5/30/2022 0 Comments Poetry by Joanna Grant Peter Corbett CC
Spanish Moss for my father Where we buried you, there by the Sound, the live oaks bent under the weight of their years, Spanish moss draping the gnarled, grey boughs—so much tatty old lace, as I thought at the time, and every frond and tendril a haven for something that stings or bites. A fit enough place for you, or so I thought at the time. None of that old moss for me—this stone was going to roll, roll, far, far away from here, as far, as fast, as forever. Now I live on the other side of the world, a desert where hardly anything grows, just date palms, acacia, and memory. As if I could not just see, but could hear, taste, feel—the silvery wavelets lapping the grassy verge by the stone graveyard wall, salt in the air, on my skin, drops gathering, slipping, dripping down my temples, down the knots of my spine. At random, I read now that the Spanish moss I remember is called sphagnum, its real name I’ve never heard of before, and that, no, its little grey fronds offer no shelter to the ticks or the chiggers that burrow beneath the skin. What else might there be for me to unlearn? I reimagine it now, reimagine it all—the waves, the wall, a heron searching the shallows on its spindly greyblue legs, the croaks of bullfrogs in their season, keeping you company, calming your unquiet mind. Now, I’ve had long enough to learn. People are what they are, not what you want, you need them to be. Bur, buried as you are in the midst of my reimaginings, well, maybe you can change. No doubt a fantasy, but still, but still. To live in this world, even if I have to make parts of it up, I have, I have to find something in it, something in you, to love. Joanna Grant holds a Ph.D. in British and American literature, specializing in fictional as well as nonfiction travel narratives of the Middle East. She spent eight years in that region, notably two years in Afghanistan, teaching writing, mythology, and public speaking classes to American soldiers and gathering materials for her own memoir, which she is currently completing as part of an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Southern New Hampshire University under the direction of Mark Sundeen. Her poetry and prose have appeared widely in journals including Guernica and Prairie Schooner.
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SO BRAVE I held my breath like a Christmas tree Before it’s cut down on that sacred eve All I wanted was to never be found So I would never make one single sound I held my breath like a lullaby Perched in a branch just a little too high All I wanted was to sing I was too afraid of so many things The birds they’ll take it all away Every hurt that you’ve ever sustained Now you’re riding that tidal wave just trying to be so brave Held my breath like a flickering flame Underneath the thunder storms and the rain All I wanted was to kiss the sky But I was too afraid that I might die The birds they’ll take it all away Everything that made you so afraid And now you’re riding that tidal wave Just trying to be so brave But every breath that I never take and every time I made a little mistake Oh I was dying just trying to be I Held my breath like a butterfly’s wings Sewn together by a little string All I wanted was to fly away I was too afraid so I stayed The birds they fly everyday No matter what anyone says And I’m going to be just like those birds Just you wait and see HOPE Please give me just a few minutes to feel all that I do. I promise after that I’ll let it all fall away, I’ll not bleed all over you Cause I feel everything around me It’s not from what I see or hear My heart only knows when it’s hurting And how to shed these tears I’ve heard it’s not the best thing for my disposition And perhaps I should build me a wall No matter how hard I try to do that The tears continue to fall So I’ll give a piece of my heart to the sky I’ll give a piece to the sea I’ll give a piece of my heart to the mountains And save a piece for the forest and the trees My gift it is my brokeness For then I have more to share And pieces of a heart can be mended It is the hope of humanities despair It is the hope my heart is feeling Look at the sun how it shines It is the hope my heart’s revealing Look at the moon beneath it’s veils in the sky
An award winning Santa Fe-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Martha Reich has performed around the world and shared stages with Melissa Crabtree, Consuelo Luz, Gregg Braden, Reverend Horton Heat and others, as well as opening for Kate Macleod and performing at the Sundance Film Festival. Originally from New England, she received a B. F. A. in illustration from Parsons School of Design and Philadelphia College of Art, but music called and she relocated to Santa Fe in 1999 where she has since released five CDs including the award winning album entitled BRAVE BIRD.
Her 2018 release, BRAVE BIRD, was described as “stunning and heartbreaking” by Americana Highways and earned her a Gold Medal for Female Vocalist in the 2018 Global Music Awards, as well as the LA Critics Award for Best Folk Artist. Often compared to Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez, Reich is deeply inspired by nature and her unique style features an honesty and vulnerability that evokes “a sound almost woven out of the earth.” Reich won the 2019 New Mexico Music Award for Best Singer-Songwriter Song ‘FADE AWAY’ and a Clouzine international Music Award for Best Indie Album 'BRAVE BIRD'. She previously won Global Music Awards in 2017 and 2016, The Southwest Independent Music Award in 2015 and a 2014 New Mexico Music Award for Best Folk Song. Martha is also a Certified Music Practitioner, playing for Hospital patients, those in Hospice and people living with Alzheimer's and Cancer. Her music can