Issue 40

I Wish It Were Enough to Be–– + The Saddest Thing

Fay Dillof

I Wish It Were Enough to Be––

the word that comes to mind is ducklike––
go about saying nothing but thank, thank, thank

you to the flowers in the tall grasses.
There’s little to say about the body

in pain. Little, in fact, when sickness eclipses,
about anything at all. Everyone else––

my husband and daughter, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, niece––
are searching for sea glass, skipping stones,

while back at the house, a whirligig spinning, I’m lying in bed, thinking
about this morning when I went into the biting sea, the shock

intensified me right into existence,
while now––I’m so sick

of being sick––and boom––like yesterday’s lightening-less thunder,
I’m not really here in the dark.

If only what’s happening to me
were like that cattail out the window,

soft as childhood sadness,
catching the light.

Or, how earlier––the small gray rocks along the shore,
as I approached, became birds.

The Saddest Thing

She’s in the kitchen, drinking coffee––
instant––my baby, now fifteen.

Leave me alone! I’m not ready!
my grandmother, our family’s only other

instant coffee drinker (one cup with sugar
and cream, before sleep) used to shout

in bed each night to her dead husband.
I wrote that description

thirty years back. Your story fails,
the teacher had said, to convey why losing a grandmother

is not just but the natural order of things.
As if the natural order of things

un-bewilders grief?
The saddest thing that’s ever happened,

my daughter insists now––meaning
the dryer-shrunk condition of the beanie

she pinched from her dad.
She loves her father and me equally.

And her father more.
Is it wrong

I always carried her strapped in the ErgoPack,
facing me?

If I calibrate how long and when
I’m allowed to put everything down,

the answer, Never.
Drive across that bridge

of self-disdain, I instruct myself,
imagining a tollbooth

and, beyond it, a slip of sky.

Fay Dillof’s poetry has appeared in Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, Spillway, FIELD, Rattle, New Ohio Review, Green Mountains Review, Barrow Street, and elsewhere. Fay has been awarded the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry and the Dogwood Literary Prize in Poetry, and has received a John Ciardi Scholarship in Poetry at Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, a Claudia Emerson Scholarship in poetry at Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a grant from Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and an Anne Bastille Residency at Adirondacks Center for Writing. She lives with her husband and daughter in Northern California where she works as a psychotherapist.

In the Falling Leaves: The Fear and the Fury of the Negro

Allen M. Price

I’m not real, I’m just like you. You
don’t exist in this society. If you did your
people wouldn’t be seeking equal rights.
You’re not real, if you were you’d have
some status among the nations of the world.
I do not come to you as a reality; I come to
you as the myth because that is what Black
people are: myths. I came from a dream
that the Black man dreamed long ago. I’m
actually a presence sent to you by your
ancestors.
— Sun Ra, “Space in the Place”

I felt a gentle melancholy in the leaves falling from the gnarled oak tree that stood beside me while an insufferable dreariness invaded my vessels and possessed my body. There I was in Newport, Rhode Island, standing in God’s Little Acre, a small corner of the Common Burying Ground comprised of three hundred markers of enslaved and free Africans—the largest and most intact African slave burial ground in the country, watching, fearing a young white man who drove by in an old beat up pickup truck with a huge American and DONT TREAD ON ME flags mounted to the back flapping in the spring breeze. I went there to observe the 195th anniversary, January 7, 1826, of eighty-year-old Occramer Marycoo, known by his slave name Newport Gardner, and his retinue sailing on the brig Vine from Boston to Liberia. Before his voyage to the continent of his birth, he said, “I go to set an example to the youth of my race. I go to encourage the young. They can never be elevated here. I have tried it sixty years—it is in vain.

Could I by my example lead them to set sail, and I die the next day, I should be satisfied.” Where Occramer’s wife, Lima, and three children are buried, I genuflected and pondered on how I keep living in a country that hates me, hates my Black ancestry, that I pledged allegiance to, but doesn’t pledge allegiance to me? I peered up at the purples and oranges and yellows appearing over the main, traversing the slumbering space. Monarchs on wings enraptured rose out of a lilac bush into the sky. Twilight came softly as the setting sun snuggled in the crook of the ocean’s arms. Hearing the breeze winnowing the trees singing my ancestors’ poetry, I wanted them to tell me how this can be, to help me with this fear and fury I was feeling as I went on thinking about the life I had once been living.

I pledged allegiance to the flag five days a week in elementary, junior high, and high school, twelve years of my life. I had tremendous pride in my country. A great deal of how I saw the American flag was through a prism called my upbringing. I didn’t know the flag’s genesis, but I believed in the ideals it represented: fidelity, liberty, and unity. I no longer believe the flag is a representative of those ideals because those ideals, founded on the backs of my ancestors, were based in enslaving them. Author, fellow Rhode Islander, and white supremacist, H.P. Lovecraft described this in his poem, “On the Creation of Niggers”:

When, long ago, the gods created Earth
In Jove’s fair image Man was shaped at birth.
The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;
Yet were they too remote from humankind.
To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,
Th’Olympian host conceiv’d a clever plan.
A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
Filled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger.

As a Black man who’s been called a nigger, a coon, a high-yellow picaninny, and lived through four years of an openly racist president, I never once became deluded by my fellow white Americans. I treated them as the gifted, blessed people they are, never holding it against them when their mouths opened and poured out racist slurs, or when legislators passed legislation that curtailed and stripped rights from my race, my humanity. My faith unwavering through the protests and petitions I witnessed and partook in all across this beautiful landscape. “We shall overcome.”

Unfortunately, the deadly racism that occurred in America in 2020 changed that. This second decade of the second millennium is giving birth to a new America. The old America is dying, and a new one is kicking in its womb. The birth of a new nation has me realizing for the first time the frailty of democracy, and its longevity. Some may say I am crazy. Others have said it was a matter of time. Fear has driven me here. Fear, fury, and a kind of bewilderment triggered by mourning for the death of my old, deeply flawed, but idealistic nation, a nation that I loved and praised to god almighty. It’s frightening to see this unborn emulating, repeating the deadly past of its mother. This birthing looks to be just as if not more bloody than its mother’s birthing, and I’m worried that we Negroes will suffer the same fate as our ancestors did, ancestors who enabled me with the ability to withstand the fear and the fury America inflicted upon me.

But I have lost the ability to withstand this nagging, unrelenting frenzy of fear and fury that has taken refuge in the crevices of my cranial, has distorted my doctrine of white caste America, and forced me to sit in judgment of them. My fear and my fury are the reaction aroused after watching Ahmaud Arbery hunted down, murdered, spit on, and called a nigger by two white Georgia men; Breonna Taylor mutilated with bullets by all-white Louisville policemen; George Floyd lynched by white Minnesota policeman Derek Chauvin; rabid, racist insurrectionists erecting a makeshift gallows with a noose on the steps of the Capitol before storming the building; and after seeing the picture of republican Georgia governor, Brian Kemp signing the Election Integrity Act of 2021 with seven other white men standing next to him and a picture of a slave plantation hanging on the wall above them. This fear and fury has a kaleidoscope in its eye and every time it turns it takes on these scary shapes that reveal America’s true landscape, a landscape where white supremacists use the American flag as a scare tactic to bully Negroes and dissenters into conforming.

That’s what flooded my mind as the pickup truck sped off down the street with its flags flapping, provoking my fear and fury. But the gnarled oak tree winnowing the buxom wind with winged words lulled my mind into a kind of stasis. This oak with its defending arms raised against attack and wreaths of foliage and piles of fagots in the surrounding copse, stood tall over the gray and heavily weathered headstones. It wasn’t like any tree I knew because trees were inviting; things I trusted and talked to as I frequently did when I was a little kid. Choosing the place had been hard because my backyard had more pretty oaks than any of the yards around.

My choice, I called Brother, and sat under, alone sometimes, sometimes, because I was an only child, with my dog Lady, a Springer Spaniel. There was always this depression of soul that pervaded my spirit of which no pleasurable, poetic sensation could transpose into the sublime. It was the same dreariness I was feeling while genuflecting in the cemetery.

I looked upon the scene before me, gazed up at the new moon, a thin crescent disc slightly illuminated, and realized that that new moon was the same new moon Harriet Tubman had used to help Blacks escape slavery. Her spirit filled with the same wrath and determination as Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, and like Moses, slaves grumbled against her during the journey. When a slave cried out in fear to turn back, Harriet pulled out a gun, and said, “You’ll be free or die a slave!” She knew if anyone turned back, it would put her and them in danger. Harriet’s train never ran off the track or lost a passenger on the Underground Railroad. She led dozens of slaves including her seventy-year-old parents to freedom. To witness such history, such glory I envied the new moon—having nothing to fear, helping my slave ancestors attain the freedom it bears. On the zephyr’s wings the liquid syllables of my ancestor’s poetry gently began caressing, intoxicating me. I closed my eyes, sharpening my senses that were abandoning their defenses, awakening memories of the embarrassing behavior I once engaged in to be accepted.

