Our glory is infinite
Our creativity a nourishing staple
We’re satiate by our soul sharing
Elevated by a simple passing nod of “I see you as a whole person”
Look at the many crystalized ways we keep showing up
Weaving our hands through walls that we’ve made climbable
Rough textures brushing us awake
Yeah, we alert
Code our passage until the rest we step back into
Eases in a dance of trusting and move to uncensored embraces
If you put your four eyes and my four eyes together we would have eight. Eight is not a dozen but it’s not just one. It’s enough sight to hide our shock that Shayla did the dirty deed on her grandmother’s good couch. She told us that the cover on the settee rubbed her rump raw when he started to rock into her. We were thirteen but we couldn’t see that we were too young for plastic rendezvous.
The mall was our office. We would show up on time and regular to the candy shop and the store that sold slutty club tops. We would suck on hard jawbreakers with a twelve-dollar top covered by our coats because, even if neither of our mothers were in close proximity, they would sense that our skin had been exposed when we got home. We both suffered from close mothers. The kind that knew your shoe was about to get untied while it was still knotted. This did not stop us from taking the cusp of our womanhood for ourselves. They obviously had had us. They weren’t telling us how we were supposed to get from here in the mall to the house with the rose bushes on Shelley Drive.
I remember our folded notes. I know now they were the love letters that I was waiting for from Darren or Chris, whatever knobble-headed boy that gave me that feeling in my eardrums that thunder could not get in if I tried. You were not afraid to tell me that you loved me even if my mother had bought my shoes two sizes too large. When I read them, I wonder where all those feelings have gone. If someone today would ask me to write how I felt about anything, I would use big words to cover up what feels like a whole lot of nothing. Our adult minds will tell us it is because of all those teenage hormones but I think it is just because we have to explain this shadow dancing that we call life.
When my dad got a new job and we had to move I thought we would show how made up miles and maps could be. There were no real lines separating North Carolina and Virginia. But on my first visit back the summer after the move, I found out you were dating Darren or Chris, whatever pointy-boned boy that had given me a feeling of sweating on the inside. I was upset with you. You locked yourself in the bathroom for two hours. You were the first person to show me the bathroom is the only true place someone can be alone in the world without anyone questioning it. When you came out of the bathroom you were different. You were hard and fast with your explanation of how Darren or Chris came to be. I was not even here anymore. You needed someone to love but not in a couch-taking kind of way. You explained that all you and Darren or Chris ever did was go to the mall, go to the candy shop and visit the store with slutty club tops staying only long enough for a jawbreaker to break down to a sugary little pill.
“Are you mad?” Arjun chuckled, rolling his shoulders into the back of the sofa.
“It’s the anniversary gift I want,” Jyoti said, tossing the hedge shears onto the coffee table. The Japanese steel gleamed under the lamp. She had only asked the minimum of Arjun, one simple favor any self-respecting, human Londoner would do for their well-deserving, endlessly supportive partner. Kill the alien who moved into the flat upstairs.
Jyoti watched every BBC news segment about the alien murders and the response from Scotland Yard. Many people had been doing it lately, from school librarians in Istanbul to your average stock market hacker on the Central Tube line. There were tutorials on TikTok and subreddits with alien autopsy diagrams and tricks to not get caught. She read the message boards late into the evening, liking the posts recommending tarps and tools and reporting posters asking for mercy and integration with the blue creatures. It really seemed no different from Arjun shopping at the village market, except he might need laundry detergent to clean the entrails from his locs.
Jyoti had been watching, well, stalking, her prey for just over a fortnight. She couldn’t take it anymore – the alien’s smug, beluga-like face when it entered the building, nor the scent its spongey-blue skin would leave in the elevator and hallways. Her chest stiffened with hate each time she shared a small pleasantry, “Morning,” and heard the cheerful, “G’day” in response. An Aussie? In Brixton? Worst of all, it wore a hat and trench, Burberry of course, and its appendage made the coat pop out like a tent around its pelvis. One evening, after a particularly stressful day of resolving the incompetence of her coworkers, Jyoti narrowly made it to the elevator to see the appendage sticking out through a gap in the small brown buttons. It looked like a shameless, shriveled penis jutting its way into everyone’s lives, safe spaces, and sanities. She narrowly made it to the hall and vomited across the entry to her apartment.
