You see, my parents were always picky about their food. They wouldn’t eat this, they wouldn’t eat that. Very choosy. Which sometimes got them in trouble. That’s why it was particularly peculiar on Thanksgiving Day that they ate the whole meal themselves. My mother does not like turkey, but she ate the thing whole… My father hates cranberry sauce, yet he satisfyingly licked the sticky remains off his fingers. They did not even tell my brother and me to come down to eat.

Summer was when their “habits” really set in. On a hot Saturday afternoon, we all decided to go to the community pool to cool off… My parents had other ideas. We arrived, and they drank all the water in the pool. Nobody could swim.

That Sunday, we went to the cathedral in town. The sermon was about gluttony. How ironic.

The next day, the weather was terrible—storms everywhere. So, my father stole the lightning from the sky and ate it whole. One day after work, my mother came home and ate the patio. I was afraid she would start on the whole house. This continued for months… They were ravenous.

Their worst episode was at our cousin’s wedding… Everyone dressed in their Sunday’s best. At the reception, guests cheered on the newlyweds while my parents made their way to every table… More importantly, they ate every plate and wiped them clean. The caterers did not have extra food to spare.

One day, we were watching television. I asked them, Why are you like this? The pool, Thanksgiving, the wedding—why did you consume everything?

They said, We are not sure.

I replied, You know you are gluttons?

They said, We have the right to do anything—but we will not be mastered by anything.

I said, If you are given to gluttony, I should put a knife to your throats.

They said, We are scared, something consumed us.

I said, What?

They said, Open us.

I said I would not.

They said, You have to see, we are not your parents.

I said I would be convicted of murder and I am too young to go to jail.

They pleaded, Please, please open us and see. Pretend we are gifts. We are afraid. Save us!

I said, Don’t be afraid (even though fear consumed me).

They started screaming, Save us!

I slit their throats. Red spilled all over the floor like a river running through a valley. As did my tears. I heard something in the other room. I saw my parents, but not in their mortal state. They were beings but not humans.

My mother smiled and looked down at the table. Thanksgiving dinner was served.

Grace Reed was born and raised outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania. She attends Towson University and plans on graduating with a degree in Mass Communication on a Public Relations and Advertising track in 2021. Her writing speaks louder than she does.

Featured image: Frank Lindecke

I performed a speedy pre-scan of Beth Ann Fennelly’s 52 micro-memoirs, Heating and Cooling.  I stopped at page 63.  The word Beyoncé caught my eye at the top right-hand side of the page.  I knew this book and I would be great friends. I was curious to see where America’s national treasure would show up in Fennelly’s life.  

I was surprised to find Beyoncé tucked between the lines of Fennelly’s memoir, “The Neighbor, The Chickens, and The Flames.”  It’s a short, fascinating read about a rogue chicken, stolen eggs, a chicken coop caught on fire, and the brief mention of a monopoly match.

I devoured Fennelly’s memoirs.  I read the book over again.  I enjoyed myself.  Why not?  It was like having drinks at the bar with a good friend—you know, the fun one.  The one who always has a story to tell.  You sit behind the bar in a tall chair, one hand cupping the thick wet glass of a cold pint, legs crossed, facing her, phone in purse, never touched during time spent together.  It isn’t needed because this is Beth Ann.

She takes you to a game of pool in a biker bar, to Barcelona, to a living room where she discusses false teeth with her father-in-law, to her nail salon, her bed post, her marriage, her children—yes, even marriage and children, which can be so incredibly boring in Facebook posts, become entertainment when Fennelly shares them.

You snort, almost spitting out your beer when she tells you about the dead cat in plastic wrap next to the vodka in her friend’s freezer. 

It’s not always fun and games.  Sometimes you get serious, as close friends do.  She recalls the strained confession of the words “I love you” to her father.  Those words were hard to say.  You lean in close, touch her arm, you’ve been there too.

