Dear Former Neighbor:
It’s been years since we were neighbors. Our children are grown up and are making their own ways in the world, yet you came to mind when I recently read the poem, “I am the Rage” by Dr. Martina McGowan.
One evening you called me, “Valerie, I wanted to talk to you. I’m not sure if you’re aware of what happened between Hailey and John?”
I was the only one of my friends without a cassette player, except for Lily, whose father was the head of the Party’s neighborhood branch. Even if they had the money, he would have never allowed it, fearing that music from the West would poison her mind with capitalist ideas.
My preferred route, the one I take most often, is considered the “back way,” avoiding the busier streets clogged by the construction of my city’s attempt at a working public transportation system. The other route is the busier one I try to avoid: quicker, yes, but with a high possibility of construction and traffic.
Brilliant, she thought, studying her own face. Following
the lines like little eroded paths down a hill of dirt.
At the bottom of anything is the top of something.
Before bed she pulls the blinds down in specific order,
then she taps each wall three times with her right pointer finger.
Grief is weird. Many of us know about the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance), so I will save you the details of what that entails and how we move through each of them, sometimes without even realizing it. Sometimes even years later. But what happens after these stages? What happens years later when you look up at the sky?
For me, wrestling history is a guidepost for some of my more nebulous memories, as well as a link to some simpler life moments. I always remember wrestling playing some role in those memories, mainly the issues of WWF magazine I was reading. They’re like anchors that make the memories more authentic, and they help validate the trauma that was to come later on in my life.
Grief invades
the thin columns of days. A phone
rings. Tree bark flakes
away. I become
salt on tongue, raw
I just added the word “disabled” to my author’s bio. Before that, I was using “neurodivergent” or “AuDHD” (the amalgamation of Autism and ADHD) as the first descriptors after my name, but thanks to receiving an autism diagnosis around my 35th birthday, I began toying with the idea of typing out “disabled” in describing myself to literary magazines.
That August I chewed a pill
and slept. A green dragonfly lit
my daughter’s hand on fire. Her new
school planted tens of thousands
It seems to be dragging its freight
like an enormous beast.
On Monday at dawn,
two children saw a body
floating in the current,
BA, Theatre, Small Liberal Arts College, 2017
I graduated in the spring of 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in theatre (spelled with an RE to show this was a deeply academic and artistic liberal arts theater program). I moved to Chicago from the small village in Ohio where I studied with dreams of “making it” as an improviser and comedy writer.
The origins of my villainy begin in early February 2020 when I drove to the other side of the state to stay with my parents for my mother’s birthday. This was a trip I did regularly, often alone. It felt like something of an escape, a place I could go and not feel the weight of everyday responsibilities.
“I made dal last night” might be the most unremarkable thing anyone can say because probably so did half a billion people in India alone. I made dal last night in Los Angeles because it rained as much in a day as the whole of last year, and I wanted more than comfort food.
Because all the birds do not fall
frozen from the trees,
and the squirrels do wake in time, most of them,
from their torpor, to the memory of nuts
under the snow lying inert for the whole bitter season;
As a woman artist, I feel most qualified to offer perspectives on what it means to be a woman in the world. Such work enables us to consider women in ways that focus on our lives, passions, and past histories, and consider how the male gaze has historically objectified women, fragmenting their outward appearance from their personhood and psychological experiences.
I’ve always gravitated to poetry. I remember writing in high school for the literary journal. Then, in college, I started taking creative writing courses, specifically poetry ones and even changed my major to English from Anthropology—primarily because I had taken an Intro to Poetry writing course and loved it.
I realized I had to do this for better or worse.
Hail Satan! I just joined The Satanic Temple, my 42-year-old daughter texted on a ‘till-that-point typical Wednesday. It stopped me right in the middle of my mid-morning channel surfing.
I thought I had let go of the concept of Satan around the same time I ditched the conservative Protestant faith I was raised in. Leaving the church hadn’t been difficult for me.
The power has been out for four days, after a bomb cyclone ripped the tops off redwood trees and deposited them around the neighborhood. Initially, my daughter, well past the cusp of patience, asked for story ideas so that she could write and keep the boredom at bay, but of course, my stories are not what she wants. This habit is about a year old, soliciting my ideas only to find a world of her own—hovering, perfecting the art of the unsaid empty space.
Every night I walk the Walls, a 12,382 cell spreadsheet of the names of women incarcerated at the first state Penitentiary in Baton Rouge between 1833 to 1913. The headers scroll past: Register # Color Name(s) Died Escaped Marks Crime Term Time of Conviction Please Name of Presiding Judge. I am a fickle warden, careless. I move women around like chess pieces until their histories align in some order.
When I was very young, I was returned nightly to this wooden box, lined with straw and scraps of colorful flyers advertising our recent tour stops—now repurposed to warm my nights. As I grew, I was moved first in with the acrobats: a great cozy room of hammocks and bunk beds and foreign accents. By the age of ten, I shared quarters with The Strongest Man in the World
Welcome to the Antique Shoppe. Here you will find chains of entangled generations, layers of dust caked on old family photographs and journals, and rust crawling up the legs of various pedestals. For some, it is your first time inside an antique store, but for most of us, this is the place we’ve referred to as home.
Listen, my dog likes to stare
into mirrors. She’s not narcissistic—
she believes her reflection’s a captive
companion confined behind glass,
a trouble-free and safe friend
I started writing Double Down South based on a memory of a woman who came into a pool hall I hung out in, in Nashville, when I was 13 or 14. The people who ran the place were all called Nick—nasty guys who said things 14-year-olds shouldn’t hear and didn’t understand but knew were inappropriate.
The big yellow bus rumbled along, flattening the grasses along the edge of the road. The fence posts for the ranches the bus was passing stood in line, keeping the fence wires in place, though here and there a sprouting post had already become a tree again. Rain had moistened the land and there were puddles in the road;
There was nothing about my upbringing, on the surface, that would have prepared me for the life I was going to lead—one that now seems fated because of the way I went after my interests, which were not the interests of the people around me. I read constantly. I checked out recordings of Broadway musicals. I was interested in performance.
no stalker got you under his skin
trauma acquired from cinema conglomerates
for our bodies to be more responsive
to all the vibrations and sounds from the screen
in your mind the 4DX movie theater opens its doors wide
Joe, a friend of mine, was unwell. Even after consulting many doctors for over three months and taking numerous medications, there was no relief. They had him undergo many medical tests such as x-rays and scans, and they also examined the blood work, but no one could figure out the illness he was ailing from.
these aren’t my woods anymore / the trees I knew were cut down / and replanted by something / domesticated / malleable / for the paper factory / down the way / the wild tangle / of snarling underbrush / tilted saplings strong enough / to survive hurricane season / creeks rising from the rocks / then sinking into the marsh / sloppy roots crisscrossing over / exposed limestone / in the soil
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