Last Valentines day
a boy
wrote me a poem
titled
“feces”
it began:
you are
the shit.
It’s winter and
There are bees in you.
They push their way out of
The corners of your mouth
When you grin, a driven mass.
Bees in your eyes, they crawl
Out of your ears like slow honey.
Their bristle legs are sticky
From the things between your teeth.
And me:
My ice hands on
Your humming cheeks
Only makes them angry.
When I blow to warm you,
And my hands, the bees
Scatter.
You try to catch them then,
You leave me.
I wait for my hands.
A dandelion,
disguised as a sunflower.
You can do
so much better
than to focus on
a weed like me.
Ada B. Wells is not her real name, but she talks about Ida B. Wells who refused to give up her seat on the train long before Rosa Parks could even ride the bus without her mother. We had just met, and her furry top hat sat over her hair. She was lamenting the state of her braids. The state of her court case. Her life as a black woman in public housing in Northampton, Massachusetts. Supposed to be the CommonWealth, but she is not common enough. She taught me the phrase “I have never called you outside your name.” Which means, I have always respected you enough to call you exactly what you told me you were called. And when you call me a “bitch” in the tenants association office, I start to wonder if you deserve that courtesy. She told me Miss Ida B. Wells almost got lynched. The way she said lynch in her Texas accent made me forget it was my last name and jarred me when I recalled its true meaning. Ida B. Wells almost got strung up in a tree. Ada remembers the KKK coming to her yard when she was five. So she has PTSD in common with me. She says Ida is one of her spirit guides, and she used to channel her in a one-woman show. I tend to think she never stopped.
I want to get a hat like Ada’s but maybe in a brighter color. I gave her the business card for the lawyer that saved me and my sons from the lead house. She admired the Highlander, and I said, “I bought it with lead paint money.” I hope she calls Howie. He’s one of the only lawyers I’ve met who returns phone calls. She and I agree the word “magistrate” leaves a bad taste in our mouths. Ada was late to the support group, and I waited with the two facilitators for almost thirty minutes. I said I felt like there was someone out there who was meant to walk in. Even though it was my first group in years. And I have not fully wrapped my head around the fact that I may be psychic. And she came in, papers flapping and sat down and exhaled. She went first, after the ground rules disclaimer Tori always makes. Tori is blind, which somehow makes her even better at domestic violence counseling. You know she’s meeting you where you are. And she may be particularly unbiased and adept at judging emotion through our voices. I want to call Ada and have her come braid my hair before court. Weave a little B. Wells spirit in between the strands. She told me hair braiding is one of her side hustles. I smiled and told her I went to fourth grade in Jamaica.
When I shared about my felonious baby daddy and the hate he dusted over me and my boys, she sucked her teeth. I used to run support groups in prisons, she said. Most of those men don’t deserve a woman like you. When I fed the meter and gave her the lawyer’s card, she suggested I give her a ride up the street. I would have if I hadn’t just bought $2 worth of Northampton Parking Authoritie’s best real estate. We walked along, tall strides matched evenly. She was going to meet some people for a meal. What will they do without me? she sing-songed and laughed. We exchanged numbers on the street. I gave her mine. She called me and started walking away. When I lifted my phone to my ear, she said, you hear Ada calling you child? I said yes, and she was gone.
This was his fifth day working on the front line of the Colorado wildfire; the smoke and
heat tearing through his chest had begun to wear on him. He coughed as he reached for his
bandanna, which had slid down his face and was no longer covering his nose or mouth. He
adjusted the bandanna so that it might stop some of the burning air from reaching his lungs and
allow him to work in a slightly less painful environment. He tried to adjust the elastic straps of
his goggles, but while doing so, the band snapped and the goggles swung loose, also exposing his
eyes to the searing pain of smoke hitting a mucous membrane.
He swore as he made his way away from the trench-digging and back up the hill to a spot
where he could put down his shovel and take off his gloves in order to re-tie the knot on the over-
stretched elastic cord. He knew that he should have asked the boss for new goggles before they
came up here two days ago, but since he was the new one on this crew, he didn’t want to cause a
problem by asking for too many things right from the start. Maybe it was a shortsighted and
unwise choice to go to the front line with malfunctioning gear, but he’d just have to be resilient
and get through with what he had for now and buy some new things when he got home.
When he looked up from his thoughts, he realized that the rest of the crew had already
moved further around the slope and were working the other side. He quickly wrapped the
goggles back around his head, pulled up the bandanna, grabbed his shovel, and started at a
moderate pace to catch up.
As he made his way around the many downed trees and burned stumps, he was impressed
by the ability of a thin cleared area and a trench to stop an entire raging fire from continuing on
its path of destruction. He realized just how powerful the earth actually was and how, in one
instant, thousands of lives could be changed forever. If the fire managed to outrace them and get
past the fire lines, then all the people on the other side of the mountain would almost certainly
lose their houses, cars, yards, and all the belongings that they couldn’t take with them to
evacuate.