My mother raised me in the predominantly white town of Warwick so I could get a good education and upbringing, but the unintended consequences of that were I did everything I could to be white in order to be accepted by white caste America, while at the same time worrying, wondering if I go to certain places will I be stared at, or will someone call me a racist epithet. I talked, walked, dressed, and behaved the way my white classmates and neighbors did. If removing the Black part of me got me accepted into white America I was fine with it, and spent over three decades living my life that way. I earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting, a master’s degree in journalism, and attended Harvard Summer School. I interned at Merrill Lynch, Men’s Journal, The Harvard Crimson, and Natural Health magazine, was a pricing analyst for the world’s largest mutual fund company Kemper Scudder Investments, wrote for Muscle & Fitness, and have been published in some of America’s most highly respected literary journals. I volunteered countless hours at food pantries, and landscaped for hospices, receiving an award by the state as one of Rhode Island’s volunteers of the year. I have never broken the law, or been charged or arrested for a crime. I smiled at every white person I walked past even those who appeared displeased by my presence. I followed every nook and cranny, every curve and fold of the waterway trailing the serpentine path of the mighty river white America deems necessary to assimilation in their society. But the country of my birthplace to which I owe my identity flat out refuses to evolve a place for me. I hate myself for doing what I did to be accepted. The need of my country’s approval has been the heaviest of my trials. Because no matter how thick my love has been, white America’s love for me has always been thin. “Thin love ain’t no love at all,” said Sethe to Paul D in Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved. “Thin love plays it safe.”

As thick as my love has been for America, that love was, literally, beaten out of me by police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds, and by those racist pro-Trump white nationalist mothers and fathers who with their sons and daughters used flagpoles bearing the United States flag to stab the beating heart of American democracy, and by those white Georgia politician men who slashed voting rights and criminalized giving water to a ninety-year-old waiting in line to vote, using the same racist abstract tactics that senior adviser to president Ronald Reagan, Lee Atwater used—“You start out in 1954 by saying ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger’ Atwater said in an interview with Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University. “By 1968 you can’t say—nigger—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… We want to cut this, is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’” After hearing Atwater say this, I understood why Belize said, in Tony Kushner’s Angel’s in America, “I hate America, Louis. I hate this country. Nothing but a bunch of big ideas and stories and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word free to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on Earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, Louis, I’ll show you America. Terminal, crazy, and mean. I live in America, Louis. I don’t have to love it. You do that. Everybody’s gotta love somethin’.”

It is so hard for me to love America because I am so upset with it, so deathly afraid of it, of what my innocent and criminal fellow white citizens may do to me because of Black ancestry. The apathy and ignorance they have carried for centuries is what produced the video of Derick

Chauvin kneeling on the neck of George Floyd. It’s the same apathy and ignorance that produced the 1963 photo of a white police officer kneeling on a Black woman’s neck in Birmingham, Alabama. In the words of James Baldwin, “I’m terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t think us human. I base this on their conduct not on what they say. And this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters.” The monstrous way white caste America treated my ancestors, stringing them up like a side of veal, turning them into strange fruit, their blood dripping on the leaves, on the roots of the trees, the tatters of their clothes flapping in the breeze after crows plucked at their bodies, I shudder to think what they’d do to me after seeing what they did to George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Jacob Blake, and U.S. Army 2nd Lt. Caron Nazario, while dressed in uniform.

On December 5, 2020, Caron was pulled over by two Virginian police officers for having a temporary license plate in the rear window of his newly purchased Chevrolet Tahoe SUV. He drove a mile and a half to a well-lit gas station before stopping for safety, and set up the camera on his phone, afraid that the police officers might do something to him. They shouted at him to put his arms out of the window, which he did, and then they approached him with guns blazing. Caron asked, “What’s going on, why are your weapons drawn?” “Get out the car!” the officers hollered. “What’s going on?” Caron asked again. “What’s going on is you’re fixin to ride the lightning, son,” one officer said to him, which is a line from The Green Mile, a movie about a Black man facing execution by the electric chair. “I’m honestly afraid to get out of the car,” Caron said. “Yeah you should be,” the other officer said. The officers then threatened to arrest Caron for not listening to their orders, and continued shouting conflicting orders at him, telling him to put his hands out of the window while telling him to open the door and get out. “I’m actively serving this country and this is how you’re going to treat me?” Caron said. Seconds later, an officer sprays him in his face with pepper spray. Caron kept his hands out of the car window as the officers yell at him to get out, visibly reeling from the spray. “I don’t even want to reach for my seatbelt, can you please? … My hands are out, can you please — look, this is really messed up,” Caron said as he tried to get out of the car.

Seventy-five years ago, a similar but deadly police encounter occurred. On February 12, 1946, Sergeant Isaac Woodward, a twenty-seven-year-old army veteran who had served in the South Pacific for fifteen months and earned a battle star for extraordinary bravery under fire, was returning home on a bus to Winnsboro, South Carolina to see his wife whom he hadn’t seen in several years. He was returning from a war he helped win: WWII. He asked the bus driver if he could stop the bus so he could use the bathroom. The driver called him a nigger and told him to go sit down. Isaac cursed him back and said you don’t need to talk to me that way. The bus driver was furious, and at the next town, he stopped, and went looking for police officers to have Isaac removed from the bus. Isaac stepped off of the bus and as he tried to explain, the police chief pulled out his blackjack and hit Isaac over the head with it. The police chief and the other police officers dragged him out of sight and beat him blind. They didn’t beat his eyes out; they put the stick in the sockets and twisted them out. One officer held his gun on Isaac while the other one beat him unconscious. Isaac did not resist and let them beat him for fear that they would arrest him for resisting. They poured whiskey over him to say he was drunk and arrested him for disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, and being drunk. He spent the night in jail. When he woke up the next morning, he couldn’t see. They took him to the judge, and he was levied a fine, but he couldn’t see to sign the paperwork that was put before him. He was examined and it was determined that he would never see again. Like Caron, Isaac was wearing an army uniform. He had medals on his chest. And a final paycheck from the U.S. army in the amount of $695. All the symbols of sacrifice and service to America but it didn’t matter.

These racist encounters with police brought back memories of when a white policeman pulled me over in October 2020, in the midst of the pandemic. It was a weekday, nine-thirty at night. I was heading to my home in Cranston from Narragansett after having spent a few hours writing in my favorite place. I took the scenic route as I always do, which took me through East Greenwich where I was pulled over. I was driving a 2006 Honda Element. An SUV that looks like a rectangular box. It’s great for stacking things like kayaks and bicycles and large parcels because all the seats come up. It’s not exactly the kind of vehicle you speed in or show off in, so I didn’t know why he was pulling me over. There was no one on the street. I didn’t know where the police officer came from. And I instantly got nervous. I was also afraid because I didn’t have a mask, and I didn’t want to open my window. I didn’t want to get out of car. I didn’t want to get COVID-19. So when he came to my passenger-side window I didn’t roll it down. I turned on the lights inside of my car.

“What do you want?” I asked him through my closed window. The officer proceeded to open my door.

“It’s locked,” I yelled, stunned as he tried to open my door with no mask. “What do you want?” I yelled again. “I don’t have a mask to put on.”

“You we’re going fifty-two in a forty-five,” he said.

I thought to myself, he’s bothering me for this? It’s nine-thirty at night, there’s no one around, and we’re in the middle of a plague the likes of which we haven’t seen in a hundred years. I proceeded to open my glove compartment to get my registration, and then took my wallet out of my pocket to get my license. I cracked opened the window just enough to slide them through and then closed it right quick.

“That’s a fancy wallet,” he said through the closed window.

“No, it’s not,” I replied calmly. “I got it on Amazon. It cost fifteen dollars.” “That little latch came with it?”

“Yes,” I said demonstrating it to him. I thought to myself, is he for real? What the hell do you really want? Is he pulling me over just to annoy me because I’m a Negro?

“If everything comes back fine, you’re free to go,” he said then walked back to his patrol.

“Of course it’s gonna come back fine,” I said out loud in the car. “This is ridiculous.” After about five minutes he came back, and said, “Your registration is the old kind.

