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The two-seater Toyota truck rushed through the darkness of early morning in Fayetteville, N.C. We were on our way to the hospital on Fort Bragg’s Army base. My pain made sitting up monumental, whimpering inevitable. I was aware of every centimeter of my body and yet, somehow, also entirely outside of myself. God, it hurt.
Read More“Did she really say that?” I was shocked, yet I wasn’t. There was a strange quality to my awareness those days, like the water coming to shore and retreating again. I was listening to myself through insubstantial headphones, muted and tilted slightly.
My mama nodded. She kept tinkering about the kitchen, pressing the button on the coffee machine and side-stepping back to the sink. I watched her in silence for long moments, dangling my feet from the bar stool with the nervous energy that took hold of me while I was mulling over my grandmother’s statement.
Read MoreMy eventual honesty with Mama started with a Laura Ashley comforter. I was going away for the summer after 10th grade as a dance major at the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program and could decorate a space entirely for myself. I envisioned decorating my side of the college dormitory in all Laura Ashley, as I had seen in the J.C. Penny catalog with matching floral bedding and draperies. I wanted to have matching things like that, not like my bedroom at home with homemade curtains and a white-painted desk that Daddy built. I decided that a thick, floral, luxurious Laura Ashley comforter would be my official welcome to adulthood, one that smelled sweet and felt cool to the touch.
Read MoreOn the day that you, fifteen, tell your mother you are sorry for saying words that hurt her, you will stand on the bottom tread but one of the hush-carpeted stairs that run through the middle of the two-story house. She will stand in the doorway to the blue dining room, which leads to the kitchen from which you’ve called her. She will furrow her brow, tilt her head, and say Thank you for saying that, then look down and wring her hands, or maybe a kitchen towel. Next, not meeting your eyes, she will heft a hurt into the air, heavy under the weight of double negative: This doesn’t mean you’re not still grounded.
Read MoreWe had a plan: if it happened at home, ostensibly in our bathroom toilet, because we were optimists even in the midst of that personal tragedy, I would not try to retrieve the fetus. Our midwife had suggested that we could have a ceremony, but that didn’t feel right for us. We were sad, collectively, often in entirely different ways, but we didn’t feel
particularly in need of a ritual. Instead, I would just flush it, send it away, a subterranean passage between what we had imagined and what was actually happening, the unlikely closure we needed. I am a girl who knows how to stick to a plan. And so I did.
Fear squeezes me into a sieve of silence. My ears defy the tv’s sounds and the Loud Mouth’s babble. The fluorescent lights are too bright. I can see every dirty scuff mark on the yellowing tile. How long do we sit here? My eyes have been on the floor but I glance up to see Loud Mouth’s face tilted in my direction, her tongue and lips flapping. She is talking to me. She is asking a question. Her words stretch like tendrils of flame across the room. They lick my ears, jolting my cochlea into submission.
Read MoreThere’s a phrase I use to utter at parties in my 20s to make people laugh: Chuck Norris touched me inappropriately. Chuck Norris touched me inappropriately, I would say, with a twinkle in my eyes, a raise of my eyebrow, and a seductive grin, begging my friends to ask for more details.
Read MoreI feel animal. My whole body runs hot, with a fever. I am bent over, crouched. I am feral. I could scratch at any moment. I shit constantly. Blood runs between my legs. I am sweating. I feel everything, swelling. I want a cave to crawl in. To die in.
Read MoreA patch of muddied red clings to the bright yellow cloth. Its died cotton expanse proven
durable through the years. Threads coil from green trim, an accidental tassel that continues to
unwind despite sharp tugging. The cloth molds nicely to my body, telling of consistent wear, yet
the double-stitch lining suggests its continued usefulness.
My period and I had spent 8-years apart, ever since my first IUD. In truth, I hadn’t thought about it much. And I didn’t know then but in less than a week I would be reunited with both my period and a forgotten feeling.
Read MoreI don’t get my period.
I’m not sick. I’m not pregnant. I’m not taking birth control. Its stoppage was simply brought on by my gender.
I am a man. A man who used to get periods before I started hormone replacement therapy.
Read MoreI don’t even know if I can call what happens a period. Period suggests a finite amount of time, a decisive ending, a stop. And so I suppose that if I interpret the meaning as stopping the blood that continues to leak, unabated, from my uterus, with every major break-up, then yes, it’s my period, but my period on steroids, an energizer bunny of a period, a veritable river so robust I can never fathom where it is all coming from.
Read MoreOn the day of my best friend’s funeral, I received a friendly text from a colleague asking how I was enjoying my summer. Not knowing I was in despair, I did not want to distress them. So, I replied with a number of clichéd nautical terms. I felt like a ship without an anchor. I was lost at sea, set adrift. This proximity to water, without the sight of land, creates disorientation and resignation. My early grief came with a strange apathy born from a newfound loneliness and struggle. Will power and the habit of duty kept me tethered to the deck. I hoped I was not at risk of falling overboard. I am not a strong swimmer.
Read MoreWhen I sent Karen the picture of the great blue heron that had sidled up to me as I sat reading on the beach, she did not yet know that she would die soon. Of course, neither did I. She was sick, and her illnesses were frequent and never satisfactorily explained, but we still believed they would be cured, that someone would figure them out and apply the right treatment.
Read MoreWeek thirteen of pregnancy I began spooning a serpentine pillow that my husband, Caleb, gave me. Uncoiled, it stretched from my feet to my face and took the pressure off my hips and chest. I was thirty-five-years old, and although Nurse Becky labelled me “a geriatric mother” at my pap smear appointment, I felt on time to motherhood. At this pace I could have a pair of children before I turned forty: a pepper for the table salt.
Read MoreFucking first times, my therapist calls them. First holidays, significant occasions, anniversary of the death. The first time after you’ve lost someone, lost a child. It caught me off guard the first year, things that I didn’t expect took me to my knees. Easter, why did that leave me weeping, lashing out at everyone, feeling like a horrible failure? We weren’t religious and even if we were, Nel was most certainly not. She’d called me from prison the last Easter she was alive, Happy Easter! I tried to chirp at her. She stopped me mid-happy.
Read MoreA / Anyone
You want to become anyone, a head placed on any random body. At the county fair, faces from the crowd fill the cut-outs where heads of farmers or cows should be. The souvenir photograph, a reminder of a new identity. You want to go into witness protection, become someone else, anyone else, an image the mirror recognizes. This is normal.
Read More“Hello,” I said holding the phone to my ear as I walked into the master bedroom, shutting the door behind me to drown out the sounds of the boys wrestling in the living room. I answered even though I didn’t recognize the number. I had assumed it was either the NICU or the funeral home and as much as I was dreading those calls, I wanted to get them over with.
Read More06.25.2022
Umma understands one out of three of my poems. This is why she declares I sound like a poet. I read Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her before I gave up on art, small girl of ten brimming with precious audacity not yet oxidized by sharp gust of outside air; recited Jabberwocky in a basement, sang Maya Angelou over the counter of an addressless existence. As long as we had no house, I could not be contained. But I gave up on art when I got my first room, blunt molasses space concretizer of reality, snuffer of dreams. Word became flesh and I hated mine, blunt molasses block of pound. What words could soften the thud of me hitting air?
Read MoreMy first widows’ picnic is where I learned that having partner loss in common is enough to bridge gaps of religion, politics, age, language, and more. Since then, I have hugged and cried with people whose names I don’t know, whose language I don’t speak, whose paths will probably never again cross mine. There are widowed people I hardly know except for how they lost their person.
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