream near the back of the campus, near our dormitories, smoking a skinny cigarette. You saw me crying, and you laughed.

    I laughed too. You were breathtaking.

    You walked close and dropped the cigarette, grinding it to the ground with the edge of your Mary Janes, and I was caught for a minute on the way you moved. You were like a dancer. Your legs were long and dainty, in the way that a ballerina’s might be. And you tossed your silky smooth black hair over your shoulders and smiled at me.

    “I know you. You’re the one Zachary hates.”

    “Zachary?” I asked, uncertainty.

    “Zachary David Smith,” you reminded me, sardonically. “Our English teacher.” “You’re in my class?” It was ridiculous to me that I hadn’t known that. I would have never missed a girl like you.

    “Not anymore,” you scoffed. “They kicked me out.”

    “Does he hate you too?” I asked quietly.

    “Not at all. He loves me. He loves me so much he couldn’t stand to be in the same room with me when the sun was out.”

    You were so proud of it. I was proud too. “So he moved you out?”

    “No, my mother did. Did he send you out here?”

    I shook my head. “Saint did.”

    “Saint Foster? From the third tower?”

    “I don’t know where he lives.”

    “He’s such a dick. Don’t mind anything he says. He didn’t even look at you when he talked, did he?”

    I shook my head again.

    “He’s just pretentious like that. But don’t worry. I’ll talk to him,” you announced. “Leave it to me. Tell me if he ever treats you like that again, okay?”

    You grabbed my elbow, and we walked back in together. You let me go as soon as you saw Saint, and you yelled at him for me, getting right into his personal space to tell him how terrible he was.

    “Don’t ever leave her in the cold like that again.”

    “I can do what I want.”

    “Right up until I call your mother.”

    He flicked your forehead. “Fuck you.”

    “Fuck yourself,” you retorted, crossing your arms over your ironed blazer. “Stop acting like a jerk.”

    “Stop acting like a bitch.”

    You leaned in, mischief playing on your lips. “Make me,” you said, jeering. Saint pushed you away, and I was glad for it. Nobody should have gotten that close to you when you already had me.

    It was a week later, and I was following you around like a lost duckling. You never minded. You let me help with your laundry and comb your hair, and you always held the light for me when the laundry room got dark at night. I would ask you to help me with my calculus, and you always leaned so close our arms would brush. I suddenly got terrible at math. You wore watermelon-flavored lip balm from a Swedish brand that I had never heard of, and only ever associated with you. I would smell it on your pillows when I slept over, and I tasted it on my own lips when you let me borrow it. It didn’t taste like watermelon. I wondered if it tasted like you.

    I wasn’t brave enough to find out.

    You smelled of watermelon, hairspray, and expensive perfume. I always knew when you were close. Sometimes, I would smell you on my clothes, but only on the nights you got drunk enough to sleep on my shoulder. I never moved you off, and you never complained about the crick in your neck in the mornings after.

    One time, I remember, your father sent you a bunch of Fireball shooters. As a present, I think. Your parents had finalized their divorce, and you were a mess. Shattered and devastated like I’d never seen you before. We had shot after shot,and you were so dizzy you couldn’t see me right in front of you, and you leaned your face so closely into mine that I could make out each individual lash. You had so many.

    You took a breath, and I heard it in my lungs. It felt like my lungs had stopped. But that’s okay.That was enough for me. You could breathe for the both of us. “I’m in love with Zach,” you whispered to me. I stiffened up. “Don’t tell anyone.” And then you leaned so close that I thought you would kiss me, but you passed out on my lap instead. I never let you touch the floor.

    I felt so cold that night. I turned down all the lights and bent my head over yours, praying to a god I never believed in that you would wake up and take it all back. But god isn’t real, and you were as cruel as you were loved, my dearest.

    I couldn’t have told anyone, even if I wanted to. If I told someone and they reported it, you would hate me. If I didn’t tell anyone, then you would fall harder for him, but you would still keep me. I would have never, ever betrayed your trust. But I had to do something.

    There’s a girl in the grade below us who looks like you, Alaia. I’d have never noticed her if you hadn’t noticed her first. I saw your eyes tracking her, with down -turned lips and narrowing eyes across the cafeteria. She walked from the north corner to talk to Saint, and you scowled the entire time.

    You crushed your milk carton onto the table so hard it splattered onto my skirt. The next day, I told Alaia that Zachary was holding office hours on Friday evenings around 8 PM.

    Next Saturday, you walked into my room and marched me to the library.

    “We’re studying English,” you told me curtly. “I slipped up on my last essay.” You never slipped up on your essays. You never slipped up on anything. You were the first ranked in your grade and you were in all the AP classes I could never reach. You were behind Saint, but everyone was behind Saint.

    “Did Zachary not help you?” I asked, pleased.

    “He’s busy.”

    I didn’t ask any more.

    Zach was always busy after that, and you always slipped up on your essays after that. I was over the moon, absolutely incandescent under the rain of your attention. You had me. I was delighted that you understood what that meant.

    And then Saint joined us. Two became three, and it felt like I wasn’t first anymore. And I thought I was used to being on the sidelines but I was wrong.

    I hated Saint more than I hated anyone. I didn’t even hate Zach like that. With him, I understood. He was older, he was useful, and he was forbidden. You always liked things that weren’t allowed, and I thought I was being kind by letting you keep your vices. But Saint was normal. Saint was worse. He wasn’t any more handsome than you were beautiful. He didn’t laugh at your jokes and never made the first move. You did.

    You were so bright and clever, I couldn’t believe you were being so stupid. I couldn’t believe you were falling again, as if the first time hadn’t left you bruised enough. And you tried to lie to me, over and over, but I’m not a fucking idiot.

    I hated you both so much I could have cried with the weight of it. It pressed down on my chest until I threw up in the bathroom.

    There was a knock on the door.

    “Are you alright?” came a voice, hesitant and quiet.

    I didn’t answer.

    “Hello?” She knocked again. “I heard you vomiting. Are you okay?”

    I opened the door aggressively, walked to the sink and rinsed my mouth. She moved out of the way at once. I wish the door had hit her.

    She stood behind me, nervous, hovering over my back. I stood up, sweat drying on my hairline, and took a good, long look at her face.

    This was the girl that surpassed you in the rankings. This was the girl you lost to. She was pathetic, and you were almost worse because if you were going to lose, you should have picked yourself a better opponent.

    She went to put a hand on my shoulder, and I reeled away.

    “Don’t touch me.”

    “Sorry,” she whispered, letting it fall. She twisted her fingers, pulling at them like they could pop right out of their sockets. Like she was a doll. A perfect, quiet, obedient plaything. I wanted her to break in half.

    “I wanted to talk to you. About Mister Smith?” I huffed. I wasn’t going to listen.

    “Fucking slut.”

    She staggered back, face going white. I whirled around, to make sure she saw my eyes when I said the rest of what I had to say.

    “Whore. A lying, whoring piece of shit that could never have what it takes to stay here. You think I want to talk to someone like that?”

    Her hands were shaking. I felt so good. I felt like someone had taken a piece of cork out of me, and I was bleeding all over the tiled floor, and now that the wound was clean, it could heal again. So I kept going.

    “Did he give you that grade because you sucked his dick? Let him fuck you? It won’t last. Nothing lasts here. Not your grade, not your dreams, not your ‘office hours,’ and not you. I’ll make sure of it.”

    She looked so frightened. I laughed in her face.

    “I just want to know,” I said. “When you’re applying to Princeton, when you need to pass their entrance essay, are you going to pull your skirt down for them too? And when you have kids and they ask you to help them with their homework, will you tell them who came before their daddy? I’m curious.”

    She started to cry, and I could feel my skin knitting itself back together.

    “Will you tell everybody that he fucks you on Fridays, when they ask you about your hobbies? When the first guy you meet at your next frat party puts his hand up your pants, will you think of him? And after–”

    She slapped me right then. And before I could say a word, she ran out the door, holding her chest like my blood had left a stain.

    The week after that, you were distraught.

    It was then that I understood that you loved me after all. This kind of hatred that burnt and boiled you from the inside, like maggots burrowing underneath your skin, it was the kind of release you would only throw on someone who could handle it.

    I could handle it. Alaia, perhaps not, but this wasn’t about her.

    “Saint and Alaia. Zachary and Alaia. Alaia, Alaia, Alaia,” you sang. “Her name sounds so perfect with all of them.”

    “Yours sounds better.” But it would sound the best with mine.

    “She’s everything,” you whispered.

    “Nothing,” I argued. “Nothing compared to you. Don’t think like that.”

    “She’s going to report him,” you told me, melancholy pouring out of you, staring out the window above your bed like you wanted to jump out of it. “She’s going to tell the principal about the two of them.”

    “Did she tell you that?” I asked, whispering too.

    “Last night.”

    “Are you going to go with her?” I asked quietly, hoping against hope that you would. I wanted you back. I will always want you back.

    “No.” My heart fell. “I would never hurt him like that.”

    “Then he’ll come back to you.”

    You shook your head. “No,” you told me with a shaky voice. “He’ll be in prison.” “So you let him go.”

    “No,” you said, starting to sob. “I can’t. You don’t understand. You never will. You’ve never been in love like this.”

    You were wailing so deeply, so hurt, that I wanted to cry with you. But one of us had to keep it together.

    “You’ll never know what it’s like to want someone like this,” you cried. “He made me feel smart. He made me feel like I was worth something. If I’m failing this, then I fail at life. He’s everything. He’s everything to me, but he doesn’t want me.”

    “Everybody wants you.” I want you.

    “He wants her.” You couldn’t even get the words out.

    “Kill her,” I whispered, mad. “Get rid of her, then.”

    You sniffled, and looked at me from under your wet eyelashes. I had never wanted to kiss you more. “What?”

    “Get rid of her.” I would have said anything to get you to stop looking so heartbroken. I never wanted you to feel like that again. “No one will know if you do it right.” You cried yourself to sleep on my bed.

    The day after, you went back to hanging out with Saint like it was nothing. You laughed at his jokes and touched his hair, and I let you because it looked like you were healing. And maybe it didn’t hurt anymore like you wanted it to, so you dug your fingers into the cut and peeled it open until you saw muscle and tendon. When Saint’s eyes strayed, you hung on to it like a leech. You followed his eyeline all the way to Alaia. He startled as you laughed.

    I loved your laugh. If I heard that sound in my dreams, I would know exactly who it was.

    “Her?” you said, like it was the most ridiculous thing in the world. “You want Alaia?”

    He scowled. “I don’t want anybody.”

    “You keep looking at her,” you argued. “I keep telling you about next week’s quiz and you haven’t said a word.”

    “I don’t want to talk about this,” he complained, but you kept going.

    “Then stop looking at her. Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

    “You weren’t saying anything of importance.”

    You slammed the table so hard that everyone in the library froze. They all turned to look at you, and you stood up like a tornado and ran away, leaving a whirl of papers behind. I ran right after you.

    It all happened two nights later. You texted Saint. He didn’t answer. I had asked you to stop drinking, but you were upset. It was the day before Alaia was going to tell everybody about Zachary. You couldn’t face it sober, and I couldn’t face you drunk. I was completely clear-headed that night. The events linger in my head like a wine stain on a white carpet. I can never forget it. Neither can you.

    You went looking for Saint. You walked all across campus in a white silk slip, shivering in the March chill. The cold didn’t even touch me. I was too worried about you. You were barefoot and quiet in a way that unsettled me, so I followed you two steps behind.