 But then she shakes the heaviness of the moment off with an eye-roll of a story about the “commodification of art,” and some other small grievance about an obnoxious “rival poet” she remembers from grad school. Other writers can be so annoying. 

I drank all of Heating and Cooling in.  Over-served—52 rounds.  I stumbled home—giddy, warm, smiling.  Happy to have had the honor of a riot of a time with Beth Ann.

 And now, it’s your turn.   

I have a gynecologist appointment today. I’m scared, strangely. And I’m just now realizing that I’m not scared of my doctor per say, or the sterile smell, or the plethora of expired magazines, or the bubbled-bellies of the women sitting next to me, or the crinkle of the paper under my naked lower half, or the way my youthful blue toenails look next to a graying head, or the way I feel I’m being pulled open and explored like a crime scene often disrupted. But I’m just now realizing that I’m scared of what lives between my legs. We share a heartbeat.

I remember all of my friends getting their periods. I remember girls whispering about how Sarah uses tampons, not pads like the rest of us – of them. I remember girls shuffling off to the bathroom with their little purses wrapped around their bodies, like sashes of womanhood draped across their chests. How desperately I wanted to wear the same, display the same.

It’s almost comedic, how many times I’ve told men I believe I’m infertile. It’s just a feeling, I say – to myself or to them. It’s because I don’t understand what shares a heartbeat with me. And if I can’t understand that, how would I ever understand a child inside of me?

I thought getting my period would make me feel in sync with my body. It might help me understand. Why do my elbows ache when I put my weight on them? Why do my thumbs swell up in the morning? Why do my teeth feel scratchy when I chew on ice? Why did my body tremble when I climbed the rope in gym class? I quake at the thought of anyone else exploring the part of me I share a heartbeat with. You don’t have to do that, I always offer. Maybe it’s more so Please let me understand that part of me before you do; let me explore this uncharted territory on my own.

My aunt and uncle have a big house on the outskirts of the city. Old and beautiful and complete with additions. They’ve owned it my whole life, and yet I still have dreams where I’m exploring dark corners of the house. I never manage to construct a complete correlation between corridors. I think I idolize its enigmatic appeal. But if given the opportunity to pass through each doorway, I’m unsure if I would.

My period has never been normal. “You’re lucky,” I recall my friends telling me. “It’s always once a month for me, and like floodgates.” They wanted the way my body rarely decided to mourn its loss of possibility. And somehow I found myself sobbing in back bathroom stalls because my body refused to evolve. I don’t understand why I still find myself crying, though I’ve achieved this sense of womanhood I so desperately cried out for. Why do I suddenly stumble upon myself sitting in the shower like that? Or why am I standing at the gas pump like that? People can see you, I have to tell myself. And still, I’m crying. I’m happy, there’s nothing for me to be stressed about. And still, I’m crying in the grocery store. Maybe I need to talk to somebody.

“I had my period every other week when I was living in Florida,” I told my gynecologist once while staring at the porous ceiling tiles, looking for a pattern when there was only chaos.  She didn’t have an answer. “No real reason to be concerned,” I recall her saying as she closed my legs like she was done with her afternoon reading.

Perhaps my fear of that part of my body could be attributed to a violation. Or violations. I wonder if there’s a place they’re piling up, like parking tickets on a dusty dashboard. Like a dusty dashboard left abandoned in an otherwise empty lot on the edge of a dense wood. Like a dense wood that holds a needle in the haystack, abandoned and waiting to be sorrowfully discovered. A body once kissed and touched and held and loved, now swinging like drying meat on display.

I keep desperately trying to pay these violations off in whatever ways I can. Three glasses of Hendricks and a desperately generous tip. A desperately warm smile at the stringy girl waiting in my therapist’s office. A collected face and back turned to the funeral, desperate handkerchiefs stashed up my sleeves. The desperate clown. Desperate to understand and possibly distract.