They’ve updated them. It’s not on Manila paper anymore, it’s on white. But you’re not due to renew your registration until next year. I saw that in the computer. And the insurance card you gave me is an old insurance card, it has expired dates on it, but I can see in the computer that you have insurance and it’s current.”

“You can see all that on your computer?” I asked. I wanted so badly to say, then why the hell are you asking me for these things if you can see it all on your computer?

“I put hand sanitizer on my hands so your stuff is clean,” he said as I cracked open the window to grab my paperwork. I closed it fast.

“Thank you,” I said and put it on the floor, grabbed a few hand wipes from my bottle on the passenger seat, and wiped my hands.

The whole drive home I kept saying to myself, he pulled me over for nothing, and may have exposed me to COVID. It was a reminder that no matter what I do, no matter how educated I become, how wealthy, how respectful or intrinsically decent a person I am, America will always see me as a Negro. Equality, acceptance, and love won’t come to us if America isn’t based in harmony with the natural order, the natural law of equality, the way it is in nature.

Negroes rich and poor, great and small, must face the same sufferings. Whether President or pediatrician, billionaire or Rhode Scholar, astronaut or actor, versed in the arts and sciences or mentally uninstructed, we are still seen as having lower IQs, lower impulse control, and higher testosterone levels than our white counterparts. Negroes are still pulled over because we aren’t supposed to reach that zenith of public glory. And if we do, we didn’t do it by merit; that Mercedes-Benz CL5 or Cadillac Escalade the Negro is driving had to have been taken away from some good, law-abiding, hard-working, white American family man whose job was stolen by a Black man. From W.E.B. DuBois to Senator Tim Scott to Harvard professors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Ronald S. Sullivan, a common thread strings them together. They’re all Black, they’re all wealthy, they’re all well-educated, and they’ve all been arrested or pulled over for activity that warranted not even a slap on the wrist. There’s no freedom to be found in financial, material success for us. It never has and never will give us the inherent superiority that white caste America believes it has. This one-hundred-year anniversary of The Tulsa Race Massacre, June 1, 1921, the day mobs of whites murdered hundreds of Negroes, and burned to the ground Black Wall Street, the most affluent Black neighborhood in America, is a reminder of that.

There are no graves for most of the dead Black Tulsa residents. Their bodies are forever lost. Thirteen jars filled with ash and dirt and bone rest in the basement of Tulsa’s Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church—an unsettled repose for the victims. Those that survived were left homeless with nothing but heaps of ash—a city burned off the map. That violent episode of dispossession festered in my mind like an unhealed wound while I was genuflecting in God’s Little Acre. The image sent a shiver through my frame and over my skin like still water when a light zephyr passes across it. My heart stomped away in my chest. Then I heard thunder from the cloudless ethereal arch stretched above me. The stars poked bright little holes through the curtain of the night. The falling leaves perfumed with celestial balms lay upon the brown leaves that carpeted the ground of the gnarled oak tree. The night sea, bathed in untroubled calms, entranced me. In the moonlight, stardust caught—a portion of the heavens which I clutched.

I peered down and was completely unnerved to see brown faces in the leaves. I noticed how a brown face closed, and how, when a brown face opened, a light seemed to go on everywhere. The miraculous luster of the brown cadaverous hue startled and awed me. The vision hit me down in my hopelessness, down in my sullenness. I had not had time to feel the vivid force of these sensations which oppressed me. Now, both began to rise in me. I lifted my head and into my eyes appeared the sable souls of those brown faces in the oak grove—leaving me with a whirl of phantasmagoric illusions for truth. I stood up on the rock wall running along the side of the cemetery only to see an endless procession of souls rising out of the falling leaves, rejoicing in an area where no grave markers had ever been. This seemed to be the gathering place for all the dregs that once lived, but these dregs were my Black ancestors. Believing their fate resigned, they sang out from full hearts and bursting throats:

Oh, freedom!
Oh, freedom!
Oh, freedom over me!
And before I’d be a slave
I’ll be buried in my grave
And go home to my Lord and be free

I held still in my mortal frame, feeling tears apace pursue each other down my raven face as their memories marred my mind. Their souls once bodies hanging from the gnarled oak tree found passage through the midrib vein in the falling leaves, to wake every eye and reveal our ancestry in every tree and plant and flowery race. Deliverance from centuries of chilling horror that ran the land. Over futile odds they cast their anguish into the flames where the pealing thunder had shaken the main. They celebrated the ceasing of the mendacious and licentious wickedness that had roamed the American Hemisphere. In the ruins of the vanquished land the germ of the civilization was smoldering. The embers they were kindling into a conflagration of emancipation. A new America was coming.

I watched my staid ancestors with wonder and respect. Then I tore my eyes away from the vision, this imaginary vista of the future. It was eerie and instructive to realize that, though they were my ancestors, I couldn’t expect them to respond to any human request from me. I stepped off of the rock wall and padded over to the vista that had disappeared. The hollow sound with which the slumbering echoes responded to my footfalls made night’s leaden scepter seal the vista and cease the song of my ancestors. The vista, other than accidental, had awoken my senses, muffled by the mechanics of my civilization and worn into despair by its brutalities. The mantled sorrow that became my lifelong companion released me from my fear and my fury. I felt my Black consciousness connecting, merging with nature’s. I husbanded that moment—the deceptive landscape, the instant awareness of future, the loud kicking of my heart. With my mind groveling, I thought to examine the relaxed state of consciousness that my body had now encapsulated. I knew what fear and fury felt like; this was not that. Then it slapped me: I was free in a way I had never been, and it created such an odd sensation. Not satisfaction, not contentment, not a surfeit of joy. It was a purer delight. I realized how strangling my fear and my fury had been, knowing my life as a Negro could end at any moment because of my Blackness. I realized then that I was not the problem, that the Negro is not the problem. The Negro Problem, as argued in the collection of essays by such Black elites as, Booker T. Washington, and W.E.B. DuBois cannot be solved by Negroes redefining or improving our image and identity through racial uplift ideology. I did it for more than forty years, and all I did was shrink myself in the teeth of white America’s terror.

I’ve questioned if I belong in this country because the racism, which white caste America invented to safeguard its purity, is destroying the country they claim to love so dearly. In this country, “There is the great, vast, brooding, welcoming and bloodstained land, beautiful enough to astonish and break the heart,” James Baldwin wrote in No Name in the Street. “The land seems nearly to weep beneath the burden of this civilization’s unnameable excrescences. The people and the children wander blindly through their forest of billboards, antennae, Coca-Cola bottles, gas stations, drive-ins, motels, beer cans, music of a strident and invincible melancholy, stilted wooden porches, snapping fans, aggressively blue-jeaned buttocks, strutting crotches, pint bottles, condoms, in the weeds, rotting automobile corpses, brown as beetles, earrings flashing in the gloom of bus stops: over all there seems to hang a miasma of lust and longing and rage.”

I used to wonder what my future was in this country, but I have a new buoyancy, a revolutionary fervor. I don’t know how long this new buoyancy will last or when the fear and fury might revisit me, but what I do know is that the white racists involved in the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, in blocking the Emmitt Till Antilynching Bill, in signing a restrictive voting bill while a slave plantation hung on the wall, and in the January 6th insurrection aren’t coming to the future. Not everyone can come into the future.

Lincoln was the future. Lincoln still is the future. And that imaginary vista of the future I saw steals over me on these calm, peaceful times—of these racist, dark times being replaced by bright ones—of the children of all races, colors, sexes, orientations, and religions growing up in the steadfast observance of unity. We sit, drawn together in happiness, under the oak trees of our native nation, a bouquet of humanity pledging allegiance to a country that breathes forth the true spirit, the true nature of the planet. I lose myself in this fancy. But there are days when it gets broken off by the rushing vision of my ancestors’ brown faces still in the falling leaves waiting to be freed.

Allen M. Price’s essay “The Jailed Down Negro” is winner of the 2021 Columbia Journal winter contest. His essay “Black Landscapes Matter” is a 2023 Pushcart Prize nominee by upstreet, as is his essay “This Is My American Country” in Zone 3. His essay “Antebellum Redux” is a finalist in the 2022 Dogwood Literary Prize in nonfiction. His fiction and nonfiction work appears or is forthcoming in North American Review, Sweet, The Masters Review, Terrain.org, Shenandoah, Hobart, Transition Magazine, Entropy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Juked, River Teeth, The Fourth River (chosen by guest editor Ira Sukrungruang), Jellyfish Review, Bayou, Sou’wester, Cosmonauts Avenue, Gertrude Press, and The Saturday Evening Post, among others. An excerpt of his screenplay appears in The Louisville Review. His chapbook The Unintended Consequences of Haitian Reparation appears in Hawai’i Review. He has an MA in journalism from Emerson College.