    You walked into his room like you had every right, and when his roommate woke up you glared at him like he deserved it.

    “Where is he?” you demanded, righteous as the grim reaper.

    His roommate shrugged. “Gone.”

    “Where?”

    “Look dude, I’m not his keeper. To his girlfriend’s, I think?”

    I knew where this was going. I should have pulled away. I should have dragged you out of there.

    “Which tower?” you asked, breathing low. I think you knew too.

    “Second.”

    You screamed in response and pushed everything off his table, and closed the door on his angry roommate. Glass shattered to the ground, spilling juice, and you ignored all of it to walk away.

    You banged on Alaia’s door with both fists, shaking violently. I didn’t know how to make you stop. Saint opened the door, chest heaving, cheeks flushed, and lips pink like they had been busy. Behind him, Alaia stood up and took a slow step back.

    That was all you needed. You shoved him away with all your might and raced towards her, feet slapping on cold tiles. You reared your hand back, ready for a slap, and Saint twisted your arm behind your back.

    “Shut up,” he hissed. “You fucking- bitch, shut up. Stop it.”

    You screamed. You dug your feet into the ground and pulled your arm back, slapping his face too.

    “Stop,” Alaia said, crying. “Please.”

    Her voice grated on my ears. I wished she could die.

    You rushed towards her like you had nothing to lose, and she screeched like you were coming for her life. She pushed you as hard as she could, and you flew away. You had always been so light.

    Your back hit the window like a freight train, and time stopped when I heard the glass crack. It happened in the blink of an eye, and I could see your eyes widen when I saw the window break.

    By the time I reached the edge, my hand had stretched out to catch yours, fingers leaning into the darkness; you were on the ground, splayed onto the grass like a favorite doll, torn silk cloth spread like broken wings.

    I watched them, still kneeling over the jagged edges of the glass. They turned red as blood leaked out of you.

    ***

    Zachary cried at your funeral. Saint and Alaia didn’t even come. I just stood there, letting the April snow collect on my shoulder and watching it build on the edge of my lashes. The maggots have come back, settling under my skin, burrowing into the festering wound your absence tore into me. My world flattened into the moment you fell. My nightmares are an echo of broken glass.

    The moon has waxed and waned over a hundred times, and my memories haven’t changed. My feelings haven’t changed. Sometimes I can taste watermelon on the edge of my lips, and I chase after the taste of you like it’s the last drop of water I’ll ever have.

    Time hasn’t stripped me of any pain. I feel the hurt like I felt it yesterday, the day before, and the day before.

    Tonight, I’m back in your room. It’s not the same as it was when you were here. But then again, nothing is.

    I can feel you like a heartbeat. You’ve never left the very bones of me. And when the sun rises tomorrow, they’ll find my body where they found yours.

  • Author Jason Reynolds never gets boring 

    Author Jason Reynolds never gets boring 

    Anyone who has heard author Jason Reynolds speak knows he has a charismatic personality. Outgoing and energetic during his events, he is a great storyteller who captivates you with his style and choice of words, and entertains you thoroughly. 

    It was during Covid-19 that I first became aware of Jason Reynolds. I had just won the 2020 Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) Emerging Voices Award. I was invited to their winter conference in Los Angeles, which was unfortunately canceled and  switched to a remote group video call instead. On day 3 of the conference, Editor Caitlyn Dlouhy of Simon & Schuster and author Nic Stone “[dug] deep into acclaimed novelist Jason Reynolds’ writing process and discussed the keys to developing a unique voice and the steps to building a meaningful career.” Although my internet decided to have a hiccup fit that day, the bit I heard from Jason Reynolds was enough to leave a lasting impression on me. It wasn’t what was said so much as how it was told. Reynolds spoke with comfort and ease. The words flew from him like autumn leaves, gently and gracefully falling to  the ground. As an aspiring writer with a fear of public speaking, this was a mind-blowing experience. 

    In early September of this year, an email from The New School informed the community about the launch for Jason Reynolds’ new book. The event would be  on Wednesday, October 9th. I registered immediately and counted the days in anticipation. 

    The Tishman Auditorium was nearly packed that night. The atmosphere was vibrant. The audience—mostly MFA students, professors, writers, and a few publishing professionals, including Reynolds’ editor—sat waiting for the show to begin. In front of the audience and next to the podium in the center of the room, a single chair juxtaposed a round coffee table. A bottle of coconut water waited on it. 

    After the lights dimmed, the event began. Peter Glassman, the founder of Books of Wonder, introduced Reynolds as the number one New York Times bestselling author of many award-winning books. He briefly spoke about Reynolds’ new book before going through all the awards Reynolds has received—even a MacArthur fellowship—and all the media outlets where Reynolds has appeared, including the Late Night Show with Stephen Colbert and CBS News. He passed the mic to Reynolds before returning to join the audience

    Sitting alone in front of the room, Reynolds drew laughter and applause from the audience when he commented about his rejection from The New School for Graduate School, but that he was “glad to be here tonight.” He had decided not to have anyone in conversation with him for this book tour. Nowadays, he pointed out, authors often talk to other authors during book tours, because it’s easier to navigate the discussion. However, he chose not to because he wanted to engage in a dialogue with the audience. This was when he began discussing his new book, Twenty-Four Seconds From Now, which is about first love, the first time having sex, and all the nerves that come along with it.

    Reynolds tapped into his own life experience, and drew himself close to the protagonist in his book. It made the story vivid and relatable. He recounted his first kiss, and when he lost his virginity, with an easy sense of humor that entertained the audience along the way. 

    But Reynolds didn’t stop there. His own life experience and sexuality were not the only reasons he wrote Twenty-Four Seconds From Now.  Visiting young black boys incarcerated on the West Coast, and talking to librarians around the country, he realized that there were not many books addressing “black boys’ tenderness.” 

    After relating all the tales and examples about his life and experience with sexuality and his motivation and inspiration for writing Twenty-Four Seconds From Now, Reynolds rose from his chair and recited the first chapter of his book from memory. He walked around the space, his words like music to the ears. His every step seemed to dance to the rhythm of that music. 

  • Two Poems by Jack Brown

    Two Poems by Jack Brown

    Four Older Men 

    A man walks into the bar and sees only me
    because I am there. He says Good enough but hesitates.   
    I tell him my age over dark liquor. There is a 
    shimmer in his moderately sunken eye when
    the first 2 falls from my mouth. 

    A man walks into my iPhone and says I am perfect 
    based on 3 images. He expects more than I can 
    give so I lie about it all. Still responding, I misread 
    his intentions because he is not very good with an 
    iPhone. I come out of character eventually. 

    A man walks into my bedroom and dislikes all of 
    its color and the past-his-time singers on the walls.
    He does not ask anything but for me to roll over
    and become small. We force our skin together and I make all 
    the right noises. The lights are white, surrendered. 

    A man walks right into me and hits me square across
    the face so I say thank you, sir. His experience trumps
    mine so he brands my chest with a SOLD sticker and takes
    me home. I am brighter than him so I stand in the corner
    like a lamp. He only ever turns me off and I stay.

    Visitation

    Back home now 
    with the labradors still barking 
    through the screen door, making
    enemies of the robins and the 
    street cat who sleeps by the 
    boxwoods on Martina Drive. 

    And there’s vodka with lime and
    my throat is the last stop on
    the Great (Southern) American Cities 
    tour and all the checked bags are 
    away in the attic. I want to howl, 
    but I’m flinching too hard. 

  • sacred bodies

    sacred bodies

    i’ve never been a woman of religion. 
    i simply do not have the time; 
    passing like silken hair threaded through fingers
    or the slip of tongues intertwined. 
    my faith lies far from hymnals.

    she addresses my body like it’s religion 
    and her altar is my sunken hips. 
    she bites into the holy loaves of my thighs 
    and sips sweet wine from my lips. 

    her touch is my first taste of heaven.
    her nails scribe pinkened confessions
    as welts into my skin. a votive flame in my gut—
    fervent yet flickering. 

    how many times can someone cry out for God
    in a night? and is she calling for me, 
    or for an omniscient being, watching, 
    like a voyeur, with envy from up above; 
    one of his angels buried between my legs, 
    devoted and desperate 
    to evoke from my throat 
    clandestine choral notes? 

    in the shadows, amongst the unfurling of our divine affair,
    our bodies tangled, with inseparable limbs, 
    sheltered, embraced by her wings, 
    we become a prayer.

  • Camp (It’s a Mitzvah!)

    Camp (It’s a Mitzvah!)

    It is 1982. I just turned 14 last month. It is the summer before 10th grade. Everyone I know in Shaker Heights, Ohio, unwaveringly follows The Preppy Handbook: a how-to manual that teaches us preppy values and culture such as consistency, nonchalance, charm, and athleticism. My own copy worn from perpetual riffling. Grosgrain ribbon belts, Lacoste, khakis, and striped, oversized rugby shirts. How many button-on Bermuda Bag covers you own determines who you are friends with and what parties you’ll be invited to. A uniform to be followed loyally and without divergence. People named Muffy and Biff and Chip, envied and emulated. If I follow it, I can ascend my Brooklyn-born, Jewish, sneaker-not-tennis-shoes status.

    I am at a sleepaway camp in the Catskills. My parents call the Catskills the “Jewish Mountains”. According to The Preppy Handbook, this is a crucial part of life. I can’t believe that, somehow, I convinced my parents to pay for it. I think my mother may be having an affair with her art professor, so getting me out of the house is in her best interests right now. I can’t think of another reason for her sudden generosity and advocacy. I don’t care. I’m fulfilling my obligation as a suburban teenager in the ‘80s, and I am wild with excitement.

    I know a few other kids who are here. Kids from temple youth group. We’ve played spin-the-bottle in the temple basement before, so I feel like they are fun people to spend the summer with. Except it is kind of weird that Helen and her brother Rod are here. He’s older, so he’s a counselor. They were two of the people that played spin-the-bottle, and they went in the closet together. I’m pretty sure they kiss a lot. I don’t have a brother, so I can’t tell. No one seems to care about it, so I guess I don’t either.

    All the kids I know from home are staying in cabins. I am staying in what used to be a hotel that the camp randomly assigns to campers. It’s not fancy, but it’s better than the cabins. It’s really cool because I am with a group of girls from Long Island. It’s like they are a gang of Rizzos from Grease. When I first opened the door to our room, they were unplugging the smoke detector so we could smoke in the room without getting in trouble and passing around some kind of clear liquor that they stashed in their bags. They are older than me. Everyone here is older than me because you have to be in high school to go to this camp, and I skipped a few grades, but I think I’m pretty mature for my age. I can keep up. I smoke. Marlboros. And I drank a bunch at Thanksgiving last year. Also, Uncle Jimmy had me smoke some of his marijuana until I felt silly at Jon’s bar mitzvah, so I think I’ll be okay. 

    These Long Island girls are all named Debbie, and they all have dark brown hair styled in feathered layers like Farrah Fawcett. They have giant boobs and wear spaghetti-strapped white tank tops with colored bras that I can see, tan lines from their string bikinis revealing the uncooked parts of their skin, cut-off faded-blue Levi’s shorts that rise up and expose the bottom curve of their butts. They call me “Baby” with their thick, delicious accents. They French inhale. They talk about “being on the rag,” which I just learned means having your period. I still don’t have my period. They ooze sex. They are unapologetic. They are nothing like the girls in The Preppy Handbook. 