I think I’ve digressed. I’m terrified of the creature that lives between my legs, the thing I share a heartbeat with. The monster and victim all in one. I want to love it, to proudly march down a crowded D.C. street for it. But here I am, telling myself I’m scared of the sterile smell that tugs to attention the hairs on my arms, of the magazines haphazardly stacked waiting for someone to make a move, of the tiny babies struggling to win their little wars in the womb, of the vulnerability of my station on that damn paper, of the practically faceless who’s searching for the details of my personal fortress, of the tool being prepared to pull me apart, of the way I’m being held open and explored like the crime scene I am. All instead of admitting I don’t understand the thing that supposedly defines me. We share a heartbeat.

Christy Kato is a 2018 Acting and Theatre BFA graduate from Towson University. She maintains a “very personal” blog that serves as a cathartic outlet for herself, but was created to encourage others to share their personal stories of struggle and growth. This is her first publication.

Check out her blog below!

https://www.christykato.com/?fbclid=IwAR3JyzPEjJoRY0HLbPYrAUgTUmXRYiAkiXdC-ROE5Tp5jxvFgYuh5aKAy-A

I am writing to ask if you’d like

to dance again in the kitchen.

I have never been much for a phone

call, as you know. I was thinking

I could bring boas and peacock

flumes for our shoulders and the waists

of our pants. All the times you’ve tried

to teach me the Charleston 

with my eyes closed—this time,

I’d like to open them. We can put ice

in the beer because you prefer it

that way. We can smoke

your Slims as we make our way

through six rounds of gin

rummy. At midnight, we could eat

half-truths as you tell me how you fell

in love. I’d like to fall

asleep in that bed while you play

solitaire at your desk—just once more.

Carmelita, this could be read

as atonement but I must live

with the choice I made, having never sent

this letter. They called me an hour ago

to tell me that you had died.

Yesterday I sat beside you,

you still able to hold my hand.

I heard you mumble along

to the song we once circled

our hips to and I could only sit dumb

and cry. Carmelita, they’ve told me

that you’ve died and I can only sit here

pouring over a letter I never intended on sending you. 

Alison Hazle is a poet/writer and art school survivor. She plans to pursue an MFA somewhere far away from Baltimore.

Let’s speak of the grizzly bear

in the middle of the room.

Thick black rambutan branches

dripping citrus under the sun.

What extra powers are suppressed

beneath? Lulling opponents to sleep

with each bend against the wind. Hope

is lost if you stare directly into the void

because by then, arms will outstretch

to consume its prey & what other

response is justified when under

direct attack & the focal

point is to stifle the air around you.

Any creature backed into a corner

remembers they have to survive &

remembers that they have skin

beneath their fur that can be penetrated

unless they quickly realize that

it isn’t the hair that wards off defenders

but the hidden keen teeth that refuse

to help another man’s hunger.

Joshua Nguyen is a Kundiman Fellow, collegiate national poetry champion (CUPSI), and a native Houstonian. He has been published in The Offing, The Acentos Review, Rambutan Literary, Button Poetry, The Texas Review, Gulf Coast, and Hot Metal Bridge. He is currently an MFA candidate at The University of Mississippi. He is a bubble tea connoisseur and works in a kitchen.

A swing brushes the cement low, in slow motion, as if drawn through night’s deep syrup, as if burdened, holding the dark ball of a child hidden in the twilight’s smeary sleight of hand. They must be there: it’s some trick of the bare winter branches and sallow moonlight. Their shivering laughter rattles like dead leaves across the blacktop, rubber-soled high tops slapping concrete.

Genelle Chaconas is nonbinary gendered, queer, an abuse survivor, has mood disorders, and feels proud. They earned a BA in Creative Writing from CSUS in 2009, an MFA in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University in 2015, and 50k of debt. They never learned to “photograph” but take photos. They’ve been published lots but don’t namedrop. Their chapbooks include Fallout, Saints and Dirty Pictures (little m press, 2011) and Yet Wave (the Lune, 2017). They serve as head editor for HockSpitSlurp Literary Magazine. They enjoy scifi and gangster flix, drone/noise/industrial music, and long walks off short piers.