be heard on PANDORA Radio as well as national and international radio stations. It is available via iTunes, Spotify, and her website: www.marthareich.com telemal CC No one asks how old a seashell is? “Please don’t suggest anything, like for me to volunteer as a pink lady or to seek psychiatric help.” –Lucia Berlin Upholstered and isolated, food is canned and repressed, but beverages corner the caged scars of summer. I suck the marrow out of bottles. Today the kid has friends over, ravenous for anything. All pithy dimples, luster and mutiny, they’re a line-up of grenades on the couch. Wish there was a beta-blocker between me and them, but the goddamn medicine cabinet is gaping dusty rings around the thirty-day supply that used to showcase there. Expired insurance crumbles time into missed appointments that smirk. Walmart shopped me yesterday and bless the vodka in bulk that ended up in my bag. I crank shots in the pantry. “How’s your mom, dad”, I rat-a-tat-tat without recognition of who is who. Four boys launch into can we just slam the door on this bullshit, singing, “Good,” “Good,” “Good,” “Good,” as I stare through the tangled fidgetry of their captivity. They wait for me to bludgeon them with parental bleating. Jacked-up teenagers hounded by adults who don’t give a shit about them is mirrored in their demeanor. Not only am I not that brand of parent, but bullet swigs deepen a need to plumb the surly taste of any boy who finds himself stranger to his body. The bloated intruder and dewy ingenue of myself paints potency of malleable flesh into a softer shade of a telescope gone wrong side up. The more I drink, the faster calendars unhinge from their years. Blossoms fluent in Spring magnify and hone in on my ripening cheeks. “Any of you boys care to get drunk?” Meg Tuite’s latest collection is ‘WHITE VAN”. She is author of five story collections and five chapbooks. She won the Twin Antlers Poetry award for her poetry collection, Bare Bulbs Swinging and is included in Best of Small Press 2021. She teaches writing retreats and online classes hosted by Bending Genres. She is also the fiction editor of Bending Genres and associate editor at Narrative Magazine. http://megtuite.com 5/30/2022 0 Comments Bury Me Naked by Jordan Dilley Christopher Sessums CC Bury Me Naked Sandra is still dying when Mom catches me with my hand under the vending machine scraping the grimy floor for an errant quarter. If I was younger, she would pull me up by the arm that isn’t raking dust bunnies searching for that cold metal chance at a Twix. But we all get less pliable as we grow older, and she can’t risk it. The way everyone is talking, Sandra doesn’t stand a chance. No one even mentions getting on the transplant list. No pristine twenty-year-old motorcycle accident lungs for her. Thirty years of that sexy nicotine exhale (woosh), first while joyriding in their brother’s Camaro, later while spritzing the lawn in the blaring summer heat and cussing out the neighbor’s dog who does his own spritzing, earns her zero pity. Not from the doctors that check her charts and update us, not from Mom who’s always reminded me that Sandra is my half-aunt, a love-child her father had with a woman he met in Los Angeles before she was born. The way she’s always told it, Sandra was the reason her father and mother divorced, her physicality more damning than his infidelity. I rise from the floor, sans quarter, and drift into the waiting room where out-of-town aunts and uncles are debating the merits of casket liners and what dress Sandra should be buried in. Sandra is still alive, still breathing without a machine, still able (sometimes) to recognize me when I hesitate on the doorstep, afraid of disturbing the room’s antiseptic sheen. I open my mouth to remind them that her lungs, despite the cancer, still fill with air, when one of my uncles brings up the fact that Sandra has never been baptized. I look up and see my own confusion expressed in the faces of my family. He is a minister of the dunking, not the spritzing variety. “Harold…” my dad sighs. I wonder if, like me, he is trying to work out the mechanics. How do you completely submerge a cancer patient without drowning, or sending them into shock? An image of a crane lowering Sandra in her hospital bed into the pool at the YMCA flits through my mind. Her hospital gown would blouse out in the water causing an embarrassing situation. And is heaven really worth it if you have to show your tits to the entire family first? Everyone shifts uncomfortably, checks their watches, wonders how long they must keep vigil before sneaking off to the nearest Sizzler to drown their feelings in all-you-can-eat shrimp and a trip to the salad bar. One of Sandra’s doctors walks in, and they converge on him. He doesn’t bat an eye, barely raises them off his clipboard as he mumbles responses to their questions. He says things like palliative care and pain management and my relatives respond in hushed tones. Feeling more an accessory than participant, I go to visit Sandra. Like most days since she came to the emergency room complaining of chest pain, she incorrectly attributed to a heart attack, Sandra is asleep. I study her chest, hold my breath until I see it rise under the beige hospital blanket. I should just trust the machines that count every heartbeat, every breath she has left, but I need to see the rise, wait out the terrifying pause, until her chest sinks under the blanket. The mop of blond hair (still there because chemo was pointless by the time they caught her cancer) rustles across the pillow and Sandra opens one glassy eye to stare at me. This is the worst moment of my visits, the liminal space I seem to occupy while she decides if I’m her niece or an opium induced vision. I remind myself to just be grateful she can still differentiate