    I am inspired to try new things so I can contribute to our late-night smoke and gab sessions. Lights-out in our room means “light-up and give-it-up.” We hang out the window, making O’s, and I try to suck my exhales up my nose without coughing. The Debbies are always sneaking over to the boys’ cabins at night. 

    I don’t think I’m ready for that yet. Maybe in a few weeks. 

    What I am ready for, and try almost every chance I get, is when I’m sitting next to a boy at dinner, or during activities at night, or by the campfires, I rub their thighs. Sometimes I do it under tables, or, if I’m feeling particularly wild, I do it right out in the open! I like to scrape my nails, which the Debbies have painted red, across the fabric of their shorts—moving closer and closer up. I stare at them while I do it. It’s so funny to watch their faces turn pink and then red as the tent in their pants puffs out. They squirm. I like the power I feel when I make them squirm. They sweat. Their eyes dart. Their breath becomes shallow and fast.

    The only person I won’t do this to is Todd. I really like Todd. He is almost 18, going to college in the fall and is very, very handsome. He has brown curly hair and warm honey-brown eyes. He’s from Canada. Instead of playing with his shorts I am learning sign language so I can speak to him. He is part of the group of deaf kids here. It’s a mitzvah (blessing) that they are here. I think that when I decide to go to a boy’s cabin one night, it will be his.

    Every day, instead of swimming or canoeing in the lake, I have spent hours with the deaf kids. Floating and flittering my fingers and palms. I emote with wide swashing arm movements and intricate hand gestures. The Hatikva (Jewish National Anthem) transformed into a Jewish hula. My limbs conjure the ancestors. And Todd. Seductive and sensual. I am transported. I am the Matriarchs. I am Ruth. I am Sarah. It’s kind of funny because I don’t even really believe in God. Maybe I should feel guilty? Or bad? It doesn’t matter. It’s a Mitzvah!

    I am captivated by my altruistic benevolence. I am like Mary, elevated by my association with Todd. Although, I don’t think I’m supposed to feel connected with her. 

    In a flash it is the last weekend of camp. It is now or never.

    Friday night service and bonfire occurs with no shorts rubbing. I am saving myself. We sing songs like “Lo Yisa Goy el goy cherev, Lo yil’medu od milchamah.” (We can choose darkness, or we can choose light.) But the Debbies and I have changed the words Weird Al Yankovic style into “Don’t kiss a boy if he’s a goy, but give him two if he’s a jew” and Ma-Gadlu Ma’asecha Yah (How great is your work, oh God, how very deep are your thoughts) into “Ma got screwed in the teyatrone (theater) by the Rabbi!” 

    Rabbi David strums his guitar and sings a lot of Cat Stevens songs about regretting choices and life passing you by. We all feel nostalgia for a time when we will be older thinking back on our carefree, teenage years. But I don’t feel very carefree, and I can’t stop thinking about Todd and his thighs. His sun-kissed, brown, thick thighs. Wafts of golden-tipped curls that glisten and cling to his Canadian, soccer-playing thighs. 

    Saturday comes, and the day is filled with the Debbies doting on me in support of my maiden voyage to the boys’ cabin. It’s how I imagine a Mikvah (ritual bath) would feel. I feel like a bride. Or a sacrifice. A virgin sacrifice. They brush and French braid my hair. They carefully apply frosted blue shadow across my eyelids. Dab my lips with watermelon lip smackers. Spritz me with Love’s Baby Soft all over. Including my privates. It tickles and burns, but I am certain that the Debbies know what they are doing. I have seen the spoils of their efforts, the wake of teenage Jewish boys turned to putty, under their spells. 

    Havdalah (service ending shabbat) is over. There are no more cats in the cradle. 

    Under the dark cover of night, hanging out of the small window of our room, the Debbies and I share a Marlboro. We pass it between the four of us, with the seriousness of soldiers preparing to storm a castle. We each offer a “last night” pledge of no regrets with shots of Manischewitz that one of the Debbies stole from Rabbi David’s office. I vow to touch it. I vow to not allow summer to end without me actually touching it. I swig the thick, purply-sweet wine. I will not not touch it. I am buzzing and vibrating in anticipation, as I wait for the Debbies to tell me that it is time to go. 

    The August moon is high and full over the vast black fields of the camp. Stars, shooting and stuck in what I think are constellations shine but don’t offer much help as I navigate my way. Slithering close to the earth over the damp, dew-covered grasses of the Catskills, I make my way to the deaf boys’ cabin. 

    I signed to Todd during song circle that he would have a visitor tonight. He smiled, but I can’t be sure that I signed what I thought I did. I’m still learning and mostly make stuff up.

    I make it to the deaf boys’ cabin. Tiptoeing, I try not to make a sound. I don’t want to wake anyone up. I don’t want to get caught. Slowly, carefully, I turn the knob and push open the screen door. I start when I hear a snore. My heart pounds in my chest. I quiver with anticipation and excitement. No regrets.

    I close the door behind me, holding my breath, fearful of a vacuum of wind sucking the door into a slam. I sneak through the bunks. Silver moonlight outlines the faces of the sleeping deaf boys. The wafts of darkening fuzz above their lips glow and dance to the beat of their breath. The murmurs of their dreams whispering. And I find him.

    His warm honey brown eyes framed by his sun-kissed curly hair spread in coils on the summer browned skin of his forehead. Naked shoulders, broad and manly. Small tufts of hair sprouting in a tantalizing trail leading down, below the band of his tighty-whiteys. Left leg curled atop the white sheet, halo-blue in the moonlight, right leg disappearing beneath. 

    He is awake. He is awake and waiting for me.

    What the fuck am I doing here? 

    He raises his left arm, lifting the sheet along with it billowing like a wing, inviting me in. I enter, enveloped in his warmth. His welcome. It is sweet and inviting and terrifyingly exhilarating.

    Against my thigh, I feel it under the sheet. Growing. Thickening. It is exciting, invigorating. I feel tingly and powerful and powerless. I am unsure what I am supposed to do next.

    Todd is signing something to me. I don’t understand. I don’t know these signs. They are not familiar; they are not something that Cat Stevens or Rabbi David have sung about.

    He says, “Touch me.” 

    I don’t understand. I have never heard his voice before: it’s strained and discordant. 

    “Touch me.” 

    I am still and silent.

    “Touch me. Down there.” 

    I do. I touch it. I slide my hand below the taught, striped waistband, and I feel it. 

    And I scream. 

    At the top of my lungs. 

    In his face. 

    In his face I scream at the hard wigglyness.

    I look around, afraid that I have woken the others, disturbed their sleep. And then I remember: no one in this cabin can hear me. I jump out of his bed; I throw myself at the door. And I run. I run, laughing, and shivering and shaking all the way back to my room, across the dark fields covered in a blanket of stars and moonlight, where the Debbies are waiting for me, with a cigarette and a shot of Manischewitz.

    “I did it! I touched one!”

  • Sponge

    Sponge

    I came to New York City—to visit—

    and I began writing poetry

    well

    and now I live here

    and my ink well is empty

    but of course I’ve never used

    an ink well

    because this is the

    21st century

    and if I have anything of importance to say

    I just open my notes app;

    let my thoughts spill out

    on to the screen…

    but now that I’m thinking about it,

    they don’t really spill

    since it’s not ink from a well

    they just,

    just…1

    1. I closed out my notes app and opened Instagram. I’ll come back when I’m feeling more poetic. ↩︎

  • I Bought a Rug

    It’s been over a year since I moved into my apartment, and I just bought a rug for my room. I also hung some paintings that I had from back home, but that’s not as monumental as buying this rug. The rug itself is rather inconsequential. It’s black and white in a zigzag pattern and a bit shaggy. I bought it from Target, where it’s been mass produced in multiple factories and distributed across every Target in the country. It is literally one in a million, but it is also one in a million because it is now my rug.

    Why did it take me so long to buy a rug? Well, I hate commitment. Since I began living on my own, I’ve been averse to decorating. In college (the first time), I moved into a small dorm that couldn’t have been more than 200 square feet. On opposite sides of the room were two small twin-size beds. Neither myself nor my roommate at the time had any interest in decorating. I don’t know what his reasoning was, but I found decorating foolish. A dormitory is a transient space, it’s not meant to be lived in for more than two semesters. What was the point of pimping out my room with LED lights and hanging up school memorabilia when at the end of the semester I’d have to dismantle the whole thing? Tastes change, too, and who’s to say I wouldn’t wake up one morning, decide I hated everything, and tear down the walls? It’s a waste of time, space, and money. I’ve held onto that mentality in every state and apartment I’ve lived in. Each subsequent apartment remained bare. Easy to get in, easy to get out.

    This is not to say my room is empty besides this newfound rug. I’m not giving ‘DL’ trade who lives in a room with a stained mattress on the floor where twinks go to die. There are certain standards to meet. I have a mattress, a bed frame with cabinets and cubbies, and multiple sets of sheets. These, however, were left over from the previous occupant, so they weren’t even mine to begin with. I have a lamp, too, and the aforementioned paintings, but those were all transplants from my parent’s place in New Jersey. It’s easy to assimilate to the randomness of it all because I don’t have to commit to it, and, at the end of the day, when it’s time to move again—which I will inevitably do—I’ll be able to leave the room behind and return the paintings back to my parents. It’s easier to move forward and assimilate to what’s to come, whatever that may be. 

    Shopping for furniture is a fraught experience. I’ll go to Crate & Barrel, Target, or Ikea and be overwhelmed with anxiety. I’ll see a bunch of tables that I like and struggle to decide which I should buy. Do I want the cherry wood finish or the mahogany? Endless possibilities mean the potential for endless mistakes. Nothing in there is unique either. It’s not made for me; it’s made for the masses. Looking at the catalog of options, the homogeneous nature of the items kills any expression of individuality. Nothing screams personality. It’s all so uniform and unfeeling. I never end up buying anything.

    Dating in New York is similarly challenging. I go online or go to a bar and swipe/look through a lineup of potential guys. I appraise men like I do furniture. Do I want to bring him home? Does he match the walls? Would he look good on my couch? In my bed? Does it come in a bigger size? Returning furniture and men is a hassle. There’s nothing worse than bringing someone or something home and after a week realizing it doesn’t fit or that I find no comfort in it. I’ve invested time, I’ve wasted time, and there’s just not enough time in the world.

    As I’ve gotten older, I’m still scared of commitment, but the fear of being alone has only grown. My hodgepodge of a room is screaming for some life and warmth. Similarly, I’m screaming for the same thing. Recently, I looked around my room and thought, if I were to die inexplicably in my sleep, I would be surrounded by nothing. This room doesn’t hold me. So to change that, I decided to buy a rug to create a room that not only would I want to live in, but someone else as well. Baby steps. 

    I marched into my local Target on 14th street and went to the housing section. There, I found four different rugs for sale. I fondled the soft synthetic bristles which left no impression on me. A slew of variations of the same. I almost couldn’t do it, but if I couldn’t commit to a rug, how could I commit to a guy? Throwing caution away, I grabbed one of the rugs and slung it over my shoulder. 

    Checking out was a task. Placing the oversized rug on the pint-sized scanner and locating the even-smaller barcode nearly broke me. I then trudged across streets and avenues and cut through the StuyTown courtyard carrying this rug. This is what commitment is; it’s cumbersome. When I got home, I rolled my rug out on the floor and laid atop it. Commitment, as I learned in that moment, is also comforting and rewarding. 