There and Back

Maggie Maize

Mama and I wanted to see the country. We made the 3,409-mile train trip from Emeryville, California to Savannah, Georgia, where I’d start Savannah College of Art and Design and hopefully “figure it out.”

California Zephyr	Emeryville — Chicago	51 hours 40 minutes *
Capital Limited	Chicago — D.C.	17 hours 25 minutes *
Palmetto	D.C. — Savannah	13 hours 8 minutes *

*delays not included

The double-decker Zephyr slowed to a crawl through the Sierras. We were behind schedule before we left California. Private freight companies owned most of the tracks and controlled dispatching, so we’d stop to let them pass. This order was a much different picture than pre-boarding. Turns out that Amtrak functioned on trust and people who disliked flying. No metal detectors. No pat-downs. No liquid limits. Only half-assed ID checks.

That evening we rattled 70+ mph through the Great Basin. Passenger trains usually use stretch breaking to increase tension between cars for a smoother ride. That wasn’t the case that night. Perhaps the engineer assumed we were asleep and wouldn’t notice sharp jolts. Our car jostled; beds pitched. It’s difficult falling asleep with your fight-or-flight senses excited. Somehow the safety straps latched to the ceiling weren’t comforting either.

I’d been pushing the tragic stories about derailed speeding trains from my mind. Then Mama said, “I had an earthquake dream.” That gave me something new to think about: sweet California, years overdue for a catastrophic earthquake.

When daylight came, I used clues to “see” beyond the curated views out the window. After all, we passengers couldn’t see the tracks or crossings ahead. I learned to rely on our horn and speed to anticipate towns or traffic. Mama navigated a map, picked names off of signs, tracked landmarks and angles of roads. It’s satisfying being on the other side of the gates, enjoying lunch while all those cars wait for you to pass.

Mealtimes were structured: 6:30-10 a.m.; 11:30-3 p.m.; 5-9:30 p.m. Servers lumped together four passengers into booths. The kitchen was below. That’s where they thawed, cooked, and plated the carb-heavy meals. Salads and veggie burgers—the only variants from yellow food or steak—sold out first, so we ate early.

This car is where you get to practice your train-pitch, a repeatable story that gives fellow passengers an idea of who you are. A train-pitch answers the go-to questions: “Where are you going? Why there? Where are you coming from? What do you do?” The last question stressed me out. I’d been wandering for the past two years. Picking anything felt misleading.

One night we ate dinner with a down-to-earth Virginian couple on their way to Denver. The woman was a weaver. The man was a lawyer who appreciated art. He once offered a re-offender a deal to move somewhere touristy “like San Diego” and paint motorcycle gas-tanks. The offender passed it up.

Near the end of the story, a British accent distracted me. The young man sat down across the aisle and told his strangers that he was a writer. Everyone laughed at his theatrically delivered stories. A few minutes later, his tablemates fell into hushed whispers. He asked his strangers how to approach me and if he should with my mom there. I ordered my interests, so I’d be ready if he got around to asking. He didn’t ask, though. He’d probably already heard me tell the Virginian couple the cluttered version.

The long days were suitable for thinking and writing. How many houses had we passed? What an intrusion—the blaring horn in the standard sequence: long, long, short, long. And this was a single route, a single train. A plane doesn’t have to be very high up for people to disappear, for land to become a patchwork. The train’s wake was personal.

I desired some of the simple living we saw. All the experiences I couldn’t live overwhelmed me. One life, that’s it. Parked, staring at tiny farmhouses while a freighter passed us, I believed I could part with technology altogether and learn what life was supposed to be.

Some days, hovering in the bathroom and walking to the observation car was the extent of our exercise. Of course, you don’t take a cross-country train expecting tremendous activity. But by Colorado, Mama and I were desperate for fresh air. Most stops weren’t long enough to get off. During fuel breaks, we got ten or fifteen minutes to pace the platform and hold our breath through crew members’ cigarette smoke.

It didn’t matter which passenger car we boarded. The key was getting back on since it was the only train of the day. When the thrill faded, I mourned those who stayed off and continued their stories that I’d never converge with again. Dramatic, yes, but also true.

“I’ve only been trying to get you alone for the past two days,” the Brit said. He said it like I’d used great wit to escape him last time. Mama was back in the room, taking a nap, and it probably was the first time we were apart.

The twenty-three-year-old worked for some magazine in Chicago. He was returning to the city with travel articles. He admitted to stretching stories for interest. My weirdo-meter urged me to walk away, but maybe he repeated everyone’s name too often. I also laughed off his persistent offers to buy my sweater.

“So, Maggie,” he said, “tell me your story.”

My still-messy train-pitch came out so flat that he changed the story right in front of me. He took notes in a pocket-sized journal, across from mine, but wouldn’t let me see what he wrote. I confessed how disoriented I felt lately, how so much felt unattainable. “My words” likely made an excellent quote for his fabricated article. He joked that my interest in fiction meant I wrote smutty fanfiction. I should’ve laughed because my objection only emboldened him to detail his intimate relationships. I squirmed, and he beamed. I left him in the booth; he asked to stay in contact.

We arrived in Chicago six hours late and had to scurry to our connection. Tingly sadness sunk in once we were settled. I thought it was because I’d overshared. Little did I know the feeling would pulse back (even years later) each time someone said, “not to worry,” and I’d “figure things out.”

The observation car was built for eavesdropping. Complaints buzzed in this shared space. “There’s no wi-fi.” “Why are we late?” “The bathroom reeks.” “My seatmate is spilling onto my armrest.” A young man in a stretched-out T-shirt said into his phone, “I paid $8 for a mini-bar size of Jack Daniel’s.” His unfocused gaze slid over the rusty factory, glowing in the sunset. We’d be late to his stop in Toledo, Ohio. He hung up then struck up a conversation with a neighbor about his $8 shot.

In D.C., we got on the Palmetto, which felt like a dated airplane with its blasé curtains and faded warning signs. This train was single story. Our roomette had a toilet right beside the sliding door but had little privacy thanks to the drape’s age-worn Velcro. Flop the toilet seat down—that was the step to my bunk.

Hot air slurped through the doors as passengers moved between cars. Then we arrived in Savannah. We’d become yet another set of passengers let off before the train’s final destination. The trip felt incomplete, and I thought about the train for the whole quarter. I longed to get back on. So, in November after finals, Mama and I took the 3,409-mile trip back to California.

I recognized the houses and farms I’d fallen in love with back in August. A harsh freeze had blanched most everything dead. In Virginia, an Amish man talked about organic food with an educator. They discussed the corruption of companies claiming to be non-GMO and selling “organic” farmers genetically modified seeds.

A girl about my age joined the conversation, saying she was a religion major. She asked the man why the Amish shun some people from their community.

“They’re excluded from activities like church if they don’t try to live our way,” he said. “It’s that harsh because we want them to repent and reenter the community.” He backed his words with Bible verses. I wonder if the man was satisfied with his own train-pitch.

Then on the Zephyr, there were young farmers headed to Omaha, Nebraska. They wore dirty boots and pointed to fields saying, “They missed harvest by a week.”

I also met Kat, an 18-year-old in the observation car. Her mousy hair straggled over her shoulders. She’d bought a coach ticket, but the windowed car was where she spent most of her time. She boarded in Denver and was returning to rural Northern California after a spontaneous trip to Arkansas, where she was scoping out land. My anxiety seemed novice compared to Kat’s honed paranoia.

She and her boyfriend planned to move to Arkansas, use her solar energy knowledge to go off the grid in the mountains. This prep was for when the government crumbles, technology backfires and inevitably crashes.

Kat and I watercolored at a table, and the train’s wheels squealed long songs around bends. She set down her brush until her storytelling high faded. She’d pick it up, set it back down. This continued for a couple of hours. My train-pitch was no better than last time. For some reason, I told her about my confusion. Much like the Brit and everyone else who I’d told, though, Kat changed the subject. Why did it keep slipping out on the train? I wanted dates when I’d “figure it out.”

Mama eventually came looking for me. I wanted to give her a warning signal, but she was a better audience than I. Kat even backtracked part of her lizard-Illuminati conspiracy for Mama’s reaction.

Kat spoke in absolutes—even if she couldn’t explain. I agreed when she said we’re too dependent on technology, the government knows too much, and money comes and goes. My responses contributed little to the conversation. That’s the way she liked it, or so I thought.

“You know that bad feeling you get sometimes?” Kat said, over her sopping wet painting. Now she was talking to me. “Always trust that bad feeling.”