One: Evan Nicholls can live in it. He can wave to an orgy
of cows under the field oak. Nod to the bull on the hill.
Sleep back in the steel bed, by nobody or somebody.
 
 
Two: Evan Nicholls can kill in it. Probably on accident,
a person or himself. The mathematics of truck plus tree.
Or the barrelling off of a sea cliff. Make somebody a body.
 
 
Three: Evan Nicholls can pick-up and go in it. Become
nobody. The rubber could scree like a chicken hawk.
And ‘Bye.’ Forget both the living and the dead.

Evan Nicholls has work appearing in Passages North, Maudlin House, THRUSH, Pithead Chapel, GASHER, and Whurk among others. He is from Fauquier County, Virginia. Follow him on Twitter: @nicholls_evan. Read more at https://evannichollswrites.wordpress.com.

Freedom Day

The first ever truly democratic election in South Africa’s history took place on April 27, 1994 – just over eight months before I was born. My mother must have been pregnant with me. This is somehow the first time I’m realizing this.

Although Apartheid claimed its official chokehold on South Africa in 1948, my country had not known freedom since 1652, when Europeans first settled in the Cape, at the southern-most tip of Africa. They named it the Cape of Good Hope as they claimed a land that was not theirs.

Twenty-two million people showed up to vote. Despite numerous threats of violence, it was completely peaceful. A nation’s grief and turmoil and anger and confusion fell silent as Nelson Mandela of the African National Congress became President Nelson Mandela of the African National Congress. This peace was a miracle, I was told again and again growing up. I believed it. I still do. Much of life in South Africa seemed like a miracle to me. I am still convinced there is no more miraculous sight than the morning sun slowly filling African skies. The rays appear slowly and cautiously, and then all at once – smattering the skyline with colors as deep and rich as the African soil. Every other sunrise since I left seems like a muted echo in comparison.

The Boy in the Backpack

Awareness of race is something I grew up with. It is impossible not to in South Africa.

I cannot be entirely sure, but the first time I recall realizing race meant different people were not treated equally by society, I was young. Close to five. I was in my mom’s old, dark green VW polo hatchback.

Mommy, why do we have a car and they don’t? I asked, pointing a stubby finger at a dark-skinned boy, roughly my age, who was wearing a blue shirt and backpack half his body’s size. He was being rushed along the tarred pavement by his dark-skinned mother. We were both going to school.

I watched my mother’s eyes flicker briefly toward the boy and his mom and immediately dart back to the road.

It’s because of the old government, Bunni, she said slowly. Looking like us meant people could get better jobs more easily. The old government didn’t like black people, my angel.

But why? My eyes had not moved from the small boy and his enormous backpack. That’s my fair!

No, my angel. No, it’s not.

Hijack

I remember it being sunny. It’s almost always sunny in Durban. My aunt and cousins were visiting from Cape Town, and they accompanied my grandmother on her usual route of collecting my brother and me from school. All six of us were crammed into my granny’s tiny VW.

We arrived at the gate to the apartment complex that my brother and I lived in with my mom – all houses, apartments, or town homes exist behind walls decorated with electric fences and barbed wire in South Africa. The keys. She left the gate keys in the car’s boot.

The rest, as devastatingly cliché life often is, is a blur. It might be because I was only five. Or maybe six.

Four men glided towards the tiny white car. I can still see knives glinting and bodies rushing and car doors yanking open and slamming. I can still feel my aunt’s arm wrapping around my small body and forcefully pulling me from the car. We stood in silence in the space where the car was just a few seconds ago and watched it disappear around the corner.

My grandmother had wet herself.