    I’ve had this rug now for a little over a month. I let the discomfort of commitment pass and have grown to enjoy, maybe even love having a rug. I’ve stained this rug, stretched on this rug, fucked on this rug, and when I wake up in the morning and step out of bed, my feet are gently caressed and protected from the cold by this rug. It reminds me that this rug is mine and only mine. It makes me want to have more things to fill this space and call my own, like a chair, or a bookshelf. Maybe even a guy.

  • Letter from the Editor, 2023-24

    Letter from the Editor, 2023-24

  • Unbecoming Homeless

    In between beats of thunder, the cars on the congested highway slow, and then stop moving completely. The flood symbol seems to jump out of my Waze app like the devil in Claus’ original Jack In The Box. I think how unprepared I am should a flood actually happen. Another glance at Waze and then I flip on 1010 WINS just to make sure the app is not sending me into the East River instead of averting a flood zone. I’m not a good swimmer. 

    It’s September 8, 2023 and I’m in my 2019 Elantra on the Bruckner Expressway. I’m driving back from my sister’s house in Long Island to the Westchester Airbnb I’ve been staying in for the past six weeks. Since my eviction I’m trying to stay as far away from Belleville, New Jersey as I can get. Well, at least forty-plus miles away. I calculate: a car moving at 70 on the highway may not be fast enough to break the sound barrier but will be enough to shatter the memory of that N.J. courthouse, its judge and her final judgment for non-payment. I adhere my foot to the gas pedal. Selective amnesia, that’s what I’m gunning for.

    Amid the screeching of worn windshield wipers against glass, the newscaster announces the results of the latest economic indicator, US Household Wealth. The report tells us Household Wealth rose for the second quarter to another record high, evidence of our country’s robust financial health. The newscaster wants to know how we listeners feel about that—about how our wealth has grown to record breaking proportions, because he says, “I don’t know about you, but mine hasn’t.” 

    Well, Mr. Newscaster, neither has mine. 

    The numbers showed an equal rise of over $2 trillion each in both stocks and real estate prices. 

    Most recently, fourth quarter’s numbers released on March 7th confirm another record. This time the driver is stocks which surged nearly $5 trillion. It offset a smaller drop in real estate values.

    If approximately sixty-one and sixty-five percent of the population own either stocks or real estate, respectively, the other thirty-five percent, or 117 million people do not. 

    117 million is a lot of people. 

    For reference, that is about three times more than the number of people living in California, five times more than New York. 

    Out of that 117 million, 600,500 people in the U.S were counted homeless in 2023; a jump of more than twenty percent compared to prior year 2022.  

    New York ranks second, capturing nearly 16 percent of the total US homeless population. Only California stands ahead with 27 percent. 

    With that, New York’s homeless population stands at 37.7 percent. 

    It’s grievous that our country has turned into a socio-economic oxymoron where US Wealth numbers and homelessness numbers are both at record breaking levels. 

    No wonder why many of us are not celebrating. Who cares about which direction the stocks are headed when you don’t know where you and your family will be sleeping tonight? 

    Another contributing factor to our growing disaffection is that the homeless number is higher than 600,500. 

    There are a couple of reasons for this:

    First, the current methodology used to capture data by government agencies like Dept. of Housing and Urban Development or the Census Bureau is faulty. I propose it undercounts the number of homeless population, not intentionally, but because it’s flawed.

    Basically, whether using direct or indirect estimation methods, point-in time, unsheltered or sheltered counting methods, transiency is a common side effect of homelessness. It makes the segment difficult to track. 

    The second reason is the homeless person’s reluctance to be counted.

    When I was homeless I shied away from sharing my situation except to family members and one close friend, because I understood the consequences. You get denied housing. 

    While evictions no longer show up on a person’s credit report, prospective landlords can contact previous landlords for references, as well as use an online tenant screening service.  

    Another reason is that a portion of the homeless that temporarily stay with friends or families are not counted, but are still technically homeless. They are likely to fluctuate on and off the homeless grid. 

    ***

    My membership in the “precariously homeless” club began several years ago. That was April of 2006 when I left my cushy job on Madison Avenue as the co-manager of a hedge fund’s trading desk.

    I had to resign; my physical health was deteriorating because of the stress.

    In January of 2002 I temporarily lost sight in my left eye during trading hours. A subsequent trip to the hospital and a neurologist visit lead to a Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis and weekly intramuscular injections of an interferon. The side-effects were horrible; imagine having the Flu for a few days each week combined with depression as a chaser. 

    I went on short-term disability, my eyesight returned, and I returned to work. My world had changed. I had changed. 

    Then, April 2006 came, and I resigned—as do all traces of the economic calm that characterized the 1990s.

    In 2007, a year after I left my job, the “Great Recession” swept in and stayed through 2009. The money that I saved during my time on Wall Street was spent on personal trainers, joining a weightlifting team, and eating healthy. My health recovered; and I remained asymptomatic. In December 2009, with my Doctor’s blessing I stopped the interferon injections. 

    All I had to do was find another way to make money. 

    However, in 2023, nearly fifteen years later, and my bank account still hasn’t recovered. I’m not alone. 

    Neither have the bank accounts of those other 117,000,000 million that don’t own stocks or real estate.  

    On Sunday, July 23, 2023, I moved to the Airbnb, a cramped, 125 square foot basement “suite” in Westchester, which I rented for two months and eleven days. Two rooms make up the suite (really one room with a thin wall separating it.) There is one bathroom; no shower. There is a toilet which I am forbidden from flushing toilet paper down. And, although I try my best, the black wastebasket next to it is perpetually overflowing. You’d be surprised the sheer quantity of odors a one-hundred square foot room can hold out of spite… I don’t look at the assortment of strange faces I pass on my way to the kitchen or shower on the main floor. 

    I will tell you I keep that suite in the basement locked. Always.

    My friend Jane warns: “You think [the owner] hasn’t gone in there while you were out? I mean, the lock means nothing.”

    Even with Jane’s warning, I am shocked when the owner confides that she picked the lock of the guest’s room while they were out “just to check.” The guest had broken a house rule, which amounts to a major crime in an Airbnb. She left one of her sandals on the living room wood floor. 

    However, there are practical advantages to an Airbnb if you’re homeless: no background credit, criminal, or income checks, no security deposit to put up—ideal for anyone technically homeless who otherwise is unable to meet standard leasing requirements. Although, be prepared to pay exorbitant fees.

    My Airbnb “rent” started at $2000. Once moved in, my host changed her mind and raised the monthly rent to $2650. She said she could get more money by charging daily rates rather than monthly rates and didn’t want to “feel resentful”.  

    Before I secured a room at the Airbnb I was mostly worried about my pets. 

    The threat of ending up somewhere, while my beloved cats ended up elsewhere, stalked me during those awful few months leading up to my eviction. 

    I thought of neighbors, several who had come to me in the past on the cusp of their own evictions—usually the night before or day of their desperate departure. Mostly after hours when the talons of economic loss finally eviscerated the last glimmer of hope they had. They pleaded with me to find homes for their soon to be homeless pets. I did; I rehomed their cats, found transport to a refuge for an injured seagull; fed a lost white dove… 

    I also cast judgments on those same neighbors I helped.

    How could they have not seen that coming? How could they risk their own safety and their pets? 

    And later, how had I not seen this coming?

      ***

    It’s July 5th, 2023, two weeks before my eviction hearing. 

    The white dove appears in the parking lot behind my old apartment building. The bird is pecking at the pebbles in the dirt, in between the cracked concrete. I dump the two trash bags I’m lugging into the green dumpster and slowly walk back towards the dove. To see if it’s injured. It flies to the roof. The wildlife refuges’ tell me it’s either a lost racing dove or a wedding dove. Either way, they say, it’s doomed. It will starve to death. It wasn’t born outside. It will never survive. I start feeding it and hope for a miracle.

    ***

    It’s Friday July 21, 2023 , two days before my move to the Airbnb using a loan given reluctantly by my employer. It’s a loan I’m grateful for but one that also leaves me feeling diminished. It’s been four days since I’ve seen the white dove. I’m still unsure about leaving the bird food with my neighbor, in case the bird returns… I’m stopped at a light on Belleville Avenue, about a half a mile from the apartment I’m being evicted from. Above me, a flock of pigeons are lined up on a telephone wire. In between the long row of grey feathers is a familiar set of white. The dove has survived so far, and has found friends. 

    ***

    COVID-led inflation has brought the housing crisis to the forefront of many lives, but the real monster lay in the unfair zoning laws created decades earlier—around the start of the 20th century. They call it NIMBY (“Not in My backyard”) and many of the zoning laws it inspired over a century ago still retain, at least in part, NIMBY’s original intention: exclusion and racial segregation. 

    Existing zoning laws, responsible for the housing crisis, have also led indirectly to “legalized’ discrimination within towns, particularly suburbia. It’s also led to an unnatural homogeneity which has caused dangerous levels of intolerance. You only need to look at a news headline to feel the rage. 

    Last year, Governor Hochol introduced plans to increase affordable housing in New York, but they were met with fierce resistance by local suburban legislators, along with their single-family homeowner constituents. Ultimately, they were abandoned as were watered down proposals introduced afterwards by local officials.

    ***

    Thursday September 28, 2023. I’ve finally pulled the trigger on an apartment in Long Island. 

    The “Island” is where I grew up; it’s where my family is.  The apartment, in Suffolk County, is further east than Nassau County and further away from Manhattan, and from school where I am a student. However, Suffolk has more vacancies than Nassau which makes the rents more palatable. 

    Money and a dwindling window of time become the deciding factors. 

    There were a few “hurdles” to clear. 

    I had to find a co-applicant (which I did). Then apply with the property management company’s “in-house guarantor,” which I also did. Once approved by the guarantor, and their fee was paid (about 60% of one month rent), I paid the landlord their first month rent. Move-in date is set for tomorrow. It pours all day and because of it the landlord will postpone tomorrow’s move-in due to flooding concerns.. After several back-and-forth calls, they put me in the books for Saturday. 

    Tomorrow will be our last night staying at the Airbnb. While the owner’s boyfriend uses his Shop-Vac to suck up the water that’s flooded the Bnb’s basement area outside the room where we’re staying, my cats and I are dry. Somehow the rain can’t reach us in the small space we’ve been stuck in for the past nine weeks. 

    Saturday September 30, 2023. Moving day. 

    With a cat carrier in each hand, I climb the sixteen plush, carpeted stairs to my 805 square foot apartment—double the size of my last apartment. I set the carriers down and inhale the smell of new carpet. I couldn’t have dreamed this one up. 

    Still I won’t delude myself about dreams. Joy, I learned, is best served, tempered, like a condiment. 

    In nine months my lease will be up for renewal. That leaves nine months to prepare for the rent increase that is coming (the amount unknown,) as well as another annual payment due the guarantor. 

    If they’ll still have me. 

    Who can be certain of anything these days. 

  • Cecilia Gentili’s Legacy, Southern Transness, and the Reclamation of Sainthood

    In Catholicism, sainthood may be granted to an individual posthumously through the process of canonization: a rigorous investigation into the life of a Christian of “exceptional holiness” who is believed to have attained eternal life in Heaven. Among the numerous qualifications to be met: an official recognition as a servant of god, evidence of a virtuous life in accordance with the Church’s teachings, and the attribution of at least one miracle, typically, to the candidate in question. Cecilia Gentili, artist, writer, performer, activist, transgender icon, and devoted mother to many in New York City, can teach all of us, regardless of our faiths, what it means to live and fight for those we love—the force behind many miracles we can tie back to a legacy that gives new meaning to sainthood entirely.