I’ve thought about Kat a lot since then. I wish I’d asked her how to decipher vague worries from legitimate warnings. California, too, had browned in the early freeze, and the marshland along the Bay was stagnant. The last few hours stretched long. I was ready by the time we arrived at our stop, the last stop. We disembarked with the remaining passengers, and things were still uncertain.

Maggie Maize holds a BFA in writing from Savannah College of Art and Design. Her writing has appeared in Savannah Magazine, Perhappened Mag, Funicular Magazine, and Sledgehammer Lit. She lives in Northern California.

Arlington or No Arlington: That is the Question, Or At Least One of Them

Gail Hosking

A veteran I met once named Bob, a former Mike Force Commander in Viet Nam, says he adored my father who was an enlisted man under his command, called me this week. “I know your dad wanted to be buried at Arlington,” he said out of the blue. “If your family is interested, the military can make that happen because of his Medal of Honor. They can move his body from New Jersey to D. C. I’ve already spoken to the nearby Deputy Commander at Fort Leavenworth.”

I paused and jotted down the details while the past churned up as fast as I could put the phone down. Why was Bob thinking of this so many decades after my father was killed in Viet Nam? Was it his continual loy- alty to a friend who did not survive the war? A feeling he owes my father something? His last act of love for a comrade? Or was it his allegiance to the military? I called my sisters and brother right away to leave the ques- tion in their laps, to see what they thought. The heaviness of the war’s return filled all four of us, though it’s been a long time since our father’s body arrived back to the states in a black body bag, years since he was buried in a family plot next to his father and grandparents in northern New Jersey. His death and that war were suddenly there again and could not be denied.

I didn’t want to deal with this.

I recalled that funeral day when I was seventeen as if yesterday. The fog, the drizzle, the cold, the bugle blown in the distance, the rifles salut- ing in the air, the soldiers on “funeral detail” who had flown all the way from Viet Nam for the occasion but would return as soon as ceremonies were over. I recalled the casseroles that my father’s cousins brought to my grandmother’s green and yellow house on New Street, my mother smoking one cigarette after another as she sat on the couch unable to move. I recalled familiar soldiers standing in the corner near my grandmother’s antique plant stand talking about my father—One hell of a soldier! I recall Reverend Highberger putting his hand on my grandmother’s shoul- der under a canopy at the gravesite, him repeating the Lord’s Prayer, and my Uncle Bob—my father’s only sibling—bending his head into his wool dress coat and sobbing. I remembered the undertaker refusing to let my grandmother see the body. “You don’t want to see this, Luella,” he said.

All this to say, when the former soldier called we had a language to link us. My dad was there again with the pull of the military as palatable as ever. It was my grandmother who insisted he be buried in a family plot. She would have nothing to do with Arlington way back when her first- born son was killed in action. I thought such questions were gone. Now they had returned. My sisters ask, who has ultimate say over his body? Is it the military, his family, or his fellow soldiers?

When Bob called me in previous times, he talked about how my fa- ther told him in Viet Nam to go home and make something of himself— get a Ph.D. “My dad, the one who dropped out of high school told you that?” I asked. Bob left the military after his final tour in Viet Nam, and by the time he got to Fort Bragg from Saigon he was told that my father had been killed in action. Surely he knew it was just a matter of time be- cause it was a statistic that kept getting repeated day after day. Bob was profoundly saddened, he said. In fact, to this day he carries a picture of my father in his wallet. “He was a character,” he repeats each time he calls. “And so smart. He taught me a great deal.” He says he owes his Ph.D. and career to my father who was older, had seen the Second World War when he was just 17, and then the Cold War in Europe where my father trans- lated Czech messages coming across the Iron Curtain and prepared for the Third World War.

Over the phone Bob reminds me again of the time he accompanied my father to the Bien Hoa PX to buy pearls for my 17th birthday. “Your father wasn’t allowed in the PX anymore because he would buy a case of whiskey and drink it all,” he said. “That’s why I went with him.” I picture officer and enlisted man walking in the door of a place filled with familiar American items a soldier might need or want for his family oceans away. Immediately I remember that green velvet box inside a yellow cardboard box arriving to the housing project I lived in with my mother and three siblings as we waited for his return. I can still feel the magic of opening such precious cargo that came from a place I could not begin to imagine. “I can hardly believe you are becoming a young lady,” my father wrote in red ink on the box. “And every young lady deserves pearls.” I wore them to the prom that month. The last gift. The last communication.

With Bob’s call, everything else returned in a rush like the details written down for military files, for the ceremony at the White House of his posthumously awarded Medal of Honor, or the Hall of Heroes pho- tographs in the Pentagon going back to the Civil War. Gathered details sum up what I can only tiptoe across because even to this day they are un- imaginable. Especially when someone asks, So what happened? How did your father die? “Crossing a river near the Cambodian border,” I always begin, “with a prisoner under his command.” When the prisoner grabbed a grenade off my father’s belt and attempted to throw it at the rest of the group, my father threw his body on the prisoner. You can imagine what happened next. The tattoos on my father’s arms were what identified him later. Nothing I want to talk about further, except to say eventually he was awarded the Medal of Honor. Nixon and the White House. His name on the wall in D.C., 17 E, five names down.

A long time ago.

But what wasn’t written down in the formal papers was the grief of family, the weight of carrying around the dead, or how easily the country forgets. What was left out was what war does to family, how my young mother was never the same again even with cards and letters stored in her nightstand drawer until the day of her death twenty years later.

I’m not sure how I remember this or even if it’s true, but I think my father said he wanted to be buried at Arlington or else on a funeral pyre in Viet Nam like the Buddhists he admired. But my grandmother wanted neither. My mother who by then was recently divorced from him, didn’t have a say. So it was he is buried in New Jersey in a family plot bought by my great grandparents. The cemetery also holds the bodies of soldiers going back to the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, soldiers whose names have been forgotten. I wonder if it matters where he is buried. Where is his spirit and would he care anymore? Earth to earth. ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I go through the day with these thoughts on my shoul- ders, the pressure of decision, and the past swimming through big holes.

Many years ago, a Boy Scout troop noticed my father’s burial stone and contacted a local military unit who now hold a ceremonial service by his grave every Memorial Day. They decorate the grave with flag and wreath on the day my grandmother used to refer to as “Decoration Day.” My sister who lives in New Jersey attends and plants red geraniums just like my grandmother did before she died at the age of 102. Back when she insisted he be buried near her family, I didn’t fully understand. I was so used to our lives as military, and because of that I expected Arlington. But now as a mother of two sons like her, I appreciate her need to be close by; in other words, to have him back home after decades of leaving to fight America’s wars. When she was buried next to him decades after his death, I watched the dirt from his grave mix with the dirt around her cas- ket. Mother and son.

I understand.

So now after all these years we are asked to decide again, Arlington or New Jersey? The energy—big energy—awakens and my sisters and I cannot decide. We lean one way because maybe it was his wish. We lean the other because it’s too late and what’s done is done. One sister insists he is New Jersey’s son with a park in Ramsey holding a bust of him. A hometown street is named after him. His name is on the New Jersey Viet Nam memorial. Beyond this, what is the issue? Another sister says she will agree with anything we decide, though maybe he belongs with his military tribe. “More people will notice his grave there long after we are gone,” she says. Our brother insists Arlington would be best, but he too will go along with anything we decide.

A feeling of loneliness comes over me when I picture his grave in some corner of Arlington. Perhaps with a small wreath or a flag on it just like all the others. “Oh, here’s someone who received the Medal of Honor,” I can almost hear strangers saying as they roam the mowed hills of our national cemetery. The truth is I want to put the war down, want to close the final door on those sorrowful years. But it seems impossible suddenly. My writing, calls from strangers, and new wars—no way to for- get. One minute I think he belongs there in D.C., and the next minute I cannot go against my grandmother’s wishes, a woman who cared for us often in his absence. Either way, he is gone. The troops have returned home. The Black Wall details the names of the dead.

A kind of loyalty exists in the military, the kind I keep running into with phone calls and letters out of the blue. Caretaking remains after the horrors of war. Even all these years later, soldiers seek me out to talk about my father. I’ve written a memoir about him. I’ve been to Viet Nam with a grassroots organization called Sons and Daughters in Touch. I’ve awoken in the night with leftover grief, sorrow for that 17-year-old los- ing her father and unable to talk about it, and sorrow for that father who surely knew loneliness himself, so far from his family, so filled with the craziness of war that he had to drink that much. The color gray—not black nor white, neither hero or looser—crowds my nights sometime even now when I’m older than my father ever was.