An official government study established approximately eighty-five hijackings take place in Durban daily, roughly four each hour. This is one of the greatest tragedies of my beautiful home: no one is afforded the right to mourn traumatic experiences because each incident is just a statistic. Approximately eighty-four other hijackings happened that day. And the day after that. And the day after that. If we grieved each crime, life would halt. And there’s too much life in South Africa for that.

The Belly Incident

Fuller female figures are typically more attractive to most South Africans. South Africans are also very comfortable talking to strangers – alarmingly so to foreigners. It’s the first thing I caution any friends visiting from Europe about. My warning – which follows roughly the same script: South Africans are a touchy, talkative people! Strangers are probably going to hug you. Don’t be freaked out, okay? – is usually greeted with a grimace that I assume is meant to be closer to a smile. But in South Africa, it really is not weird. For most of my life, it felt like there were no strangers in South Africa, just friends you haven’t seen in a while. A cliché does not make something any less true.

I was fifteen when it happened. The Incident. I was meticulously examining the chocolate bar options at an extremely ordinary petrol station – while my dad paid for the petrol – when a disembodied hand collided with my belly.

SMACK

It looks good! exclaimed the possessor of the hand, which was now patting my stomach. I had not seen this hand before, nor had I seen the woman it was attached to. The dread that ensued can only be reserved for a stranger telling an insecure teenage girl that her awkward, chubby belly is, in fact, as chubby as she feared.

My home has a unique ability to teach people to find the humor in each situation. Even horrified fifteen-year-olds.

Anger

I have spent much of my life feeling angry. Sometimes angry and confused. Sometimes angry and guilty. But always angry. It is not loud. It simmers, cooking slowly. It certainly does not yell Yes, I like beer, okay! in a courtroom. It is not a hostile witness. I’ve come to understand this anger as quiet and just. It is often too easy to mistake volume for strength.

I was privileged enough to not be shielded from what happened before I was born.

In my mother not protecting me from the profound evil so many white people committed, she protected me from becoming another white person who perpetuates the same evil. My school teachers did the same. They never shielded us from what happened only a few years prior.

My generation is known as the Born-Frees. It makes sense. Legally, we were the first generation where all races were born free and equal. For the first time since my ancestors arrived on the continent. The thing about being South African is that none of us are ever truly free from Apartheid. It is too deeply entrenched in South African earth. We are buried and born in it.

I don’t remember the first time I felt guilty about my white skin. But I also don’t remember a time I didn’t feel guilty about the fact my lighter skin color meant things were easier for me. Because of Apartheid, the majority of white South Africans had better access to educational and economic opportunities than their darker-skinned counterparts. Many still do. Apartheid was a system brilliant in its cruelty. Almost twenty-four years later, its structure is still being dismantled.

I am still angry a lot, though it’s different now. I understand the world better now than I did as a child. Injustice is ugly. It is hideous that I am treated differently because I am a small white woman and not a Black man. This anger, it still simmers – but it propels me forward.

IT Reimagined

I worked at a nonprofit organization called the Domino Foundation the year after I finished high school and the year before I left South Africa. I loved it there.

There were many moments I loved. Moments that still make me smile. We worked with a low-income community forty minutes outside Durban.

It was substantive work. Immediately rewarding, often hilarious. Once such incident was when the foundation’s coordinator, Shaun, sent a clown to a day-care center that the organization runs.

The children, very young – no older than three – had never seen a white person before, let alone a ghostly white person with an alarmingly large and red nose.

Chaos ensued. To put it delicately, toddler shit hit the fan.

Chubby little legs speedily waddled as far away from the well-meaning monster as the four walls would let them, and shrieks bounced off every surface until the horrendous pale beast was successfully removed from sight.

It is one of my favorite disaster tales of all time, both fictional and non-fictional.

Shaun is no longer allowed to send people – red-wigged or otherwise – to the foundation’s day-care centers.

S.A.P.D.

I once saw someone getting beaten by the police. He could have been a violent or dangerous criminal. He could have stolen food to ward off Death for another day.