between the two. She twitches the blanket away from the edge of the bed and pats a spot next to her legs. I drag a chair next to the bed instead. Though her face registers disappoint, I can’t bring myself to sit on the bed. Despite the layers of denim, blanket, sheet, and hospital gown, the thought of our legs and hips touching makes me uncomfortable in a way I can’t articulate. Years later, when Mom drags me to change the flowers at her graveside, I’ll wonder if it was Sandra’s fragility in those final days, or some primal repulsion to the sick and weakest among us that stopped me sitting thigh to thigh with her. To make up for my reticence, I take her bony hand in mine and gently squeeze it. Sandra stares at me, then at the door, then at me again. “Tell it to me straight,” she croaks, “what are the hens squawking about now?” I follow her eyes toward the door as if I can see through all the walls separating us from the waiting room. “How they’re going to bury you,” I finally say, relaxing. # The first time I met Sandra, a sticky summer night, the fumes of BBQ sinking into our clothes, she walked up to me and with a lopsided grin asked, “Where’ve you been all my life?” before dragging me to a table loaded with hamburgers and hotdogs. Mom trailed behind us, eyeing the beer in Sandra’s hand, lips pursed every time she wobbled on her espadrilles. When Sandra whipped the turquoise bucket hat my mom had purchased on-sale from Macys off my head and replaced it with her own straw-hat, Mom intervened. “She needs sun protection,” she said, throwing her arm toward the sky where the late-afternoon summer sun was blaring. Sandra sighed, regarded Mom as if it took all her patience when she said, “And a wide-brimmed hat is better for that.” Sandra in her cut-off jean shorts, her cropped hair, her unmarried state even at forty. Mom said something under her breath that sounded like hike or bike. # Sandra smacks her lips. I hold her water cup in front of her, position the bendy straw between her dry lips. “Hole—me—dirt on top. Doesn’t need to be more complicated than that,” she says after she takes a drink. I nod. It’s a simpler idea than Harold’s suggestion, anyways. “How do you want your body disposed of when the time comes?” she asks, interrupting my second attempt to understand the mechanics of immersion baptism on the bed ridden. “Uhh, well—” “Never thought about it probably,” she says with a look that could be approval or jealousy. Though the fact is, I have. Well before Sandra came to the hospital, before the doctor showed us her scans, doing his best to be sympathetic in a situation that for him was routine, I’d thought about my corpse. The easiest, most familiar way, demonstrated by one grandmother and a cousin with a drug problem, saw me comfortably nestled in a white satin lined coffin, flanked by sprays of lilies. The organist would play songs I didn’t like, and some machine would lower the coffin into the ground as my relatives stumbled away from my plot to sliced casserole and pie. Recently, I’d entertained the idea of cremation, but ultimately couldn’t reconcile myself to it. Sandra was right, just chuck me in the ground with enough dirt on top to keep animals from eating me. “Just don’t let them church mine up too much,” Sandra says, referring, I know, to Harold. For years, she’s sent him into self-righteous tizzies with her agnostic skepticism. Maybe there’s an all-powerful God who is equal parts loving savior and whirlwind of swift destruction, maybe not. Prove it, she always tells him. I mumble something incoherent, knowing my power to effect change in our family is nil. I don’t even get to pick the restaurant we eat our feelings at after these visits. I hate shrimp and feel so-so on salad. Sandra’s hand leaves mine, trembles toward her mouth as one of the fits that wracks her body sets in. A pair of nurses rush in and hoist Sandra into a sitting position as she fights to breathe. They shoo me into the hall and close the door. I’m about to protest, the fear that this is the last time I’ll see Sandra making my heart palpitate, when Mom spots me. “Finally,” she says. She has her coat buttoned up and her purse slung around her shoulder. “I’ve been looking for you all over this place.” Sandra’s room is now silent, and she gives the door a perfunctory nod before hauling me to the parking garage. # Later, I’m shivering next to cooled mounds of cantaloupe and pineapple, hidden compressors preventing them from sweating juice. I pretend the congealed splatters of salad dressing near the lettuce bowl isn’t a reflection of the restaurant’s cleanliness. Baked potatoes steam from foil and the grease from fried shrimp glistens in the lamplight where two tables have been pushed together to accommodate our family. The arrangements debate has petered out, everyone silently agreeing to ignore Sandra’s wishes and to stick with the casket and maudlin ceremony they know. I slide my plate of fruit and French fries next to a platter of discarded shrimp tails. They’re reminiscing about Sandra as if she’s already dead. I want to tell them about the conversation we just had, less than an hour ago, but I just keep shoveling lukewarm French fries into my mouth. “Did you know she drove that car all the way to Florida one summer, just because?” Mom asked the group at large. I’ve heard this story before. After her first and only year in college, Sandra drove by herself to Florida in a beat-up Checker she bought for one-hundred dollars. There she learned to surf, and the joys of ingesting what she had only dared smoke in the garage before. “And she took up with that Hispanic fellow that tried to get her to move to Puerto Rico with him,” she continues to a round of sympathetic head shaking. That part isn’t right. I know because after the first time I heard the story, I