If Arjun truly loved her, she’d have an alien carcass on her couch in time for their anniversary dinner next week. Other women would ask for a grand wedding or an all-inclusive holiday in the Maldives. Jyoti wasn’t asking him for much. That creature had to go.
contracting
not just literally
bodies that attempt to interface
with mine
finding out the responses
to naming what i am
responsible to
picking up things that cannot be put back down
masking a performance that i’m comfortable with
it’s not moving my heavenly body in a way
that garners too much attention
playing the wall that now helps me stand fully
my family always comments on my posture
my forces of nature adjust my shoulders for me
they are my antidote to
the contempt
the judgement
the misplaced rage
the hunger
that is placed on my personhood
my femininity
like a chiropractic realignment
there’s a stirring in my soul
a voice that is a myriad of tones
reminding me of my own
it has a mixture of sea salt and clay
speaking of permission to be
to be expansive
to be bold
to be rich in my pitch
they implore me not to limit myself
they invite me to soften
they courage me to let folks in
or even worship
dote on me
love on me
a sensation of care that is not pretentious
it is seen when i feel seen
in all that i am
all that walk with me
a kiss on the top of my crown
an affirmation of my spirit that is not transactional
a sense that i can swing and sweep on a dancefloor when i hear that song
a dispatch from Io, adjacent to Jupiter
that reminds me that
I am indeed worthy
of such exaltation that does not alienate me
instead allowing me
to fumble and be nuanced
receive and take
love and be loved
an illness of half truths
misguided projections
and assumptions
can only take root in my psyche and bodies
if i grant it permission.
She grazes my neck
“You know you had a hernia when you were two years old. I was so scared. They wanted to operate on you but you got a fever, so I took you from there. Your belly-button went down good.” That was over 30 years ago and she still reminds me from time to time. And I let her.
On my grandmother’s sewing machine.
She tells me the first and last time my grandfather attempted to hit her. She stabbed him. Then nursed his wounds. And that was that.
On my grandmother’s sewing machine, the beaded curtain sways in the breeze as if in harmony with the buzz of the bobbin.
“Get down from there!” It was too late. I fell straight on my face. I climbed directly across my grandmother’s sewing machine, over her napping head, found my footing and then lost it right on top of that TV.
The tiles were mismatched in the room where my grandmother’s sewing machine is. The tables are wooden. The shutters are frosted glass. The sofa is plastic. The cup is tin. The fan creaks. After the water comes in after 4am and goes out at 11pm, the faucet still leaks. My grandfather is gone. I call for her to throw down the keys. I find her sitting at her sewing machine.
Trimming the ends of the long finger like stems
I cut a 45 degree angle above the knuckle
The new ache oozes sap stored in the base of the stem
I toss the dismembered
piece and cut the friends one by one.
The precut thorns do no damage between my money grab fingers
I read somewhere that plants scream when you cut them
I often wonder if the other plants in my home understand just
How dying things look beautiful on my living room table.
you used to call me when you got to work to say hello even though you just left my bed a half hour ago. that was the beginning of a new, the new, when birds continually sang, the sun always shined at night.
my heart raced with me when I would run into target on the way home from work to pick up a pink top, because people say I look good in pink. so, I figured, you would say the same thing. I would smile leaping back into my car, thinking about how your lips would part as you said “I love you in this.” and you would put your hand at the small of my back and coax me to you and we would dance to our music in the kitchen while the chicken was frying and the biscuits were rising. right then I knew that pink was your favorite color too.
as part of our dessert, you would take me for a ride in your 1982 four-door blue volvo. it was always breezy on those hot summer nights. the car windows would be down, our heads leaning back in laughter. no care in the world. no care in the world.