We were leaving a successful day of being authentic Durbanites: freckles, pink noses and salty skin, barefoot and covered in melted ice cream remnants.

The Elangeni Hotel slowly passed my window. We snuck up to the hotel’s rooftop pool (reserved for guests) on several occasions; I was well-acquainted with the towering, white, beachfront edifice.

I usually have an alarmingly good memory; I’ve spent most of my life pretending I don’t remember as much about people as I do to avoid seeming like a creep. Yet, I cannot remember many details about what I saw. I can’t remember how many policemen were there or how many weapons thrashed through the air exactly. At least three. I think. I also cannot remember how old I was.

Old enough to know what I was witnessing was wrong. Old enough to feel nauseated. Old enough to feel the weight of shame settle upon me as I breathed a sigh of a relief when the scene finally moved out of my view.

Is violence part of South African DNA? I want to believe it’s not, but sometimes I cannot even convince myself.

The Cell Phone

My mom was very strict about cell phones. You can get one when you turn thirteen, Andrea was the response to my incessant and tormented nagging.

It’s my mom’s second favorite party trick to regale a time we walked past a cellphone shop in a white-tiled mall, and a tear trickled slowly down my cheek as I gazed longingly at the Motorolas and Nokias and Samsungs I could not have for another year.

Her favorite party trick is to whip out a letter – penned in my twelve-year-old hand – that she has scanned on her phone:

DEAR MOM

   PLEASE, please can I get a cellphone. I promise I’ll never leave anything on the floor again, I’ll make my lunch, pay 4 airtime. I’ll do ANYTHING (beside eating avo, banana and butter*). It’s a matter of life and social rejection!

   PLEASE!!

   (If you don’t let her get a phone) soon to be socially rejected daughter

ANDREA

Oh to be an almost-teenager when a cell phone is the be-all and end-all of life itself. I miss it sometimes.

*Under absolutely no circumstance would I agree to eat these. Absolutely NO circumstance.

Shaka’s Rock

Shaka Zulu was a famous Zulu warrior and king who lived between 1787 and 1852. He is renowned for throwing his warriors he deemed cowardly in battle off a large piece of rock that juts into the Indian Ocean, close to his military base. SAHistory.org matter-of-factly recounts the mass deaths that occurred after the death of his mother, Nandi. He murdered people because he believed they did not show enough grief. He was – and still is – revered for his brutality. 

I am very familiar with this rock as I grew up a twenty-five-minute drive from it. My friend’s family owned a sugarcane farm only five minutes from where so many Zulus paid the price for their perceived cowardice. We all stayed on Georgie’s farm at least once a year, for the Mr. Price Pro concert. The Mr. Price Pro (although there is a new sponsor now) is an annual surfing competition that attracts surfers from all over the world. We never cared much for the contest itself. It was the free ocean-side concerts on the Friday and Saturday nights we ascended upon the beachfront for. Thousands of people gathered to fist bump, sway, or get up to general mischief at Shaka’s Rock Beach.

King Shaka is an important part of our history. There’s an entire page on South Africa’s official government website dedicated to him. His real name was Sigidi kaSezangakhona, “King of the Zulus”, it tells readers. He is also responsible for revolutionizing how Zulu warriors battled. The assegai-throwing spear was replaced with short stabbing spears, enabling the Zulus to conquer enemies at close range. Many more people could be killed.

There everyone stood – there I stood for so many years – drinking and dancing on the land where so much blood was spilled, laughing and cheering as the tide lapped gently, gently over the rocks. 

My Father’s Father

We do not know how my dad’s ancestors arrived in South Africa. Though it’s safe for white South Africans to assume (if we do not know how our ancestors arrived) that it was to further either the Dutch or British imperial agenda.

They were Dutch, later becoming Afrikaans as culture transformed and morphed. They arrived on ships, with slurs already forming on the tip of their tongues.

This, of course, is speculation. But that does not mean it is incorrect.