My son is now the age my father was when he was killed. The number stands out as if a blinking light. Now I understand how young forty-two is. I call him to ask what he thinks. “He gave his mother so much trouble by leaving her so she should have the last say,” he says with confidence. “I think you should let his body remain where he is.” A doctor friend insists we should consider my father’s wishes. A nephew says he could see both ways. All the while as I listen to others’ opinions, I picture a case of hand grenades under my father’s cot. His red, white and blue Mike Force scarf around his neck. What the French called terra rouge under his jungle boots. That Song Be River and the chirping of birds. People he would die for. Did die for. It’s armed forces competing with family. The rest between two notes as the poet Rumi wrote. What do I owe my father? What does he owe us?

Call it a painting we are not done with yet. With every phone call I’m back at the easel wondering what to add or subtract. In one way my father no longer exists, though he is very much alive in the painting of him at Fort Bragg’s Hosking Field House, on the black wall in D.C., in my books, and in the memories of soldiers still alive who embrace the grieving. And yet. And yet.

What I’m sure of is that my father would be proud of his four chil- dren. In spite of what comes home from war, in spite of poverty and grief, we all became something. Which is to say, we have lives. Children. Homes. We have all gotten on that train, as Frederick Douglass said once about courage, and headed forward. It could have been otherwise. We are left with what he taught us: disciple, love and the poetry he read to us as children. We are left with the insurance money he arranged before his fi- nal tour of duty so that we could all attend college. In spite of alcohol and absence and the tug of war, we always knew he loved us dearly. No small task in the world he inhabited.

But is digging up his grave and sending his bones to Arlington just another military experience taking over our lives? Would another MOH stone speak to passers-by of patriotism? I can still see his Charlie Chap- lin style civilian clothes, a Rudyard Kipling book in his pocket, his blond hair in a military buzz cut. A man who loved his family but struggled with home life as he cleaned his weapons at the kitchen table. I could go on and on. The discrepancies abound. A carved Buddha around his neck, an AK47 across his chest. There is no place to put such a man. Not New Jer- sey. Not Arlington. Then again, what does it matter?

Why am I struggling so much? How could one body hold so much power? “We’re military, Honey,” my mother used to say when I com- plained of moving again. Is giving my father’s body over to the military another return to that way of life? I wonder what she would say now.

Weeks after many family conversations and thoughts, I finally call Bob after dragging my feet. It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon and I’ve just finished watching the movie Summer of Soul—a documentary about a music festival in Harlem and life in America in 1969—with friends in upstate New York, a documentary about a music festival in Harlem and life in America in 1969. All I can envision is that year I went to the White House, that college year I tried so hard to tiptoe around the war protes- tors, the grief I carried in silence. When the film is over, I reluctantly pick up the phone to settle the question once and for all. I lean into the wall in another room as I stare out the window to the red maple trees with their falling leaves in the distance. Bob says he understands. “It’s what the fam- ily wants,” he says. He knows it must have been a tough decision. “We will stay in touch.”

“War lasts a long time,” I say into the phone just before we hang up, as if seeking assurance.

“Yes, it does,” he says with a tender yet confident pause.

For a moment the truth lies in the space between us.

When I hang up I burst into tears as if it were 1967 again, the year of his death. What I am carrying, what I have always carried since the war, releases off my chest and I cannot stop crying. I recognize there is no right answer, no way to say Arlington or New Jersey. Still, I feel as if I have let someone down—maybe Bob or my father or the tribe of the military or my family. That teenager I once was suddenly cannot stop crying.

The documentary I’ve just watched from that summer of soul brings back time. The music questioned our country’s psyche, divided us and brought us together all at the same time with songs like Bad Moon Rising, Everyday people. What’s Going On? With that the war returned for me and added to the weight of that final answer I gave Bob. Though the word final is clearly not the right word. The dictionary defines final as ir- revocable, conclusive, last and indisputable. The decision of Arlington or New Jersey is none of these.

Gail Hosking is the author of the memoir Snake’s Daughter: The Roads in and out of War (University of Iowa Press) and a book of poems Retrieval (Main Street Rag Press). She holds an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars and taught at Rochester Institute of Technology for 15 years. Her poems and essays have been widely published in such places as Lillith, Consequence Magazine, Reed Magazine, Upstreet, Waxwing, South Dakota Review, Collateral, and The Florida Review. Several pieces have been anthologized. Two of her essays were considered “most notable” in Best American Essays and she’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

The Woman and the Watcher

Melissa Hunter Gurney

There’s an oddity that comes with being told you might die. An ability to float above yourself, as if you’re dead already. An eerie feeling that your insides have fallen out—left your body empty, yearning, while they watch from outside. You become two people—the woman and the watcher. It’s the watcher who eventually tells the story—the watcher who knows everything each time you try to forget.

The woman asked cancer how long the ravaging usually took and whether there was a way she could make it beautiful. She wanted to keep cancer to herself—as if it were part of a dreamworld, as if explaining it would somehow make it less fantastical, as if it was a sexual experience that only her and cancer could understand—an intimate moment not to be shared. She whimpered, stroked the ribs along its stomach, nuzzled her head into its armpit, and closed her eyes. She asked it what it meant when death happened in a rented apartment. Asked it if people felt better when they died in nature—beneath long strands of willow or curled up in the crevices of oak. She asked it if it was true that people could heal themselves. She asked it if Western medicine was a farce. She asked it if she could keep it to herself—die in the night without anyone noticing. Her talking turned to whispers and then she went silent. She came to an unknown length of time later, like those moments when the driver all of a sudden realizes they are driving but can’t remember the road behind them. She looked up, towards the shadow of a neck, and mouthed the words—I’m on the left before allowing herself to cry.

The woman told cancer the history of those words. She told it how a childhood friend and she invented the saying, on the left, as they moved into the realm of adulthood. She told it she didn’t remember when they came up with it, or what exactly the context was, but she knew it had something to do with the panic that came with perusing one’s existence and something else to do with being a girl who would turn into a woman. A girl who would turn into a woman—she tongued the words between breaths. There was something mystical about it, she said. She knew that somehow, during this transition, being able to say— I’m on the left today—was imperative. She told it that the left was representative of a place inside themselves, a place that caused fear, angst, and sometimes revolution. She told it that she knew the simple murmuring of those four words to a friend who understood what they meant, would bring relief. Even if the depth wasn’t understood, there was one person who would relate to the girth of it, she said—one person who would know what it meant to be on the left, too. She waited, but cancer was silent.

Two months after the day she was told she had appendiceal cancer, two long months of living on the left, she was in the hospital for a second surgery. Five more scars on her belly, three feet of her insides removed, and a wound vac pulsing right below her heart. The nurses told her she had to walk today. The catheter slithered out and with her fluids removed, she went cold. Cancer was lying next to her. It was time to fly through the sky like an angel in heat. This isn’t what the nurse said, but it’s what the woman was imagining—flying through the sky like an angel in heat. She repeated it softly so the cancer could hear. There was a patient on the other side of the curtain, a patient she shared a room and a toilet with for five days, a patient who was ninety-seven years old and spoke Spanish, a patient who had a son, a daughter-in-law, and a cancer too—a patient who had priests in and out of her room at night. So, when the woman woke up, she found herself thinking about religious ordinance and places in the sky she’d never seen before. She asked cancer if it mattered that she wasn’t religious—if it was where we believed we’d go that we actually went. If not knowing, and therefore not believing anything, meant she’d float into an unknown field of matter. She asked it about the heat too. Maybe the heat’s because I’m a thirty-nine year old woman still wondering what it would be like to go through the pains and pleasures of pregnancy, she said. I never had a strong belief around babies either, she whispered. She asked cancer if it meant something. If lying in a hospital room, having had three feet of her insides cut out, no one coming to bring them back in a cute little bundle was symbolic—she left it for cancer to think about. The woman wondered if she’d ever feel heat again, or if from now on the only heat she’d feel was the heat of her own urine as it ran through her. Cancer never responded.

The nurse was still talking, singing almost, you’ll have to walk today, my darling. But, the woman couldn’t hear her. She asked cancer what it meant to be in heat—for your body to change like the colors in a light stream—for parts of you to fly through the sky while the rest stayed on the ground sifting through dirt. She asked it if some wombs birthed death instead of life—empty sacks filled with disease. She asked it if walking was merely a distraction from flight—if she was meant to be here to begin with. When she finally came back into focus, she desperately wanted to send a message to her childhood friend that read—I’m on the left . . . help. But she didn’t.. She realized she was in her first trimester and cancer was the father—the only one she was allowed to rub her belly in front of, the only one who understood the fragility of what grew inside.