asked Sandra if she would have moved to Puerto Rico. “Oh God, no,” she’d replied as we sat on her back porch, her chain-smoking Pall Malls, me shot-gunning Whoppers. “Juan asked me to go after his father died. He had to move back to look after his mother and sisters. But there was no way in hell I was going to spend the rest of my life frying plantains and fetching his mom when she wandered into the neighbor’s yard.” She’d shivered after that, even though the day was warm, the moisture evaporating where our bare feet touched the concrete. It was obvious what a close call she had considered Juan’s request, because shortly after he left for Puerto Rico, she started saving all her tips from her waitress job at a fancy seafood restaurant and began investing in condos. She paid close attention to market trends in the area and pulled all her money before the cycle went bust. The family had never forgiven her for returning in the 80s driving a Cadillac and paying cash for a brand-new house with premium wall-to-wall. A few fries, soggy with melon juice, remain on my plate when the waitress comes by with the check and to remove the platter of shrimp tails. When we get home, the answering machine is blinking. Finally, because no one else will, I push the play button. It’s a message from the hospital. While our family was putting Sizzler’s all-you-can-eat policy to the test, Sandra died. Passed away is how the doctors puts it, an innocuous term he follows up with respiratory failure. I hand the phone to Dad so he can make the necessary round of calls. Mom has the decency to eke out a couple of tears before steam-rolling Sandra’s requests for a fuss-free funeral. Florists, an organist, and a highly recommended funeral home are enlisted to make a good showing. I try to intervene in the following days, to insist that Sandra would prefer we give her money to charity and not spend it on a casket with rounded corners and a velvet interior. The extent of my efficacy is to have “In the Sweet By and By” knocked off the organist’s list. A poor epitaph, I think as we pull into the funeral home parking lot. Family, and a lot of Mom’s friends, are in the foyer signing a guest ledger and vying for whose trip had the worst traffic. A group of women, ensconced in layers of black and navy chiffon, surround Mom, and pat her shoulders while pressing fresh tissues on her even though her eyes are dry. They’re the type of women Sandra would never have had anything to do with. “Ninnies,” she called them. When once I asked what a ninny was, she told me to imagine a poodle trying to balance a checkbook. The whole thing is…overly sentimental, even by funeral standards. For the first time, I’m glad Sandra’s dead; at least she was saved witnessing this spectacle. Hardly anyone seems upset. Only one woman, sun-tanned and deeply wrinkled, holds a tissue to her eyes as her shoulders tremble. She’s sitting alone, and when I look at Mom to ask her who she is, I see that she too is staring at this stranger. Her lips are drawn together in a tight line and the muscles around her mouth are working though no sound escapes. I lean forward to see if Dad is aware of this silent demonstration. He shakes his head at me, as if he knows what I’m going to ask. After the service, I stand on the chapel steps as people shuffle out, waiting for the tanned woman. I finally spot her, billowy black trousers and oversized sunglasses against a backdrop of pantyhose and pencil skirts, oversized blazers and polished oxfords. I watch as she walks to a car with Florida license plates, too nervous to ask her if she knew Sandra and then watch her scramble to say something comforting when I tell her I was Sandra’s half-niece. She gives the chapel one last sweeping look before climbing into her two-seater and gunning the engine. I think she pauses as she takes one last look at the chapel—does she see me? Is there recognition in her gaze? Did she pause just a little too long as I balanced on my block heels? I’m still assessing the evidence over a plate of casserole and a smaller plate of pie and cookies in the fellowship hall of my uncle’s church while the flower arrangements from the funeral are divvied up among Mom’s friends. There’s a squabble over a vase of dark purple gladioli. Dad looks on from a small table, half eaten slice of pecan pie in front of him, the long day showing on his face. Other small tables of relatives watch as Mom emerges victorious, vase in hand. I decide to go for broke, to ignore Dad’s silent warning from earlier. “Who was that tanned woman in the sunglasses at Sandra’s funeral?” I ask Mom as she passes by my table. For a moment I worry she’ll drop the vase, that water and bits of glass will coat the floor and table and make my uneaten corn casserole and fruit pie a health hazard, but she doesn’t. She sets the vase on the table, pulls up a chair. “That woman was Sandra’s friend from Florida.” There’s an emphasis on the word friend, a sort of code that I’m supposed to understand. I halfway do, but in our town, at that time, I have little reference that isn’t wrapped up in layered innuendo. Carol and Susan have been married in front of Ross, Rachel, Joey, Chandler, Monica, and Phoebe, but it will be years until I watch a video-taped version when Mom and Dad are asleep. “After Juan, well before and after Juan, Sandra and she…” She shreds a pile of napkins, methodically, taking her time. I worry she’s forgotten what she was saying when she gets up. “Just be glad she didn’t stick around for the reception,” she says. The gladioli sit abandoned in front of me, purple blossoms beginning to wilt at the edges. Did Sandra even like gladioli? I never thought to ask, but I doubt it. Gladioli are effusive, their petals long and unfurling, forcing you to look deeper, to trace the path the pistil makes into the flower. Sandra was more like a marigold, vibrant, but not fussy. just chuck her in the ground, and cover her with some dirt. Jordan lives and writes in Washington. She has an MA in literature from the University of Utah. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Woven Tale, JMWW, Reunion: The Dallas Review, the Heavy Feather Review, and the Vassar Review as well as other publications. 5/30/2022 0 Comments May Something, 2021 by Mateo Omar Marcus Winter CC May Something, 2021 I pull up to the 7-Eleven and the guy in the car nearest me is facing forward passed out against his steering wheel; you can barely see him at first. I go in the store and I’m looking for something carbonated, so I guess a soda, preferably Sprite, cuz it doesn’t have caffeine. I pace up and down the aisle hoping it will magically appear. They have Sprite but it’s in plastic bottles. I’m not against them for environmental reasons, really I just think Sprite out of the can tastes infinitely better. Plus it reminds me of Spain, if you order soda at any restaurant there, they give it to you in a can, alongside a glass filled with some ice. And lastly I like the crisp sound it makes when I open it. So finally I settle on plastic bottle Sprite, but then out of protest to unseen forces, I grab one of Sprite’s competitor titles instead— you know: Sierra Mist, Squirt, Ginger Ale, etc. one of those. The cashier is scanning my Not Sprite and his gut is so large that he looks pregnant. He’s not obese either, just a very large gut under his white Gucci shirt that admittedly contrasts nicely with his dark South Asian skin. I ask for a pack of Camel Crush and he says “we’re closed,” and I say “what?” and it occurs to me that he thinks I was asking for spare change or for help or something and he’s been trained to say that they’re closed when that happens. I wonder how I must look for him to think that. “Just Camel Crush please.” “Oh,” he says. I think the total was 13 dollars. That’s probably exactly how much he makes in an hour. It’s more than I was making in Arizona. It’s more than I’m making now. The American Dream. I’m outside again and this guy is still like, ODing in his car. I knock on the window lightly and suddenly notice a large black dog in the backseat, and the window’s half rolled down. I feel embarrassed and get in my car. That’s his guard dog, he’s asleep, he lives in his car, we’ve all been there. But I don’t leave because it’s still bugging me, the situation. I text my friend Banjo, not because he’s a recovered addict, but because I just need a second opinion. “No one would fall asleep in a really brightly lit 711 parking lot, like that’s weird right?” Banjo says it is absolutely weird, and that this guy might not be alright. I watch for a bit. The guy’s breathing is really slow and oddly twitchy at times; the twitches are the only thing that makes it clear he's breathing. Guilt and a weird sense of obligation motivates me back to the window and I knock again, loudly this time, and as he lifts himself up I ask “are you alright?” and for some reason I’m surprised by how sincere I sound. He looks confused and says something resembling a yes. I say okay, I wait one long second, and then get in my car and drive away. I could’ve stayed longer but there’s no easy way to ask someone if they’re on drugs. He was awake, that was good enough for me. Although his pupils seemed large, and pupils are supposed to get very small when you’re on opiates. Then again he could’ve just had really dark brown irises. In any case he was definitely on something. The moon is moving west in the sky. I’m in the Target parking lot now, the one where my ex-girlfriend swears she saw the Devil. Still no sign of him. Mateo Omar is a writer and artist currently based in San Diego county, California. So far his writing has been published or is forthcoming in Mixed Mag, Gypsophila Zine, and Rise Up Review. He can be found on Instagram @arachnidoll. Christopher Sessums CC things I shouldn’t know I remember some things, like the softball game at recess and how he knelt beside me, put his left hand on my chest, and his right hand on my shoulder blade. He gave me a little shake. “You have good shoulders.” Later, when I told on an older kid for grabbing my shirt and throwing me around the playground, he told me to toughen up. I remember the night the boys in my third-grade class went to his trailer for a sleepover. My sleeping bag was in the corner of the living room; the smell of the brown shag carpet was more pungent than the stale popcorn and cheap pizza. The bare wood paneling along the hallway led to a neglected bathroom where he stood at the open door while I brushed my teeth. Then I don’t remember. There are only flashes of things I shouldn’t know. A snapshot of an appendicitis scar. A lifeless burgundy curtain resting crooked over the one window in the bedroom. But I could have seen the curtain from outside. There’s no face with the scar; just a disembodied image, angry red and jagged. I don’t tell anyone. There’s too much I can’t remember. Jim Almo (he/him) is a southern writer and musician living in the northeast. He grew up in a fire & brimstone cult in the Appalachian mountains, which you can read about in his memoir if he ever finishes it. He is a verified coffee nerd, former touring drummer, and loves to cook vegetarian dinners with his wife and two teen boys. You can find his work in CP Quarterly, JMWW, and now Anti-Heroin Chic. He's also on Twitter @jimalmo. Eleazar CC The Girl with No Eyebrows My hands are demons, laced with black blood intended to rip away the most prominent feature of my face—my dark eyebrows. My left hand is the greater evil, lurking just above my eyelid until the fingers brush against the short, gentle hairs that compose one brow on my forehead. The