This is the thing about being South African: it is almost a given my white DNA (at least in part) comes from slave-owners or enforcers or supporters of Apartheid. It is sometimes difficult to accept how my family was brought to South Africa. It is hard to accept my genes are likely shared by administrators of evil.

I used to worry my DNA was contaminated. 

I do not regret not knowing my dad’s family history, or even my dad’s dad. I think I’d rather not know. It’s easier if my speculations remain just that: unconfirmed ponderings.

The Street Vendors

Wherever you go, you will find street vendors. Ironing board covers, mass-produced Chinese goods, and seasonal fruit weave in between cars stopped at traffic lights. It is as South African as my seventy-nine-year-old grandmother deterring small grey vervet monkeys from burglarizing her house by threatening them with a water gun half the size of her entire body.

To me, South Africa’s vendors make its streets feel like home. No vendors more so than the beaders. The beads are captivating and bright and intricately molded into every shape imaginable. The beaders’ hands are limitless in their capabilities.

Sawubona! they yell across the car park. Hello!

Their faces are limitless in joy.

Sometimes you feel someone’s smile more than you see it.

Michael McIver

I love my dad. He is incredibly generous – irresponsibly so, actually. And he is kind. And loving. I know he would do anything for my brother and me. But my dad is a racist. I’ve never known the full extent of his racism, but it’s always made its presence known. I remember flinching each time he used a word I will not repeat. I remember being confused at how kindly he treated people of color but how unkindly he spoke about them.

There was a time when I was about seven, two-ish years after my parents got divorced. I went to my dad’s house for the weekend, and true to character, he sent us back to my mother with a pile of random gifts. One of them was a flag, which I proudly showed my mom.

This is a BAD flag, Andrea! she said sharply, striding across the kitchen and snatching the offending item from my small hands. I saw horror and anger in her green eyes – my eyes.

I didn’t understand.

This the flag the old government used – the government that would have never ever let you and Jessie be friends. We do NOT use our flag. This is not South Africa’s flag anymore. She slowly walked over to the corner of our kitchen and dropped it in. The bin lid slammed closed.

No me and Jessie? Whose house would I go to on the weekends? Who would I play with at school? I wondered aloud.

Jessie and I have been friends for over 18 years. Ever since we shared toothless grins as five-year-olds. We’ve spent countless hours laughing and crying and laugh-crying. We’ve traveled through Europe and stayed in dingy hostel rooms together.

Jessie is a black Xhosa woman.

Oh.

Then I understood.

My relationship with my dad is complex. It’s difficult to fully blame him for something that doesn’t seem entirely his fault. My dad is a twin. From what I’ve gathered from his sister, Diane, my grandmother was particularly partial to his twin brother. His dad, my grandfather, died before I was born. I was never sorry about this fact – he was a cruel, hard man from the stories my dad told us. I do not even know my grandfather’s name. He was Afrikaans, South African Dutch, and emulated every unfavorable quality an Afrikaans man could possibly possess: an inclination for beating and aversion to emotion, tightly wrapped in undiluted racism.

My grandfather is the reason my dad could never bring himself to even raise his voice at us. He was beaten first and taught later.

When my dad was 12, he witnessed his six-year-old brother, Arthur, accidentally fall off an apartment balcony. He was sitting on the ledge and he slipped. My dad watched as Arthur’s small body crumpled and cracked at the force of gravity pulling him toward the earth.

His family never spoke about it.

I love my dad so much. And his racism is so, so ugly. Some things just cannot be reconciled.

Sleepover

I had a favorite bedroom wall in the house I lived in between the ages of seven and seventeen. It was behind my door and it was glorious. My mom had a rule: if I didn’t draw or paint on my other bedroom walls (a tough ask for my younger self), I could unleash all the creativity I possessed on that ten-by-five-foot wall behind my door.