I hear it’s time to walk. The woman’s partner was in the room staring at her—he’d clearly said something she missed while she was in conversation with cancer. Heeeelloooo—where are you . . .? he said as he put his hand on her arm.When she came out of herself and saw him, heard his voice, she had a momentary flash to a version of life where their child had just been born. She envisioned passing the baby to him and watching his face as he held it. This is the only way she would have imagined their partnership in a hospital room before. When her eyes came into focus, she saw him looking at her with pain and worry, covered in death—the death of spontaneity, the death of safety, the death of everything that comes with knowing the people you love are healthy. She turned away from her partner, leaned into cancer. Don’t let him see me like this, she whispered. Her partner placed his hand on her chin, gently turning her face back towards him. He used the voice he used when he was trying to make her laugh—a voice that seemingly hid the fear within. Don’t do that, he said. The woman saw him—his flesh, his truth, the vastness of his humanity filling the room like the song of a babies’ first cry—the palatable smell of metal waste bins and empty syringes brought her back. She put her head in her hands wanting to hide her tears. I can’t walk, she said. I’m not ready—it hurts too much. Her partner leaned in and put his forehead to hers, something they did by mistake one time that somehow became a thing. When she closed her eyes and felt his skin, she pictured cancer watching them. She asked it to stop. She asked it to leave them alone. She asked it why it was doing this to her—why it implanted itself between them. Cancer ignored her. I’ll do it, she blurted—I’ll walk.

She had no idea that upon trying to walk for the first time she’d once again run into the concept of lefts. She closed her eyes as her partner helped her get to a sitting position on the side of the hospital bed. The messy braid her hair was in fell across the middle of her breast and she could feel her gown separating in the back—air wrapping around her incisions. The wound vac continued to pulse, but the pulse felt more like a stab—a heart that was trying to kill her. She could hear the patient’s son entering on the other side of the curtain while her partner moved her pole, her bags and her wires closer to her. Hola, mi amor, the son said, and the sound of dry, tired kisses rose to the ceiling while the woman rose to her feet. She stood hunched over, holding on to the metal pole as if it was a life force. The woman would never forget that moment. It was the first time in her life she knew she couldn’t escape. She’d fractured a bone in her foot when she was younger, but even then she could crawl or hop out of a room, move quick enough to hide beneath a bed or behind a curtain.

Now, she was stuck in limbs and muscles that didn’t work. Stuck in the realization that death was in her—some kind of gene mutation—a conspiracy of her body and mind. How could death be in her? She couldn’t imagine it. Stuck in something so beautiful—a symbiotic river of power and life, a luminescent shell holding everything she knew to be her. Stuck in a womb pulsating blood and nutrients to her emotions, her mind, her heart. Stuck in a sensory being that glows with ecstasy when others touch and peruse its crevices, fondle its curves, lick its paws, breathe its scent, taste its pleasure. She turned to cancer. How could this vessel that holds all the mystery, all the beauty, all the secret worlds of me—all the whispers, all the dreams, all the characters, all the philosophies, all the empathy, and all the fucking love? How could this place I worship, this place I learned to treasure so much so that I carved my entire life around it—the choice not to get married again, the choice not to yearn or plan for children, the choice to build a sanctuary around this body, this constantly evolving root entangled with the vastness of the universe. The choice to allow those who want to come to come, those who want to leave to leave. How could death be in this vessel of mine? She repeated it sharply so cancer could hear the pain as it tinged through her wounds.

Her partner brought her back again. Heeeeeey . . . are you with me . . . we can do this, you know. With his help, she pushed the pole and moved one foot in front of the other again and again until they were in enough of a rhythm that she could go back—back to the left where she’d been residing quite permanently now—back to cancer. She asked it how death got in her. She told it that she understood it would happen one day. She told it that when she was little, the thoughts of death came in the night—she’d pictured a man under the bed with a knife waiting to pierce each layer and turn her into a bird. She told it that as she got older she imagined the walls dissipating when the sun went down—her body vulnerable, seen by the ghosts of those who entered before her. She told it how a snake would slither in from the wilds—the kind of snake that takes birds from their nests and swallows them whole she whispered. She told it about the human hands pushing her in front of the train as it rushed into a station. She told it how she thought about the bridge collapsing while she was driving across, the explosion rippling through the subway tunnels and the being alive for a few hours buried beneath a city and a people—buried beneath breath. She told it she thought about the plane going down, smashing through a mountain range or into an infinite ocean. She told it the sharks were a constant—piercing her flesh between coasts. Rising up from dark harbors. Tearing through a leg where rivers fall into seas.

She told cancer that she convinced herself it was these thoughts that kept her alive. Predicting the danger before it had time to creep in. When she crossed the streets she pictured the trucks smashing her to the ground—the head she used to see in the mirror splattered across the ugly, flat pavement. It would be so much better if it was a dirt road, she’d think, and she’d walk across unscathed—traffic moving like light around her. She told it she was protected by stories, shielded by fantasy and fiction. Fantasy and fiction she hissed as she pictured cancer slyly smiling. She never imagined what it would be like if death was in her. Her feet came back into focus and she moved one hand to her belly—holding it so it didn’t have room to move. How are you doing? Her partner asked. Fine. She said. Do you want to get some tea or sit in a different space for a while? He placed his hand lightly on the edge of her back. No. She said. I want to go back to my room, I can’t walk anymore. She could feel the heat from his hand. Okay, he said, we’re getting closer, just a little further.She noticed a photograph of a mother and child sitting in a field of flowers. The mother wasn’t smiling though, her face was resting and the child sat beside her mimicking her stillness. Her partner told her to stop in front of it for a moment. He wanted to grab a coffee and he needed the nurse to watch her while he did. The picture of the mother and her child turned blurry and the woman turned to cancer again. How could this vessel, that she’d put so much into, be the murder and the violence, the death and the meal? How could this vessel be the monster she’d secretly and methodically been preparing for? How could this vessel—with all these roots and all this imagination and all this beating, screaming love—be the thing she had to fear most? When her partner came back, she looked at him and he looked at her. You’re doing great he said, we’re almost to the halfway point. When they started walking again, the woman looked at her feet, elbows and forearms resting on the rim around the metal pole, barely holding herself up in a hunched over position. I hate this, she thought, they can’t know how much it hurts. One foot in front of the other over and over again until she knew her feet would do it without her. When she looked up she could see the door that led her back to her bed. The number 223 B was getting close enough to read. She turned to her partner, moving slower and slower as she got closer. I never thought I’d be like this in front of you, she said. Be like what? he answered, his hands holding the unruly wires that kept getting stuck beneath her wheels—you never thought you’d be this beautifully human? She wanted to feel his sweetness but instead she felt shame and anger—the kind of shame and anger that made her want to tell him he should walk, not her. Walk away as quickly as he could. It would only get uglier from here. Forget walking, walking was for people like her, he could run, he could do the escaping she couldn’t. She wanted to tell him she’d be fine, she had cancer now—she didn’t need him anymore. Just as she was about to say it, just as she was about to make herself look worse off than she already was, she heard this loud rattling getting closer and closer to her, and all of a sudden a grey haired man, double her age with a Swedish accent said, passing on the left and whizzed by with his pole and the rickety wheels dragging behind him, trying to keep up. She stopped, looked at her partner, and they both broke out in uncontrollable laughter. The kind of laughter that caused unbroken people to lose their breath, but she was broken and it wasn’t her breath she lost, it was everything inside of her crashing together at once—an explosion of pain so sharp and so real she shrieked loud enough for the nurses to hear and come running. Stop laughing. She said please in a kind of whimper, I can’t . . . it hurts too much . . . stop . . . please. Her laughter turned to tears as the pain pulsed through and all the way up. She grabbed cancer, pulled it to her — this must be what it feels like to give birth, she said, and then she pushed cancer to the cold ground and felt heat again. When she finally got control of herself she looked at her partner and instead of telling him to run from her she thanked him for being with her during one of the lowest moments in her life. The moment a gray haired, Swedish man, double her age, outran her in the cancer ward. She turned back to see a shadow rising—maybe the left is where I need to be, she whispered loud enough for cancer to hear.

Melissa Hunter Gurney is a Brooklyn-based writer, educator, and curator. She is the co-founder of GAMBA Forest, a community art space and literary lounge in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and Black Land Ownership, a grassroots organization put in place to combat systemic oppression around property in the Americas. Her work tends to explore the multifaceted experiences of Pan-American women and artists and can be found in various publications including: The Yale Review, Pank, Great Weather for Media, The Opiate, Paris Lit Up, Brilliant Short Fiction and Across the Margin.