    In light of Gentili’s recent passing at age 52, I dove head first into the archives of transgender saints throughout history and was heartened to have discovered a few recorded instances, such as Perpetua, Marinos, and the popular, yet controversial, Joan d’Arc.

    In the public declaration of her faith, Perpetua, describing one of her final visions while preparing for a fight with the Egyptians, writes, “I was stripped, and became a man.” Though their stories may not explicitly detail their experiences with gender, likely due to looming threats of imprisonment or execution for “heresy”––like Joan, for instance, who famously deviated from gender norms and burned at the stake as a proclaimed heretic by the church––it can be gathered from the preservation of many of their narratives that these revolutionary trans figures, including others lost to history, strayed far from what the Roman Catholic church considered to be “the image of god.”

    Cecilia was born in Gálvez, Santa Fe in 1972, only four years prior to Argentina’s military dictatorship and its onslaught of extreme political repression, known as the “Dirty War,” which resulted in the deaths or “disappearances” of tens of thousands of civilians who were suspected to be subverts or left-wing “terrorists.” In an interview with Trans Oral History Project in 2017, Cecilia recalls her first childhood memories in Argentina, enduring constant pressure from family members to keep a veil over her true identity, finding solace under a tangerine tree at her grandmother’s house, and imagining she might have been born on some fantastical transfeminine planet populated only by other girls with penises. 

    Cecilia began using the girl’s restroom at an early age because it felt right, for which she continually found herself in trouble during elementary school. Fast forward to 2024, the year of her death, where the simple act of urinating as a trans person continues to be a public debate amid increasingly popular “bathroom bans” implemented by at least 11 states in the U.S., and where, overall, a whopping 428 active bills target every aspect of a trans person’s life–including healthcare, education, employment, incarceration, and the military. I can’t help but think of 16-year-old Nex Benedict who recently died in February after being brutally attacked by fellow students in their high school restroom in Oklahoma, and the countless, unnamed trans and nonbinary youth who have faced inexplicable violence as a result of the rapidly growing anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment across the country. 

    As a nonbinary trans man who began medically transitioning in my late twenties, it was just last year that I experienced my first altercation after deciding to use the cramped men’s restroom in the Whole Foods at Union Square during a break from Pride Week festivities. (The paradox of visibility comes to mind here.) I was high on mushrooms, which only exacerbated the muddled trio of fear, anger, and humiliation simmering in my core, and although I walked out physically unscathed and, for the most part, equipped to tend to my own insecurities about “passing,” there remains a lingering apprehension whenever I enter a men’s restroom. I often opt for the dreaded “W” in the event that I am cursed by the binary in public spaces, for the sake of my own wellbeing. It breaks my heart to imagine my younger, closeted self in that Whole Foods restroom, trembling in fury under the cis male gaze, completely at the mercy of a man twice my size fuming with toxic male fragility.

    I think many of the trans people in my life, especially those who, like me, were raised in ultra-religious, conservative households across the Bible Belt, can relate to the phenomenon of having an innate understanding of their gender from an early age, and the struggle with language encompassing it, or the lack thereof. Growing up in the South, I always played the husband during games of House, never questioning my eager tribute. My first kiss at age ten was in an episode of make-believe with my friend and neighbor Hannah, in which I played the role of her boyfriend at her coy request. We made quite a habit out of our pretend relationship, my own sprouting feelings for her kept carefully under wraps. Imagining myself in any other role felt ludicrous. Contemptuous whispers and rumors that she was a lesbian eventually spread like wildfire around our suburban neighborhood. When Hannah moved away, I didn’t kiss another girl for a decade.

    During every girls-only slumber party throughout junior high school, I experienced a burdensome sense of displacement. In retrospect, as cliché as it sounds, I envied their flawless portrayal of girlhood, my own attempts falling short as I yearned for both their attention and approval. I dated (read: AOL instant messaged) boys that I wanted to look like, chopped my hair off up to the nape of my neck for the first time, and took up skateboarding at 13 just to prove I was capable, if only to myself. Like Cecilia, I knew what felt right for me, even if my deviation from cisheteronormativity was deemed “sinful”–an invitation for God himself to intervene. 

    What I didn’t realize at 13, but understand now, is that the god I’ve been praying to all along is also a faggot.

    David Wojnarowicz, a multidisciplinary American artist, writer, and AIDS activist who spoke candidly of his passions and anxieties into a tape recorder while confronting his HIV diagnosis, frames the limitations of language so aptly in his tape journals, comparing his struggle to transcribe the elusiveness of a singular feeling to “[the approximation] of something that’s like a cyclone,” an analogy that never fails to pull at my heart.  When I relate this truth to my transness, it broadens the possibilities of everything I was forced to believe about myself. Perhaps my gender was always meant to transcend language.

    After high school graduation, Cecilia discovered community through sex work, an age-old profession through which many Black and brown trans women are able to find stability within a society that systematically rejects them. Like any other profession, sex work was merely that to her: work. A means to an end. During this time, Cecilia struggled with drug addiction and sought treatment at Samaritan Village after her first few years living in New York City, leading her to The Center for group counseling where she eventually began facilitating her own meetings for trans women. During her time in recovery, she went through the asylum process with assistance from Catholic Charities and was able to land her first legal job as a patient navigator at Apicha, a community health center based in Lower Manhattan that prioritizes LGBTQ+ health and wellness. Cecilia transformed Apicha significantly over the four years that she worked there, so much so that she required a larger staff to keep up with growing clientele and insisted on exclusively hiring trans women of color. By that point, she had been recruited by Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a health center dedicated to providing support for those living with or otherwise affected by HIV/AIDS, where she was named the Managing Director of Policy only six months after her onboarding in 2016.

    In her lifetime, Cecilia championed protection for all trans people and played a crucial role in bridging a significant gap in New York City through her intersectional advocacy around HIV/AIDS, breaking through stigmas affecting marginalized communities brought to the fore by the 1980s health crisis. Overall, Cecilia’s outreach work in New York City spanned a wide range of issues including abolition, healthcare access, sex worker’s rights, homelessness, and gender-based discrimination. She worked tirelessly for people to understand these struggles as interwoven. Cecilia lobbied for GENDA (the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act) which was enacted in 2019 as part of an amendment to the Human Rights Law, adding further protections specific to transgender people within the spheres of employment, housing, and public accommodations. In 2019, she also founded Trans Equity Consulting, a policy-reform organization providing workshops, campaign support, conflict mediation and more, all in an effort to make institutions, academic settings, and workplaces more inclusive, by educating on the LGBTQ+ community. In a partnership with Callen Lorde in 2021, NYC’s largest LGBTQ+ community health clinic, Cecilia created the COIN program (Cecilia’s Occupational Inclusion Network), which to this day provides free healthcare to all sex workers.

    Her extensive collaborations in community-oriented projects and affiliations with grassroots initiatives such as DecrimNY, a coalition of sex workers and allies dedicated to the destigmatization, decarceration, and decriminalization of the sex trade in New York, for which she was also the founder, is a true testament to a life spent committed to the liberation of all people. Her wholehearted commitments to justice are a true representation of saintliness, redefining traditional notions of sanctity through her courage, compassion, and advocacy for marginalized voices.

    The fruits of Cecilia’s love and labor will forever remain deeply embedded in the life of every trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming person in New York City. This much was evident at her recent funeral service in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, as the church’s pews overflowed and resounding cries of her name echoed out into the morning air for every passerby on Fifth Avenue to hear. It was an iconic place to memorialize a woman of her esteem, considering St. Patrick’s Cathedral was central to many HIV/AIDS related protests in the 1980s. Most notably was Stop The Church, a demonstration organized by ACT UP in December 1989 that disrupted a Mass service and received national attention, ultimately forcing the U.S. government to confront their negligence surrounding the health crisis and their complicity in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

    Above all, Cecilia embodied the spirit of a saint, transcending the boundaries of convention and challenging sanctimony as a trans sex worker of color. She even mocked the hypocrisy of the church in her debut off-broadway show, Red Ink, and much to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York’s disdain, was a self-proclaimed atheist. A quintessential matriarch, she fiercely protected the livelihood of those commonly ostracized by Christianity in a time of escalating fascism by the religious right in America. For those who cherished Cecilia, her willingness to stand up for those most persecuted by the Church seemed nothing short of miraculous, though such acts of grace would never find recognition within Catholic doctrine. In an Instagram story reposting the statement from St. Patrick’s Cathedral calling for a Mass of Reparation after her controversial funeral service, one user wrote, “they wouldn’t know a saint if one slapped them in the face.”

    Cecilia’s legacy reminds me, all of us, of the inherent resilience and generosity of trans people in loving a world that often tries to erase us. After all, we bear a responsibility to one another, a duty to care for, protect, and defend each other, because only we can truly keep us safe. I am reminded that trans people will write their own history, and will avoid the exploitation of our narratives. Our truths are tokens of valor; sacred mementos for trans generations to come.

    A holy card with an illustration of Cecilia sits at my bedside, next to an amber bottle of immunity tincture and a Trans Oral History Project postcard. Her hair is slicked back into a ponytail, leather jacket draped over her shoulder, her right hand placed tenderly over her heart as she gazes into the distance looking cunt as ever. It reads, “Travesti, Puta, Bendita, Madre. Be my child.” Underneath, the verse of Psalm 23. When I think of Cecilia now, I hear her shouting, “I want all the faggotry and tranny behavior!” in celebration of love and life, somewhere in a queer paradise. When I pray to Saint Cecilia, I feel the warmth of her protection, and I see her smiling down at me from Heaven, enveloped in the holy splendor of tangerines.

  • Down South

    Down South

    I understand but do not take part
    and the only community here is laundromat owner
    one plate.        one spoon        washing in the giant sink
    looks like fine china                  and me.

    Brothers by mouths and white socks –
    kind my mother put on me.

    Train mothers put children on
    your mother takes to work
    and brought you home on.

    Community is vehicle driver
    name unknown         white truck     4 ave     driving slowly south.
    Diamond company truck. Ah
    Driving gingerly driving motherly

    Downstairs they pass food to mother through the old window.

  • Hope for Rain

    Hope for Rain

    It is summer and all my friends are dying.

    Usually, summer is when we come to life, reborn from the roots of our ancestors. It is the time when we typically sway in the wind, embrace the sun, and drink from the pail of the old man who lives in the even older brick house. But this summer isn’t the same; we are dying, and the old man has yet to emerge from the withering wooden door at the top of the stairs. This man with his dusty gray hair and kind eyes. Who looked after my friends and me this past spring after the old lady died on the concrete path. Oh, and when she died, he kneeled over her and cried, and kicked little Tulip in the head. 

    The old lady fell on the ninth day of spring. She lost her footing on a protruding weathered plank. The watering can tumbled out of her grasp and clanged against the concrete path. She lay there, eyes vacant, beside our exsanguinating pail. Sap the color of Rose’s head covered the ground, leaking like sun rays from underneath her skull.  The old man ran outside, his heavy footsteps resounding on the old wooden porch, and, for the first time in my life, he stepped into the dirt without a care in the world. Tulip lost her petals, and two of her sisters’ spines snapped under his foot. Yet, he cried for the woman instead of the lives he had just taken.