While we keke and skip along the sidewalk, we stumble across something resembling a sandbox, but instead, is filled with this dark substance that favors cookie dough crumble. It is brown with white speckles, green sprouts, and cold, moist worms poking their heads out, groping for air. Intrigued, we approach what we end up calling the dirt box, and agree that we would play in it in a way that is familiar to us. Curiously. Intimately. We sit in the dirt box with our legs folded, reach our hands in, and find out that the topsoil is the most malleable — easy to grab, but hard to hold. It races through the spaces between our fingers to return to its home but leaves our hands slightly blackened like mama’s Sunday sizzling tiger shrimp. We flip our hands over like pancakes and examine the remains. Puzzled, we take handfuls of the dirt again, and again, and again, and realize that each time we do so, our hands become more stained, more soiled than the last time. We realize, unlike sand, dirt tracks of all the places it resided. We now had ten miniature dirt beds packed beneath our nails, forming new homes, housing our curious nature, and deepening our intimacy.
You too young to be here
Snaggle-toothed
God messenger
Brown, round, little-bit
You goodwill shopping
Blue ring around your mouth
Scared of heights no-more
You friendship bracelet
Business woman
Pop star emerging
Back of the bus riding
Take-no-shit-er
Trading Post couponer
Talking until
The battery of your
Hand-me-down Nokia
Burns hot as the sun
Little Brown Girl
They’ll call me when you’re not there
And I’ll pretend we’re sisters
Suspend the disbelief that this much
Cheetahliciousness, could happen twice
In the same universe
We’ll write each other’s names over our hearts
Save each other from sharks in the pool
Laugh this hurt off our bones
I never got the chance
To say goodbye to you but
I hope your laughing now
Somewhere nestled in the sheets
Of your california king
The one you always wanted
Planning to send me flowers
After your first big movie deal
Isaac closed his eyes and, within moments, had fallen asleep deep into a world that was surrounded by utter darkness. It is in that limbo realm between reality and his imagination that he found a space where nothing mattered, and nothing existed. In this world, he worried not about what comes for tomorrow or the day after. Nor did he have to put on this facade that he constantly carried around when he was awake. Here, in the midst of darkness, he was just himself.
But still, he had a complicated relationship with this dark and silent world. For it is in this world that he feels a step closer to God himself. While lying there, he often wonders if the peaceful feeling he is experiencing is the same feeling God had when he created the universe. There God sat in the midst of a darkness that moved upon the face of the deep. And with the snap of his fingers, he created life. How powerful that must have been to make something out of nothing. Sometimes Isaac could sense that power near him. Whenever he did, he got a yearning to dig down and confess to God his deepest and darkest secrets. But what held him back from opening up his scars to his creator is revealing what that creator may already know to be true. After, God is all-knowing. So maybe this darkness that Isaac has found solitude in isn’t all he has cracked it up to be. Could it be possible that he had used it only as a temporary place to foolishly convince himself that he had discovered the ability to hide from the one who knew him before he even knew himself? Had Isaac become like Adam and Eve when they also foolishly thought they could hide in the garden? Perhaps he was nothing more than a coward that constantly evaded the pressures from the outside world and only desired for the sun to go down and for the bodies that lurk around him to fall asleep.
Isaac knows that there is truth in all of this, but something about this empty space still calms the frightened spirit inside his body. It’s as if he was fallen in love with the quiet darkness, for it understands and knows everything about him without saying a word. It’s healing. It’s calm. It touches him in a way a woman never has, for it knows that Isaac is angry. Isaac is conflicted. He is sad. He is empty of joy yet full of regret. More than anything, he wishes to bow down and confess his sins but fears he would only do it again when he was back in reality. In the real world, he is lost, but he has found a glimpse of peace in the darkness.