darkness emerges in isolation, strengthens with boredom and petulance. One pull turns into seventeen, the debris littering my cheeks and chest. My mind struggles to conceptualize disaster. Smooth is alluring like a wet stone in a shallow lake. My hands are manipulative, experts on my daily cadence so they know when to strike. As a strange introduction to this tendency, my first pull was in front of a crowd. I was ten years old. I wore silky pajamas as I sat on the blue leather sofa at my parent’s lake house in New Hampshire. The living room reached maximum capacity with my family and relatives huddled around the television to watch a movie. The activity poured over into the dining room. My mother and her sisters listened from the kitchen as they finished cleaning the dinner dishes. My left hand padded my left eyebrow. I’ve always preferred symmetry, but my left side is stronger than my right and I often find myself leaning on my better half. I let my hand rest in my lap, but the demon overpowered my mind and moved in a circuitous rhythm. The thumb and index finger latched onto a hair and dug into the follicle. They clawed into my skin until a half crest strand lay in the center of my palm. I clenched my fist to hide my secret. I examined the piece when I was sure no one would notice. The hair was small, angelic. The demons strengthened over the years. Soon it wasn’t enough to pull one hair. They craved more. They needed to recreate the blended pleasure and pain emitted from a pull. Five to ten hairs fell through my fingers and landed around my neck. Gaping holes protruded from my face. My sisters stared with contempt, clucked their tongues and cast their eyes down to the floor. I eventually typed “hair pulling” into an internet search and discovered I was not alone in my tendency. Others just like me also had these demons that lingered at their eyebrows. Trichotillomania is an obsessive-compulsive disorder caused by stress and anxiety. It is exacerbated by boredom, loneliness, fatigue, or overwhelm. When I reached high school, my older sister took a heightened interest in my Trichotillomania. She was a junior and since we went to the same school, she cared more about my appearance. “Let me fill in your eyebrows,” she pleaded one afternoon. Rather than accept the help, I took her statement as a jab at my mental health and recoiled to my bedroom. She continued to ask in a variety of forms. Sometimes she held a makeup bag. Other times she cornered me on the way to the bathroom. She asked in conversation or when she was getting ready to go out. She lauded her makeup skills, said she would draw on eyebrows, but I treated her remarks as snides, further justifying her younger sister as a freak, a lunatic, the high schooler with a messed-up face. After two years, I caved and filled in my eyebrows for junior prom. My older sister was in college and recruited her high school best friend, a makeup connoisseur, to do my makeup for the dance. I obliged because I admired her friend. She thought I was funny and judged me based on my character, not my eyebrows. When I looked in the mirror, examined my face with eyebrows, I felt beautiful. Normal. I didn’t know whether to cry from embarrassment or smile with pride. I realized I had a chance for recovery. The goal seemed tangible. I stopped pulling as much. I let my older sister teach me how to fill in my eyebrows so that I could do it every morning. I practiced in the bathroom mirror, buying makeup in secret. I struggled to perfect the art, often buying too dark a shade or applying the makeup too heavily. Tissues and toilet paper piled up high in the wastebasket. Some days the thought of putting in the effort was unbearable. Other days I spent thirty minutes in the bathroom trying to perfect my eyebrows. My progress ebbed and flowed the remainder of high school. When I started college, I reset the clock, encouraging myself to control the demons. I kept my hands busy by twirling a pen or squeezing a stress ball. I spent most of my time around other people. The demons emerged in the dark of my dorm room, alone with my thoughts about my success on the field hockey team and my demanding coursework. While my roommate slept on her side of the room, I pulled in secret, wiping away the hairs to remove evidence in the morning light. I waited for the bathroom to empty out before I touched up my face, concealed the damage done in the black mosaic of the night. My teammates learned about the holes in my face because after practices and games, we showered together in the locker room and my face went raw. As water cascaded down my face, my eyebrow paint washed away. They stared with skepticism, avoiding conversation altogether. In some ways, it transferred out of the locker room, into my relationships with them. Most didn’t want a friendship. Others ignored my presence. After I graduated from college, I tried again to regrow my eyebrows. Now a young adult settling into the professional world, I needed to appear confident, composed. But instead of relocating to Boston or New York or LA like the rest of my classmates, I moved home to the suburbs of Massachusetts. I threw myself into running, hoping the sport would occupy my hands, consuming all thoughts about pulling. But the loneliness allured my demons. More hair gone, more makeup applied. I saved enough money to move to Brighton, a suburb of Boston, and after a year of friends praising Somerville, I made the jump across the river and found a place near Davis Square. I ran. My cousin and I trained for the Bay State Marathon. I dated around, met strange men at local bars and restaurants. No one stayed in my life for long to learn about my demons. Until I met my partner. The first time she saw me without eyebrows I forgot to pack my eyebrow pencil. Before going out