    Strangers took the little old lady who cared for us away in a big white car that blocked out the sun. She never came back. From then on, the old man who loved her would fill her pail with water and shower us from above. He would tread carefully on his tiptoes, ensuring he gave us each the water we deserved. He would cry as he watered us; his salty tears sunk to our roots and shriveled them dry. 

    But it has been almost three weeks since we have seen him, and we cannot take much more. Zinnia’s head is falling; Tulip’s getting weaker every day; Rose looks as if she’ll go bald with a large gust of wind; and I don’t think I can support myself for much longer. 

    Where did he go? The man with the glasses on the edge of his nose. The one who would sit just beyond the speckled window in a weathered leather chair with the paper in his wrinkled old hands.

    “Daisy?” Tulip calls out to me, her voice sounding weaker than ever before.

    “Yes, love?”

    “What do we do?”

    I watch as everyone turns to look at me with anxious and tired eyes—those who hadn’t already fallen, at least. And I looked to the sky, a bright, vibrant blue, clearer than ever before, without a cloud in sight.

    “All we can do, my dear, is hope for rain to come.”

  • Pixelated

    Pixelated

    SOUTH CAROLINA 

    Before the Internet 

    Pixelated 

    i. 

    I was 15 in North Myrtle Beach,  

    skateboarding towards 420 World  

    under the stale haze of old billboards and tattered confederate flags. Big Mike worked there,  

    and it’s where the porn was. 

    My friend Lauren, who dated Big Mike, told me that I didn’t masturbate right. 

    I never put my hands in my pants. 

    I held a pillow under me  

    like a torso  

    something firm  

    and humped until I came. 

    I was bisexual, 

    I am still bisexual. 

    2 men and 1 woman kind of bisexual. 

    I am sure it existed in California,  

    but queer feminist porn wasn’t in my sphere  

    among titles like Karma (with a backwards R) and Cock Busting Teens part 3. 

    Devil’s Threesome: Hot, Wet, and Blonde: $19.99 

    A perfect bisexual DVD. 

    A “late bloomer” I guess, 

    though most boys in comparison to girls are. 

    Blooming in a world that viewed

    me as female,

    and was withering. Blooming in a world viewed 

    me as female,  

    was withering. 

    Too big for my britches / stunned, 

    a screaming groin.

    So funny how quickly shock turns to arousal. 

    I skated home in the merciless sun, 

    the smell of softening asphalt below me  

    following an orgasm lantern adorned by a faint flicker. 

    ii. 

    The kissing was exhilarating,  

    the devil was a male character 

    playing the brother of the female character. 

    Pants were peeled, 

    my awkwardness deepened. 

    A sunset of an unnatural energy cast a shadow on my mind and boner, there was a contradiction 

    between the visual and the meaning. 

    Entropy 

    my shoulders/face/back stained red. 

    I wanted to be her brother/boyfriend? 

    I didn’t want this flesh,  

    my body, 

    to be touched 

    the way that the men touched hers. 

    Squinting/Furrowing brow gave focus to the sound, 

    Pixelated/my hard-on emerged. 

    15 minutes of panic-jerking 

    TV turned off 

    pulled up my underwear/grabbed a pillow. 

    An inaudible space 

    imbued with honeysuckle shampoo/Erin’s face. 

    She swept her pink bangs away  

    /I made her laugh in Wendy’s. 

    Drunkenly kissed my neck skinny dipping. 

    I turned to lightheaded glass 

    on another plane/a wave/a shudder/a tiny echo planted a seed that blossomed 

    in a boisterous and debilitating desire. 

    “brother and sister” 

    Nucky Thompson’s Final Scene 

    A half-baked coupe 

    trying to come to terms with my blood relations. Scorching highs, booming lows. 

    My family and Atlantic City  

    had the same facade, 

    being a big important machine 

    that doesn’t function now. 

    Eye contact on the bus,  

    fucking in the lifeguard boats 

    she took me to her girlfriend’s house  

    in Asbury Park. 

    Pieced together 

    that we weren’t together 

    at a Pride barbeque. 

    Under the boardwalk 

    two boys, engrossed, watched a video  

    on a flip phone: rotten.com 

    something was being eaten alive  

    rusty tap water 

    barefoot baby I found outside of the Wawa  

    the way that no window’s elapsed the city’s pitilessness time did too 

    until I was healing  

    from surgery

    Boardwalk Empire,  

    my reason for living. 

    The only thing you can count on is blood  

    the blood in your veins and the blood that’s in mine. 

    Nucky Thompson dropped 

    like a full bottle 

    onto the boardwalk 

    the psychic without a crystal ball  

    read my palm that Summer 

    right there 

    where the fictional death lies  

    next to mine 

    perplexed and agitated, she said, “You’re a man.”

    ASHEVILLE

    Tomorrow, tomorrow 

    Your last breath 

    with a summer rain soundtrack 

    in the crook of a mountain. 

    I was down the mountain 

    parked in front of my house,  

    my girlfriend’s car. 

    The rain stroked the peripheral of the blue screen life 

    on my phone. 

    Giving cybersex a cadence with a man who lived far away.

    When one wakes up they can hear the heat in North Carolina. 

    Pitch like a dog whistle, 

    only southerners understand. 

    The hum was louder that morning, as the cicadas cried. Why doesn’t the cicada offer any knowledge of its demise? Maybe the cicadas cried for you too. 

    The spin of the earth pierced the silhouette on the picnic blanket. 

    Surrounded by our friends, I stared into outer space. 

    Shrouded in the disgrace of jerking off while you died. 

    I avoided hormones 

    creep 

    as long as I could  

    a violent white man 

    out of fear of turning into  

    everything I hate 

    takes advantage of the living and the dead. 

    “They couldn’t even choose their meals on any given day. I can’t believe  they could have chosen this.”

    “I didn’t see them as selfish until now.”  

    How small of us. 

    We had just come out to each other,  

    only you and I knew that. 

    Wiping the tears from your cheek that night I whispered,  “We can sleep on the playground 

    and if it rains, 

    we’ll bury ourselves in sand,  

    it’s cooler than our houses.” 

    CHICAGO

    NASA 

    No kissing naked namelessness naïveté 

    A mirror that you watched yourself in afternoon abbs aloof Sadly, there was no foreplay seeking safeness salify Ariana Grande blasting abrupt avast abscond

    NEW YORK

    Planes Flying By 

    In Queens, I hear planes above the light pollution shipping

    lives either closer to or past one another 

    while we endure the stickiness of August in the city. 

    Tiny bottles and cans 

    clinking in the houseless carts  

    from the basement apartment. 

    I hate it  

    When lovers only focus on my pleasure.  

    It should be requite. 

    It’s always like this: your head held between my

    knees. I clutch your neck, labored breathing. 

    You look up. 

    Teary eyed with adoration: this is our tenderness, yet I am growing numb. 

    John Lennon’s beady eyes stare into mine 

    from the other side of your room. 

    The first girl I ever loved comes to mind as you say, “I’m your faggot,  daddy.” 

    I nod. 

    She was afraid of pleasure and obsessed with it when we were younger. 

    She told me that on AIM 

    maybe? 

    If not, 

    it’s something we’d have typed out in Courier New  

    on LiveJournal.

  • Figures 

    Figures 

    In response to the analytical and dehumanizing language of The New York Times’ “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History” by Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui and Jugal K. Patel… 

    /// 

    According to the numbers, people finally give a fuck about Black people.

    /// 

    When a people are made into numbers, by nature, they become divisible. By design, subtractable. 

    Replaceable. 

    One thousand eight hundred sixty-five minus one thousand eight hundred sixty-three equals two, but one hundred and fifty-eight years have passed since that really mattered. 

    /// 

    “School-to-Prison Pipeline” this, “Thirteenth Amendment” that. It’s all just noise. But according to the numbers, you hear us now. 

    /// 

    The blood- soaked floorboards of government buildings, the welts across our backs. The breeding, the buck-breaking. The true imagery is too much for you to bear. So, I must remain a “figure.” 

    One darkly-shaded figure crammed into a diagram of a slave ship in a U.S. history textbook out of many. So many that it had become easy to think nothing of them at all. 

    Numbness is sometimes the survivor’s only reward. It can also be found in the assailant’s manifesto. 

    ///

    Some days, the ocean beckons to me, too. Vast, dark, and grand, I want to return. Knowing is an anchor. I ground myself in truth, but I am drowning in it. 

    What do you see when you speak of “black bodies?” Do you feel your separation, the irony? Can you taste it? 

    It is salty. It is metallic. It is on your hands. 

    /// 

    According to the numbers, you finally see us. 

    I just hope those eight minutes and forty-six seconds felt like four hundred years to you, too.

  • Third-Person Autobiography: Not Just for Therapy Anymore

    My need for a creative outlet is matched only by my need for therapy. Creative expression, in all forms, is a different kind of therapy. Since 2018 I’ve taken two courses each semester, one of which was almost always a fiction workshop. Writing under the guise of fiction, I can express and explore my thoughts in ways I don’t even broach with my therapist. I write about myself, my fears, and my disappointments in ways I don’t want to relive in conversation. What is the truth, and what is fiction? I don’t have to answer that, and that is where creative writing gives me the outlet sans anxiety.

    Something changed in the spring semester of 2022, though. I work full-time so I typically only took asynchronistic classes. I never intended to venture into unfamiliar territory, but by the time my registration was open, many classes were full. The result was a fortunate one: I ended up taking Personal Essays and Short-Form Nonfiction in the same semester. I’ve had the usual nightmares about school—missing deadlines, staring at a blank page for five days, posting something I love that turns out to be incoherent to all other readers—but the stakes seemed so much higher in nonfiction writing, so much more personal and everlasting.

    I struggled with the prompts out of fear I would divulge something and regret it. Adding to my anxiety, Short-Form was on ZOOM, and I had only been in one other synchronous class. And yet, to this day, those two classes have been the most productive and most transformative classes I’ve had.

    My breakthrough came in the form of pieces like “When Phones Weren’t as Smart as People (and Humanity Survived): A Look at Sindy in the 80s” and “Thirty-Two (plus Fifteen) Short Paragraphs About Sindy Gordon.” For the first time, I felt a comfort and a desire to write about myself. There was one caveat: I could only truly write about myself if I wrote in the third person… 

    …Sindy continues to write about herself in third person. It may not seem much of a disclosure, but to her it is bare and breathing. She has concerns that she’ll come across as presumptuous, or as Elmo. Yet, it allows her a healthy, creative outlet to express sadness, pain, and confusion, as well as to share the lighter things in her life. Sindy feels a freedom to be honest and understands that by allowing more complex accounts of her life to be explored she also unleashes the best of herself. She’s never written anything as a purely therapeutic exercise, but the benefits have been undeniable. Through her vignettes she has learned that even the most passing thoughts can be significant when captured and expressed.

    Like, how Sindy believes that Law & Order plays 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. If it does not appear on the Channel Guide at any given time it just means she doesn’t get the channel it’s currently playing on.

    After a fabulous dinner party in the 80s, someone who Sindy was sure despised her described Sindy to a mutual friend as a “circus act.” Sindy was relieved by this until her sister convinced her it wasn’t a compliment. It took her sister two weeks to do that. 