Beautiful Things

Zozulka Hausler Lew

Corona. Only pharmacies and liquor stores will remain open. So everyone can get their drugs and their coronas. There is too much going on right now. I walk down the street frantically, paying no mind to the bodies around me. I’m just chasing after whatever sanity I have left, it is just out of reach, but I know exactly where to locate it. Everything will be okay. I have no motivation, no direction, and no desire to do anything. On top of this loss of control in my own personal life, half the world is dying from COVID-19 and the governor is considering a complete shutdown of NYC. My city is going to disappear so can you please just announce that all retail stores, including Levi’s (where I work), are shutting down already. I’m impatient when it comes to grim prospects of the world.

“Just get on with it already!” I scream in my head, not directed towards anyone or anything in particular.

The red brick brownstone where I grew up, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, comes into sight. Years of paint chipping away, now covered in illegible tags, and a huge “FOR LEASE” sign plastered to the face of the building shrieks at me. Shut up. I can smell the garbage and shit that rots in the downstairs entrance. Stumbling over the brick in the sidewalk that still sticks up, I know I am home.

I unlatch the waist-high black metal gate across the front stoop and close it behind me a little too hard, causing that familiar metal clang. Our family installed the gate years ago to discourage passersby from loitering on the stoop (like I am now), and to give some measure of privacy. But now I’m safe, the sun hugs me in a warm embrace and the gate seals off the outside world. I can watch the people go by, and write behind this invisible wall. I find my spot, next to a big crack my family never got around to fixing, tucked away in the corner of the doorway entrance. The entranceway is huge: two side-by-side, 9-foot-tall, red-painted oak doors with large glass panels, still covered by old lace curtains strung across the inside of each door. A half-moon glass transom over the doors sports the familiar “No. 203” in hand-painted gold leaf.

I run my hand over the cherry colored paint of the door and quickly scribble my tag “CHAOZ” with a chisel tip Sharpie under some intruders tag. Might as well. This is my space, my territory. So many nights spent on this stoop, talking to my dog Booey, watching people walk by on these crowded sidewalks, in this vibrant neighborhood, while my mother, father, aunt, and whichever one of their various friends came by to socialize, share laughs and drink beers. I long for the cool breeze of those evenings, watching the sun slowly fade; scents of pizza, Budweiser, and Marlboros converge in my memory. I used to imagine myself doing the same thing one day, drinking and laughing with my friends on this stoop, but not smoking because I promised my parents I would never smoke.

Tears gathering in my eyes, I pull out my notebook, a small sketchbook I refer to as my Book of Chaoz. It’s filled with weird sketches, anecdotes, and inconsistent handwriting. I flip through, I need to pick the perfect page, and land on one somewhere in the middle. This is where my book on sexuality and my distorted sense of femininity begins. I’ve been meaning to put it down on paper, but could never bring myself to, so I’ve just been collecting all these thoughts in my head, locked away in an impenetrable space, just how I am sitting here, hiding. Drops of salty sorrows mix with the ink on the page as I’m already reminiscing on my childhood on top of reflecting on my painful experiences. At this point I’m just consumed by my emotions, trapped in my Book of Chaoz, burying everything away.

Something catches my attention out of the corner of my eye, dragging me back to reality. I turn my head to the right and a tiny dog attached to a red leash is walking up the five steps from the ground floor entrance to the sidewalk. The ground floor sits half-way below the sidewalk level, an architectural design I will never understand in these old Brooklyn brownstones. From where I am perched on the top of the front stoop, it makes it hard to see who is on the other end of the leash. The dog reaches the top step, level now with the sidewalk, and I can now see him leading a young woman. Simultaneously, I hear a group of middle schoolers, to my left, walking towards me and my territory. I can tell they are in middle school by the pitch of their voices and the way they sneer and laugh. There are about ten of them and they’re screaming “EWWW DIRTY BITCH,” and other inaudible, vile, remarks. They remind me of a pack of hyenas.

I see that they’re taunting the woman who is coming up the bottom entrance steps with the little dog. I direct my attention back to her. She is standing at the top of the steps now, still behind that gate, which is clearly not protecting her from the outside world as well as my gate is. She is wearing an army green sweatshirt, ripped cargos, and a worn-out army backpack. She has a shaved head and lots of face tattoos she did herself. I can tell by the technique, it is very similar to my DIY tattoos.

“I’m going to fucking kill myself,” she mutters under her breathe.

Not quietly enough though, because I hear her and decide to befriend her. I should have opened with “Fuck those kids,” because that’s what I am thinking. Instead I say, “Hey!” I think she also decides to befriend me or at least trust that I’m not going to harm her because I’m not in the best state myself.

I smile and ask “Are you staying here?”

Apprehensive, she turns towards me, but says nothing, sizing me up. I explain to her that this is where I grew up, in this building, and that I come here sometimes just to feel at home. I see a shift in her. She lowers her protective shield, realizing I’m not an enemy. She finally responds.“Yeah, I stay here. The basement door is always open. I stay here with my friends.”

I tell her, “I haven’t been inside since we moved. My great-grandmother bought this house in the early 70s and it has been in my family since then. Until we sold it.”

I linger on this statement in my mind. My grandparents immigrated here from Ukraine when they were kids, escaping WWII, after spending years in DP camps in Germany and Austria. They both grew up in Brooklyn, in this same neighborhood and eventually met in their teens. My mother and her sisters all lived in this house with their grandmother–my great-grandmother–at various times throughout their childhoods. My great-grandmother passed away here, in this house. I was born here and lived here my entire childhood, until my grandmother sold the house four years ago. I spent every holiday there with extended family–cousins, aunts, uncles, various in-laws. Christmas was my favorite. We would set up two long folding tables in the living room on the ground floor, cramming everything into the limited space like a jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes we would have over 20 people on mix-and-match chairs sitting around the table, set with linens embroidered with traditional Ukrainian designs. My mom has old black and white photographs of my grandmother and great-grandparents spending holidays in the same room, the multi-course, meatless Christmas Eve dinners or the hams and assorted porks of post-church Easter meals visible in the photos. I often wondered if their celebrations were as chaotically joyous as ours.

There are three apartments in the building, sprawled over four floors, all once occupied by relatives and family friends. Yellow peeling linoleum covered the hallway floors and steps of all the staircases, leading upstairs. There were more doors than rooms in the building, a result of many incomplete renovations. Each apartment had a marble fireplace, each doorway covered in detailed trim, and tiles of every color and shape could be found inside. My favorite tiles were the ones that covered the walls of the bathroom of the ground floor, that also led out to the backyard. They were perfect pink squares surrounded by blue rectangles with hand painted flowers. The backyard was beautiful. There were perpetual packs of cautious feral cats roaming around; grapevines covered each fence; and shady trees towered taller than our buildings, four stories high; all hidden from the outside world. My floor-to-ceiling, bedroom bay-windows overlooked the backyard and I remember always looking out at my secret forest under the night sky. I used to call it the Brooklyn Forest. I’m sure it more closely resembles a jungle now, wild and overgrown, without my mom and aunt to care for it and keep it neat and tame.

“My friend Scoop, he’s a little crazy, I wouldn’t go down there,” the girl warns me, interrupting my daydreams of the Brooklyn Forest. “He poked someone up with his knife when they came down before. He’s really protective of this place because it’s kinda our home.”

That’s when it hit me. This home that I have so many memories in, that I had spent most of my life in, and in which so much of my ancestors’ lives unfolded in, was no longer mine. It would always be my home, but I no longer lived there. I have to let go. And I did let go, at that moment. Hearing this stranger–always on guard against the world around her–say those words and seeing that she now took comfort in the same place that protected me for 14 years and still protects me now.

“Do you know anywhere I can take a shit?” she asks.

“There’s a Starbucks a few blocks away” I respond, giving her directions.

She walks off and I am back to writing in my Book of Chaoz. A new sense of liberation and peace comes into me. I am safe here right now, writing on the steps of my childhood home. But I was released from this home, almost four years ago, and now I’m ready to let it go. In the same way these words will be freed from my Book of Chaoz one day and set upon the world. In the same way I said my last goodbyes to Booey, holding her close on the living room floor as she was freed from this world. In the same way I whispered goodnight to my Brooklyn Forest on the last night I spent here.

The girl returns a few minutes later. We start talking again. As she’s telling me about all the places she has lived in across the country, traveling around, I come to realize she can’t be more than five years older than me. I offer her a Marlboro out of my pack, and smile to myself as I recall all the beautiful things I had the chance to experience living in this home. It is no longer my home, but will always be my portal to all the beautiful things in this world.

Zozulka Hausler Lew was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York and is Ukrainian-American. This is her first published essay.