the previous night, I made a conscious decision to leave my makeup at home, thinking the eyebrows would stay on through the morning. When I woke up, needing to pee, the eyebrows transformed into black smudges running across the width of my forehead. I tried to utilize the excess makeup to assuage the damage, but it didn’t work. I sulked back into her bedroom, concealing my eyes. When we woke up later, she studied my face, but made no comment on the eyebrows. At this point in our relationship, we were still discovering each other, working hard to make a lasting impression. “I should go home,” I said, gathering my belongings. She narrowed her eyes, her face softened. “Why?” “I, uh, don’t have everything here,” I said, rummaging through my black Michael Kors purse, trying to find the one possession that would make this situation better. But, of course, I knew my eyebrow pencil was at home. “Because of your eyebrows?” she said, almost in a whisper. I froze, uncertain whether to share my demons, admit to the Trichotillomania that I’ve struggled with for the past fifteen years, or feign ignorance. “Yeah.” My voice was small. “I don’t care,” she said, “We all have things we struggle with.” I nodded, not really believing what she said. “Really, Jaclyn. It’s okay.” I couldn’t muster a smile then as I processed the words escaping her mouth. It was okay. No one had muttered that phrase about my Trichotillomania. No one had so completely encapsulated my demons in the most thoughtful way. Jaclyn Torres is a writer based in Medford, Massachusetts. She runs the blog Candor & Spunk, which cultivates queer voices through wellness and writing. She has been featured in Anti-Heroin Chic, Hobart, Drunk Monkeys, and The Lesbian Blog. 5/30/2022 2 Comments She and I By Gerri Mahn Jeremy Segrott CC She and I She was seventeen when she began dating Eric, a twenty-five year old guitarist in a Grateful Dead cover band. He would go to the diner where she worked on the weekends. She watched him rehearse. Afterwards, the band would get high in their studio. She would have a wine cooler. She never sat on their lumpy couches, she leaned in the doorway and listened to them talk. Her mother said they should go to prom together. Eric said he would take her. The thought of her adult boyfriend at a high school dance made her sweat; her classmates and teachers looking at them. She said she wasn’t going to waste her money on a dress. She ate dinner with Eric and his housemates. She slept in his bed. He drove her to high school in the mornings after her Chevy died. The hammering coming from the engine had gotten so loud she could barely drown it out with the radio. The car finally gave up in Cherry Hill while she was driving in search of the grandmother she had not seen in fourteen years, and who then refused to speak with her unless she agreed to start speaking with her father. When she broke up with him, Eric insisted they would still be friends. He insisted on taking her to the used car dealership to price out a replacement. When they left, entering the heavy flow of traffic on the Rt. 9, Eric demanded to know why she had stopped loving him. She shrank against the seat as his shouting grew louder and louder, as he punched the steering wheel again and again before launching his fist into the windshield. Eric was short and wiry, and it had never occurred to her to be afraid of him. When he punched the windshield it canted out, the glass splintering into a spider-web pattern across the entire driver’s side half. She leaped from the car and ran through the traffic, up to the mall and into Toys R Us. She stood with the manager, watching Eric speed erratically around the parking lot before tearing off. She was shaking so badly the manager helped her dial the store phone to call home. No one answered. A friend from school came to pick her up. Eric was parked in front of her mother’s house when they arrived. He rushed out the front door, hands jammed into the pockets of his cargo pants as he crossed the lawn in huge strides and drove away. He didn’t look at her. She found her mother sitting calmly in the living room. “Do you know what he did?” she asked. The words went up and down, crashing over each other so that she did not recognize her own voice. “You know he’s sorry, but you really upset him,” her mother said, shaking her head as she walked out of the room. She spent the night at her friend’s house. A week later, without a word, her mother dropped a letter on her bed. When she looked at it, the crashing came again, this time in her stomach. The letter was from Eric. He said that he had never been so angry. That no girl had ever made him so angry. That he had never wanted to hit a girl until he met her. She remembered being four years old, wearing her red dress and standing by the windows in her grandmother’s kitchen. He said he was not coming, he said this was goodbye. She cried “Daddy! Daddy!” into the phone after he hung up. She did not write back. Gerri Mahn is a mom and a veteran with degrees in English Lit and Library Science. Her work has appeared in Den of Geek, Mulberry Literary and Maya Literary Magazine. 5/30/2022 0 Comments Brave by Janelle Sheetz Peter Corbett CC