    When she was a publicist, Sindy worked on the Canadian release of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and did press with Terence Stamp for two days. He signed a production still, “for Sindy, with love.” Sindy does not believe he loved her. Sindy later worked on the New York City release of Original Gangstas (1996) and did press with Fred “The Hammer” Williamson for three days. He signed a production still, “to Sindy ‘Get a real job.’” Sindy does believe he meant it.

    Numerous photos taken decades apart make the following statement plausible: Sindy does not know the purpose of a brush or comb.

    Once, Sindy had a psychiatrist that lived two-and-a-half blocks away in a tall luxury building facing north on 57th Street. During a session, she told Sindy she sees her walking to the grocery store sometimes—and it’s not just that she’s not smiling, it’s that she looks like she could be the most miserable person in the world. “What do you think of that observation?” the doctor asked. Sindy didn’t hesitate to respond, “I think it was a mistake to go to a shrink that lives two-and-a-half blocks away.”

    Sindy always hoped to do something extraordinary with her life. When an honorary degree bestowment wasn’t ever going to happen, she went back to school in her fifties to finish the degree she started right after high school. 

    University of Michigan scientist Ethan Kross notes that

    “…using one’s first name minimizes social anxiety, the fear of being evaluated in a social context—the reason most people hate public speaking. It disables social anxiety not only before the stressful event but, significantly, afterward too, when people tend to chew over their performance and find themselves lacking—what scientists coolly call “postevent processing.”

    Workshops are akin to public speaking, though the audience is undeniably supportive. Even so, it remains difficult for Sindy to share some of the more painful memories, but as a writer she knows it will prove both cathartic and creatively fulfilling.

  • Pumpkin, Spice, Naughty, and Nice

    Every year, beginning shortly after the Fall Equinox, just as Christian girls begin to don layered scarves in plaid print and Nordstrom ankle booties, cafes nationwide unveil an exclusive offering of autumnal coffee drinks. Starbucks, for example, serves its famed, ultra-sweet Pumpkin Spice Latte. 

    It’s a wholesome time, and a devilish time. The trees shed their leaves. The robins prepare for their V-flight formation to the south. And, because climate change is no longer a reality we can escape, we randomly get 80-degree days before the inevitable cold snap that introduces November. We eat whole turkeys and act as if the Indigenous Peoples of this stolen, occupied land were happily breaking bread alongside their Pilgrim conquerors. And, somewhere, in a bubble bath, Mariah Carey is washing her face with some of that $20 million salary she gets for writing the number-one original Christmas song the world over.

    If Christian girlies who love the fall season truly knew and embraced that their bescarved, twinkly-eyed glee comes at the behest of many who suffered brutal deaths, or that their Target scarves were forcibly made by Indonesian children for less than a dollar a day, would they smile so big when sipping those tasty PSLs?

    This is not an indictment of the seasonal drinks, but an imaginative retelling of how said drinks elicit not only this kind of festive cheer but sense memories, and perhaps it all connects to desires of love and belonging. Or, just plain desire. Get in where you fit in. Fall, if you haven’t heard, is also what the kids call cuffing season. And that’s what I’m focusing on. Comfort wherever you can find it, whether it comes in a warm drink or in a lover that feels like a warm drink. So, I tried a few of these autumnal drink variations around New York city, and I have stories to tell. You’ll see!

    ***

    $8.89 pumpkin pie latte from Maman – 25th Street between 5th and 6th Avenue. 

    One part frothy cream 

    A careless dash of pumpkin pie spice on top

    One part dry and unseasoned whatever- you- have that could pass off as coffee

    It was an unseasonably warm day for this expensive-ass drink. There was also $1 extra charged for the oatmilk. And, the grumpy barista, a tall, bearded man who spoke with an uncharming blend of sarcasm and apathy, watched as I hesitantly pressed the default $1 tip button on the Square card machine. (I hate when they do that.) I was mid-armpit sniff when the grumpy barista deadnamed me: I told him my name was Michelle, and I’m pretty sure he called out “Michael” on purpose as he handed me a drink that tasted like the disdain and lovelessness I presume lives in his heart.

    I had just come from dance class, hip-hop, if you must know, my body still covered in dew from rehearsing full-out choreo for 30 minutes straight. I was due to have sex after. The man knew I’d be coming over sweaty, and he insisted that I not shower. 

    I took a sip. The coffee was bitter, leaving a chalky aftertaste in my mouth, and yet the whole drink was too milky. 

    Meanwhile, the man I was due to have sex with in approximately twenty minutes wanted me to suck his dick. I asked to see a picture of said dick. He’d already been avoidant enough, messaging me from a blank profile on Grindr, no details in his bio, and his texts carried a perfume of shame–perhaps the perfect compliment to the dirty, milky chalk now coating my tongue. 

    “It’s five inches hard, if that’s okay,” he said, right before he sent it. Surprisingly, it wasn’t a photo that disappeared after five seconds of viewing. It was pale pink with an interesting curve with ridges along the tip, surprising for a penis that my left thumb seemed to outsize. A dirty, bright-pink towel laid on the floor beneath his brandished member. I took a screenshot and texted a friend. 

    “What do I do?” 

    My friend: “Let me see the problem.”

    I sent the problem. 

    (….)

    (….)

    (….)

    I put my phone in my pocket and had another sip of the pumpkin pie latte that I nearly spat out right in front of the grumpy barista, when my phone finally dinged. 

    “Well, what do you think?” said the man who wanted me to suck him off. He was down the block in a Flatiron hotel, waiting, and I could already smell his shame from the cafe. 

    My phone dinged again. 

    My friend: “Tell him you have diarrhea. Wait, that’s nasty hahaha, tell him you are sick and then block him, or say you have diarrhea and block him. You’ll never see him. Does he live in New York?”

    He was visiting from West Virginia, oddly, and I gathered from our conversation that he worked in tech. 

    “I have diarrhea I’m so sorry omg i feel so bad,” I texted the man who wanted me to blow his trumpet with a mouth full of dry chalky dirt and then I blocked him on every app and then I asked the grumpy barista for a glass of ice water. He gave me tap water with no ice. 

    ***

    $7.76 Fig balsamic latte from Joe Coffee on 13th Street between Broadway and 5th Avenue. 

    No fig

    All lies

    Too much balsamic flavor

    Cold, gloopy milk that dribbles down your chin.

    This drink tastes like an experience I had as I was rushing to my first class of the day, a class that closely examines America’s mass incarceration system. I was dressed impeccably in layers–button down, blazer, and silk scarf– but a glance in the mirror revealed my plum lipstick had smeared, a spot of it blotching my chin. I thought about leaving it.

    I was exhausted and rundown. The night before, I was up with one of my regulars. We met months ago on the street, when I was having a vanilla ice cream cone. I wore daisy dukes, and the ice cream dribbled down my exposed thighs. He stared a while at the dribble before he licked his lips and asked for my number. I met him at a downtown apartment his twin brother lived in. (His twin brother worked a late security job and wasn’t home.) 

    He texted me at midnight as I wrapped an episode of Apple TV’s The Morning Show. An hour or so later, I was peddling on a Citibike to our designated spot. When I walked in, I was trying to look into his soft brown eyes, which seemed trained on my thighs again the way they were when we met. He looked and touched everywhere but my face. 

    There was something sweet about the way he sprayed the bed with Febreze before I arrived; something sweet about the way he didn’t put his hands on the back of my neck when I went down on him; something sweet about the way he put a pillow under my backside to enter me as my legs wrapped around him, as I squeezed his thick biceps between my thumb and forefinger like a burger I wanted to take a bite out of.

    I just wished he’d kiss me, fully, deeply. As if he liked me. Did my breath stink? I had like 17 mints and three gargles of mouthwash before I came over, I should’ve tasted like a bushel of raw peppermint, freshly plucked. 

    Did his breath stink? 

    Maybe that was it. 

    There was nothing sweet about the way he told me, as I was getting dressed to head out into the rain, not to “tell anyone about us meeting.”

    ***

    $6.89 Pumpkin Spice Latte from Starbucks (literally any of them).

    Just enough pumpkin

    Just enough spice

    A creamy blend of coffee and oat milk 

    Whipped foam on top

    And a dollop of whipped cream, drizzled in liquid caramel

    I met up with someone visiting from France who I might never see again. We met in a park one evening and we drank Pumpkin Spice Lattes. I don’t know if Starbucks is the originator of seasonal coffee, but I know that the saccharine way they taste is more closely aligned with my sense of joy than anything else I’ve tried this fall. I remember how the flavor of them went down that night as easily as this man’s sloppy wet kisses. 

    We hailed a yellow cab and made our way uptown to his hotel on the Upper West Side. We watched a girl sing on an MTV re-run of the VMAs. We talked for hours and listened to each other’s songs. I played guitar, he played jazz. We laid in his queen-sized bed and I asked him to give me a hickey. He did.

    We went for a walk, and he held my hand. He said I was a pretty girl, and that anyone who would make me feel otherwise was a dick. Older white ladies caught sight of my hickey and gasped. He was in town for a week, and we had plans to meet again. 

    He canceled them last-minute to go and record a new song. I haven’t had a pumpkin spice latte since.

  • Troubled Sleep Interview

    Troubled Sleep Interview

    Troubled Sleep, the newest used bookstore in Park Slope, has gorgeous vintage tiled floors that date back to a time when the space was a French Bistro. I spoke with Alex Brooks, the manager and book buyer of the shop about community entanglement, obscure occult orders, and the palm-reading aspects of buying and selling used books. 

    Lior: Tell me a little about what a day in the life looks like as a bookstore manager, bookseller,  and bookshop keeper. It can be such a romanticized role. 

    Alex: It’s totally romanticized. Everybody comes in here and says, “Oh I always wanted to run a bookstore,” and I’m like, “Well, half of it is lifting heavy boxes, and the other half is like being a moving man, but it’s good—you get your exercise in.” Day to day, you have your regulars: you have the people you see consistently and I think the people you interact with the most are the ones who come to sell you books repeatedly. And that’s kind of your cast of characters. That’s your crew. They’re all different types, luckily most of them are pretty nice, and I’d say I’m friends with a bunch of them now. I look forward to them coming by and we have these ongoing conversations with different installments. Some of them are more challenging because they bring unusual or obscure books that I’m not familiar with and some of them honestly have greater knowledge of those books than I do. For example, [Alex gestures towards a bookshelf] This one shelf up here came from a friend of ours who lives in the neighborhood and brings us books. He’s a great guy, love seeing him, love chatting with him—but it’s a challenge because he has all these books relating to the occult. Oh, Blavatsky is in there. I wasn’t aware of the Rosicrucians either. Have you heard of them?

    Lior: No!

    Alex: Yeah, it’s this occult order that was formed in Germany in the 17th century. 

    Lior: Oh, Lord…

    Alex: Yeah, I’d never heard of them until yesterday, till he brought these books in. 

    Lior: That was your yesterday. You’re in this constant community entanglement, community discussion. So, you’re connected to the collective that is connected to Codex (a delightful used bookstore on Bleecker). 

    Alex: Yeah, good knowledge.

    Lior: How did you become the person to be, like, I’m going to take this on, I’m gonna be the guy for this shop? 

    Alex: You’re a Codex fan; you go there?

    Lior: I am!

    Alex: Nice, I love Codex.

    Lior: Codex is special. 