He met back up with the others who were steadily digging, chopping at roots, and digging
some more. He was caught up in the repetition of the work when suddenly, from behind him, a
massive Honeylocust tree splintered, crackled, and fell with a tremendous crash. Sparks flew
from the ground as the burning roots were crushed beneath a massive amount of two-hundred-year-old wood and bark.
The entire crew stared at the tree that now lay in the dirt, and he knew, without having to
ask, how powerful the fire actually was. If it could burn down an entire healthy tree, what was
stopping it from taking down twelve healthy firefighters? All that shielded them were hand tools
and the bare dirt.
there is a story my mama used to tell me when she lay in two feet of snow in the middle of
a field somewhere off Rt 9.
she lay in the dark and watched the stars so long she couldn’t feel her body, the snow around her
clean and wide. she stayed until she couldn’t hear her breath or her heartbeat. it was so quiet, she
could hear snowflakes lie down next to her, and when a tractor found her there, she left, covered
in soft white dust.
sometimes, i lie in bed and try to feel nothing except the mattress. if i stare at the ceiling long
enough and hard enough, i can pretend the crack of white i see there is in my ears and my spine. i
let pillows slip into my arms, blankets settle inside the backs of my knees. i let my knee caps
soften into feathers.
my mama taught me how to stand when your feet tell you there is no ground. she taught me how
to walk when the ground shifts under you and your ears tell you up is sideways. my mama taught
me that tipping my head back in the shower is a privilege.
now, the edge of the collar of my coat is damp with warm breath. there is a lacey piece of eye-blue sky framed by the broken edges of leaves. in it, a growing mass of birds contracts and
expands.
Once she lived in Arizona and she got an award, so her mother sent her an azalea. It was pink
and pretty, so out of place in the apartment of nubby beige and ochre chair covers,
cigarette smoke, monsoon grit.
All her life, she’d been touching her fingertips to a voice she hoped would thrive. Sometimes it
was her interior smartass that woke up when she was drunk. Sometimes it was
weeping or a terrible cough.
When she heard herself in the night, the songs she yearned for unraveled, held no duration.
The azalea bloomed. Yet most days she drank herself downward; she’d start out lively, bellowing
Running on Empty while flinging herself around the so-called living room. She
showered, went to work, tidied up, read books, but she can’t recall grocery shopping
or making meals other than coffee. Did she ever vacuum? There was a time a dead
azalea in its crimson foil perched by the doormat waiting for a ride.
It used to be that the boyfriends were most important—someone’s presence, the testing of that
sliver of voice this woman called love. When young, she’d wanted a name that was
more romantic, the name of someone in a book! At first, she thought Laura; even
better, Lauren, which was less common! But the only Lauren she’d ever known had
been raped by a man who came up the fire escape in Baltimore. That girl, already so
wildly frail, was paired up with guitar-wielding George and his boa constrictor. Back
then, few women had language for one another; they kept it to soften men. The
woman, with that dead plant still at her doorway, tossed those memories like socks
into the bureau drawer. Still so many missing, so many torn that weren’t hers with
their secret and disheveled mysteries.
So now she has watched her mother’s body die—vivid, shocking, slow. Mean-mouthed, bossy,
big-hearted, the mother continued to suck the voice out of her daughter while
pressuring her with gifts: an enormous illuminated Bible, one furry black bear
footstool, an original pen and ink llama cartoon, gift certificates to Land’s End, and her
death—that stock-still absence, its whirlwind.
What happened to Lauren, to Baltimore, to the Arizona roommates who once or twice watered
the azalea? Pain flourished but never without a sense that an array of jeweled futures
was waiting to be plucked, tried on like disco clothes, glittering but easily discarded
were they ill-fitting.
Her mother’s mouth fell open all the time. Out in the world, so many voices on the page or
singing, TV voices, politicians—some rude, some elegant—so loud and intrusive they
drowned out children screaming from hospitals, they chewed the edges of sitcoms,
like dogs howling or that lone rooster interrupting the donkey’s bray from the top of
the pasture.
4 a.m., her roommate’s cat paws this woman’s cheek, mews, and briefly, touch becomes voice. In
Phoenix, monsoon dust settles far from a man’s hand pressed down hard on
someone’s mouth back in Baltimore. Yet one time is always another time as both
women wake, woven into early birdsong. A person may keep reaching her forefinger
towards a first word, but it’s the second and third—the onward—which she’s really
hoping for, intends.
I’m here,
in a small moment
looking
for windows
to break
this isn’t rebellion
I tell my mom
I broke a jar on asphalt
picked it up with my hands
I listen to melancholic
silence
in big rooms
I nod
and sweep by people
I don’t hand out flyers,
or paint t-shirts,
I stay inside my head
dreaming
about bony limbed frogs
who push against me
and eat each other
Good Morning small room with no windows,
folk punk and three birds squawking at me—
I slept on the floor last night
I dreamt of running a potluck without contributions and barely any food
I quit my job, spent all my money on chard and italian cheese
I deleted all my voicemails,
turned the model train landscape in the corner
into a diorama of my own matriarchy.
Good Morning cold wind
Good Morning mapquest directions—
I am pretending not to exist.