Brave My cellphone buzzes. “I’m gonna need you to be brave at 10:00,” the text says. I know what happens next. I’ve heard enough stories from other former students. After getting our phone numbers during our time in the musicals he directed or a trip performing in Disney World with his choir, he reaches out for other reasons. Maybe I’ll have options. Do I want a photo of him that’s rated G, PG, PG-13, or R? Maybe I won’t get any options at all. Maybe he’ll just send a dick pic outright. We should report him to someone. The principal at our Catholic high school wouldn’t be happy. Nor would his wife and the superintendent of Catholic schools. And even though he almost always waits to target girls after they graduate, he’s still crossing a line. It’s still inappropriate. It’s still sexual harassment, even if we’re young and hesitant to call it that. As young women—just barely so at 18—this is just the beginning. We have years of more sexual harassment ahead of us, years before the #MeToo movement happens. Some of us will get lewd messages from former co-workers, some of us will be groped in bars, some of us will be raped, but for now, we don’t know what to do. We treat it like a dirty secret that bonds us, and that’s probably how he hasn’t lost his job, despite a rumor that this exact conduct got him fired from the public school nearby. We’d rather keep quiet than feel responsible for destroying his career and marriage, even though the fault would be his. I warn my younger friends still in the school not to stay in contact with him after graduation, and I don’t tell any current students so the stories don’t spread throughout the school. I don’t want faculty and students to know it came from me. I don’t realize it yet, but I’m protecting him. We all are, and we think we’re protecting ourselves. My cellphone buzzes again at 10:00, right on time. “Are you ready to be brave?” he asks. I ignore him. Janelle Sheetz lives with her husband and their son in the Pittsburgh area. Most recently, her work has been featured in Discretionary Love, Motherwell, and Atta Girl. Her writing can also be found in Paste, HerStry, Ms. magazine, and more. Jeremy Segrott CC If I One Day Disappear Why don’t you just leave? you ask. How you look at me, my dear, well-intentioned friend who cares so much. What you imply, though you don’t mean to, is what he says outright: Stupid. Lazy. Worthless; if I suffer, I deserve to, because I’m choosing to be this way. But the “why” you demand is so old and deep and dark that if you could enter that Hadal region, you’d know: I was made for the trap that swallowed me. Because my mother chose life out of principle instead of generosity and readiness, then resented my father for falling in love with the child he’d asked her to discard, then took me away from him. Because I was loud and messy and difficult. Because her love was a bauble, a dangling lure made of ifs and maybes that I caught sometimes, but sometimes caught me, like a hook in my tender young cheek. Because I was wounded and rewounded by other underloved children who used me to distract from their own sorrow. Because, heart violated, I let my body be violated, too, just so the parts of me would match—an impulse like that feeling, having gazed overlong into the depths, that maybe you belong there. Because I thought no one would ever want to keep me, until he did. Until he showered me with hot gold need that seemed to burn off my impurities. Because his mind was sharp in places where mine was dull. Because he said he wanted to protect me, take care of me. He wanted my children. Of course, you’d say, That’s how it starts. And I’d say thanks so much for the insight, as well as the hindsight, neither of which could’ve registered in one jarred senseless by the opiate fallout of a lovebomb airstrike. Because he was careful, once the hurting began, to hurt me just enough, and at the right intervals, that I could bear it. That I’d forgive him. I’d never have stayed with a man who hit me, but one who insulted me? Demeaned me? Scorched the stunted sapling of my self-worth? To that, I said, yes, please! I thought such was the way of complex, hypersensitive men with the women who loved them—women strong enough to persevere; women good enough to heal them. Because he made sure I was five months pregnant, jobless and friendless, alone with him in a new town, before he really began to rend me, repeatedly, unforgivably, baring the false facets of his heart to other women, playing pieces of my identity like poker chips. Because I still tried, the way a death-row inmate tries, to make the best of things, knowing a fast-track to the abyss was the lone alternative. And while I thank you for your concern, I don’t need tears or anger that aren’t mine, or advice that, if followed, would lead not to heaven, but to a different hell. I need someone who’ll listen. Just listen, never judge. They used to shame women for leaving, you know—not so long ago. In our grandmothers’ day—our mothers’, even. When did staying become the shameful thing? The moment some of us grasped our true power, they declared it sufficient, though it wasn’t for most of us—only for a charmed or gifted few able not only to hold their power, but to wield it. Forgive me, my well-intentioned friend, if my arm went weak with doubt; if I dropped my weapon in the presence of what I, not yet wise, mistook for eternal devotion. Was it tough love you meant to give? As if I haven’t had that—almost nothing but that—for most of four decades. As if that weren’t the very toxin that deranged me thus, ever in flight between manic joy and anhedonic paralysis, on the run from a pain I can’t explain to you, a demon whose shape you can’t see. And if I one day disappear from your life, it’s not because I don’t care for you, or appreciate your efforts. It’s because instead of listening, you talked. You didn’t say I was stupid, lazy, or worthless, maybe. But you said all I needed to do was to make a plan, save some money, find a lawyer. And then you said, There are no victims, honey—only volunteers. You became the shinier side of the coin which, on the reverse, bore my tormenter’s face. Francesca Leader is a self-taught writer and artist with work published or forthcoming in the J Journal, The William and Mary Review, CutBank, Coffin Bell, and elsewhere. Find her on IG and Twitter @moon.in.a.bucket. |
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