    Alex: I was working Friday nights there for a while, it was kind of fun cause you’d get that Friday night crowd of people who are out Downtown. And they’d just come in hot with energy that is too rowdy for a bookstore. I’ve been working at the other shops for a few years and just earned the trust of the bosses. I was looking to step up and I thought I could bring a little more to the table and add some value to the collective, and then we just got hooked up with this space. 

    Lior: Was it a role that you had been imagining yourself in for a while? Like, as a literary nerd, book lover… 

    Alex: You flatter me. I enjoy working in bookstores for sure, but not everybody does. A lot of book nerds don’t necessarily want to be public facing, or dealing with people. 

    Lior: Totally, it’s actually very social. 

    Alex: It is.

    Lior: More so than people would even visualize. 

    Alex: I’m not necessarily great at the social element but I like it. I like seeing people all day, especially coming out of the way the world has been the last couple of years. I really missed social interfacing. 

    Lior: Do you feel like you’re a palm reader of sorts when people bring their books to sell? Or when they bring their selections to purchase and you’re like, “Oh! You’re choosing this book at this time in your life.” Like, you give them a little bit of wisdom, what you see reflected in their choice. Do you feel like you get to know people a little based on what they buy here or what they bring? 

    Alex: Oh, definitely. When people bring their books to sell, then you get a full reading. 

    Lior: Totally, you’re like, that’s your life!

    Alex: Right, like this guy who brought all the occult books yesterday, he brings so much stuff, so much variety—he’s the ultimate man of mystery. Every box of books he brings us opens up a new labyrinth of his life. I think I’m always doing it on an unconscious level, the palm reading based on what people buy. The best is when someone buys a book I really like and we can just share that enthusiasm. 

    Lior: Well, what are you reading that you’re excited about these days? 

    Alex: Let’s see, what’s in my pockets here…

    Lior: Oh, very cute! That’s a very good book pocket, a perfect little novella sleeve [Alex pulls out two books from his vintage Carhartt jacket pockets]. 

    Alex: Definitely, it’s good for a novella or the mass market size. 

    I’m the kinda guy who takes two books for a subway ride.  This book, The Housemaid, is by this writer, Amma Darko, who is Ghanaian. It was published by Heinemen, part of a great African writer’s series. I believe she’s still alive; I think she was born in the fifties. Darko has maybe six or seven novels and this is one of her best-known books. Unfortunately, they’re out of print now and, like, only available online which is so lame, but it makes the print copies, like, all the more precious when you can find them. So I picked this one up and it’s great so far—I like reading literature from a faraway place to get a taste of a different culture. [Pause for customer interaction—the customer and Alex talked about a bookstore that no longer exists that wasn’t enjoyable to go to but they both wish still existed]. 

    Lior: I’m curious about who has inspired you and your literary path. Who has taught you and who has taken you on as a book person? 

    Alex: I would say primarily the other people I work with in the shops. You know, our original shop, Book Thug Nation, goes back till 2009, so I was a customer originally. Through these shops, I’ve discovered more books and more writers than at any other place. . .Now, I know how to look for them myself.

    Lior: And how did you start learning about how to look and cultivate your own sense of ownership and taste? 

    Alex: It takes a while, you know. I started from this place where if I look back at my reading taste. . . 

    Lior: Oh my God. 

    Alex: There was a point when Book Thug Nation just opened and I was looking for William Faulkner, looking for romantic poets and the stuff that I read in school. You don’t realize how big the world of literature is and how much else there is to read. Not that there’s anything wrong with reading William Faulkner or romantic poets, old verbose white men. . . 

    Lior: They have their space. 

    Alex: Right, they have their space. But there’s so much else and that’s our general ethos here, especially with the fiction—we’re always trying to have fiction in translation, keeping it international, the Russians too. 

    Lior: The Russians! 

    [Pause for book purchase The customer purchases a book by Andy Warhol and comments that he thinks Warhol is underrated].

    Lior: I’ve never heard someone say they think Andy Warhol is underrated. 

    Alex: Maybe as a writer?

    Lior: Oh, absolutely. Even just witnessing the community entanglement, how it happens, how people are so happy to be here—people are thirsty for this; I was like thank God this shop exists! 

    Alex: It takes on a life of its own. 

    Lior: I love that about what a bookstore can be. Are you writing anything these days?

    Alex: I wish! I was actually on a good streak with writing until we opened up this place. I’ve never published anything; I’ve never been able to apply serious effort, but I like to read and I think everyone who likes to read plays around with writing.

    Lior: Absolutely.

    Alex: It’s just all about the reading, I think—when I read, I write.

    Lior: I find that is true.

    Alex: You write, too?

    Lior: Yeah.

    Alex: You find that link between reading and writing?

    Lior: Oh, totally. If I’m not reading, or if I’m not inspired by what I’m reading, it’s hard for me to write. It’s like a well that dries up. 

    Alex: If you’re not watering it. . .

    Lior: If you’re not watering it, it’s like [makes dried-up noise].

    Alex: Oh God, that’s a scary sound! You’re right, though. That’s why if I start reading a book and it doesn’t inspire me at all, I have no patience for it. I’m not going to waste my time. 

    Lior: I think that’s valid. So, the name of the shop…I read Dead Souls was a potential name? 

    Alex: That’s what I wanted. 

    Lior: So that’s what you wanted to name the store, but you didn’t want to offend the church across the street?

    Alex: Indeed, we wanted to be respectful.

    Lior: I feel like the vibe that Dead Souls gives off is totally different from Troubled Sleep. I mean the word “dead…” 

    Alex: It’s a lot putting “dead” in your name, but then again, I think humans have a death urge and a death fascination, so I don’t think it would have been bad for business necessarily. I think it would have drawn people in. I’m an enormous fan of the book, Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol. I would name anything after that book. I don’t really know the book, Troubled Sleep, by Jean-Paul Sartre—I’m not much of a Sarte-rian. 

    Lior: What would you say to students who are just beginning their own literary path? What would you want students to know?

    Alex: In general, if you talk to people about having a career in books or even just having an interest in books, there are always going to be people around you who say discouraging things. People say discouraging things to me all day. They come in and say, “Oh a bookstore, huh? Tough business. Good luck!” There are people who talk about the Internet or reading PDFs, but the thing is, those people are all wrong. That’s the great truth of it; no matter what happens with smartphones, or streaming TV, or people ordering books off of Amazon, I think the written word is here to stay. People will always like to read physical books. For anyone who is thinking about a career in writing, there will always be demand for that and there will always be opportunities for that. It’s not going away. Books have been here for a long time and are going to stay here for a long time. One of my older buddies said to me when I was thinking about opening this store: “Any job you do in life, whether you’re an investment banker or a custodian, there will be competition. Somebody else will try to do your job better than you, so you better do what you’re good at. What you’re naturally talented at. Cause that’s where you’re going to be the most competitive.” If you’re a person who’s into books and into writing, then that’s what you should do. I don’t want to speak like I’m all wise, but I believe in that. 

    Lior: I love that. I think it’s a really hopeful note to end on. 

    Check out Troubled Sleep, take yourself on a date, browse the ever-evolving selection of new and used books, and say hi to Alex! Who knows what you might find, or what might find you. 

  • Shy

    As a child, I was constantly told by family and my parents’ friends that I was shy. Children live up to the names they’re called and I did just that. I would hide behind my mother’s leg, too “shy” to interact with anyone I didn’t know. There are many pictures of me tucked under her, my face buried behind her back. Every time I was characterized as shy, I took hold of the label as my shield, which protected me from the harsh world I didn’t understand. I didn’t develop outwardly. I turned completely inward, unable to make friends, which isolated me even more in my timidity. In the wake of extremely outgoing parents, I was allowed to drown in my shyness and stay hidden from the world. In retrospect, the label kept me safe for a time. I never had to discuss the turmoil in my life. I learned to dissect and process my pain alone through storytelling in my mind.

    The brutality of middle school commenced when I was too young to understand how puberty can render adolescents cruel. I was barely 10 years old. I skipped a grade, started school early, and was far from the changes of physical maturity. I struggled to stay out of the line of fire, but my peers were relentless in their pursuit to destroy each other, and I was a walking target. I was small for my age, played the flute in band, played tennis, and took all advanced classes. I was the quintessential “nerd.” Kids would ask, “Why don’t you talk?” and follow up with, “She’s so weird.” I retreated into my music, my shyness, practicing hours a day to avoid contact with others. It was a place I could express myself, something I longed to do, but with it, came more name-calling. Kids screamed “music geek” while pushing me into lockers.

    I could not hide in music the entire day. I still had to walk the middle school hallways to class, and the kids appeared to have a mission—to prove they could get to me. “Wolfgang” came next. My leg and arm hair was jet black and super thick against my tiny frame and olive skin. A girl in my class made the comparison to Teen Wolf and was determined to spread the word. I wished I were anyone but myself, that I could look like anyone but me. I’d search my body, my face, for a redeeming quality with no success. I despised my hair. Now, my jet-black mane that reaches my waist is a defining characteristic—but back then, it was the bane of my existence. Her words tore my self-esteem to shreds. 

    When “Wolfgang” lost its effect on me, they added “flat-chested” to further the insult. Everyone was developing, but I was two years younger than most people in my grade. The kids didn’t care about biology. One time, a girl in my class picked up a book from a wet, muddy bench and wiped the soiled cover down the front of my new shirt as I walked by. She said coolly, “I needed somewhere flat to wipe my book.” As everyone in the lunch area laughed and pointed, I ran to the bathroom crying and attempted to clean myself, furiously wiping at the mud—but no amount of water, pink hand soap, or stiff paper towels could wash away the anguish I wore every day. I looked in the mirror and labeled myself: “small, meek, and ugly.” My own body furthered my ridicule and made me hate that girl in the mirror for the tears she cried. Most days I found places to hide from the cruelty and name-calling that never ended. My armor, my well-chronicled “shyness,” permitted me to withdraw from everyone, even family. I felt degraded and worthless from the names I was called for a long time. 

    Life changed the summer I turned 15. I visited family out of town and returned a full seven inches taller than when summer began. I walked into my junior year and wasn’t so small anymore. I quit the band and orchestra. Boys started to notice me. I wore make-up, my hair was styled. I wore different clothes, but I wasn’t different. I still looked in the mirror and heard the names: 

    “Ugly.” 

    “Weird.” 

    “Lanky.”

    “Flat-chested Wolfgang.”

    “Shy.” 

    These names invaded my mind and left little bits of debris in my psyche.

    Many years passed before I could fully process that part of my youth, and I still struggle with body dysmorphia when I’m stressed. 

    When I had three daughters, my anxiety swelled. Would they endure the same treatment in school? It led me to prepare them, maybe too much. I recounted the many ways I was bullied. I warned them about the consequences of bullying. I avoided labeling them, especially as “shy.” I felt it was the gateway word to allowing name-calling. I never called my daughters descriptive names other than positive ones: “smart,” “kind,” “generous,” “caring,” or “wonderful.” I replaced “shy” with “you just haven’t learned how to talk with new friends yet, but I know you will get there.” I didn’t want their personalities to be forgone conclusions because of traits they may have exhibited as little ones. My girls were the impetus for healing my wounded heart and freeing myself from awful labels. 

    I looked in the mirror, while holding my three daughters, and called myself  “Mom.” I told myself I was “strong.” I didn’t need to hold onto those labels from my middle-school peers as a life sentence. I am able to live outside the box I was put in, to live in my own world. Am I shy? 

    No, I am not shy at all. No, I am not the name you called me. I am the name I call myself.