My friends and I loved – LOVED – Louise Rennison’s book series about a human disaster named Georgia Nicholson and her friends, the Ace gang. Noni, Jessie, Paige, Cally, Shianne, and I read all ten books and regaled each of Georgia’s antics around Eastbourne with more enthusiasm than we discussed our own, sharing our sandwiches and carrots and chips and peanuts with each other.

The day we learned a film of the first two books – Angus, Thongs and Full-frontal Snogging and It’s OK, I’m Wearing Really Big Knickers, was being made became one of the most thrilling moments of our pre-teen lives. So much so, we graciously overlooked the film was called Angus, Thongs and the Perfect Snogging instead of its original and significantly more amusing name.

We fell in love, along with Georgia, with Robbie as we ceremoniously gathered around the TV in my living room. More specifically, Aaron Johnson (now Aaron Taylor-Johnson), the most infuriatingly beautiful male specimen our twelve-year-old eyes had ever gazed upon. We were as horrified to learn of his relationship with a director over twenty years his senior as we were hypnotized by his face. We were outraged by his sheer audacity to not reciprocate at least one of our loves.

We lamented the love that was not to be as we scribbled his name and Andi or Noni or Jessie or Paige or Cally or Shi in hearts on that 10×5 foot wall behind my bedroom door well into the early hours of the next day.

The Tree Fellers

The first things that come into vision are tree stumps decorated with chainsaws and a sign reading TREE FELLING with a phone number. I wondered then, and I wonder now, if anyone ever calls the number. The Tree Fellers are refugees.

Always.

Displaced people who have fled other African countries, fled death. They are often doctors and physicists and teachers – people with so much to offer a society they will never fully be a part of. Bound by their need for survival.

And there they wait, all day. Behind the chainsaws on the tree stumps. Waiting, waiting, waiting for their phones to ring.

Ubuntu

You have an accent!

Yes, I answer. We all do. Americans are not somehow void of an accent. People’s frequent inability to comprehend this fact astounds me. Depending on my how sassy I am feeling, I will add this. For the sake of peace, however, I mostly just leave it at Yes.

Where are you from?

I never grow tired of watching people try to connect my fair, freckled skin with my African nationality and heritage. Confusion slowly creeps across their faces, battling an innate societal understanding that it is not polite to tell someone they are not allowed to be where they are from.

Life imitates art, you know. In my case, the art happens to be Tina Fey’s pop culture masterpiece: Mean Girls. If you’re from Africa, why are you white? is my American national anthem.

The next question on the script is cued: What’s it like in South Africa?

Four years later, this question still stumps me. How do I start to explain the complexities of South Africa? I never want to scare people with our crime statistics. But I am also not ashamed of its troubles. How does a nation begin to fill a chasm that has been systematically eroded for hundreds of years? How do I explain the irrational sense of hope that persists? I cannot.

I settle for Ubuntu. I am because you are. This is what makes South Africa the most beautiful place on Earth to me, regardless of our beaches or game reserves or wineries. It is our people’s innate care for one another; the acceptance that we cannot function individually if one of us is hurting.

How are you? Unjani? Hoe gaan dit? Eleven national languages all express the same sentiment. How are you? Tell me. I want to know.

It is the sheer determination of South Africans to overcome – to refuse defeat – that marks my nation. South Africa is hideous and magnificent and its soil will always feel like home beneath my feet.

Andi McIver is a senior at Towson University. She grew up in South Africa and is a Mass Communication major. She has received the Elizabeth Wainio Memorial Communications Fund Scholarship for academic excellence, Patrick J.O’Connell Memorial Fund Scholarship for most promising Mass Communication student, and TSEM Information Literary Award.

Those of us hailing from that oddly shaped mid-Atlantic state haphazardly carved into the east coast of America are probably familiar with the strange phenomenon that coincides with traveling either north or south from our homeland. I’ve been as far as Massachusetts in one direction and the tip of Florida in the other. At a bar in South Carolina, I got called a “Yankee,” one hundred and fifty years after the Civil War’s conclusion. In an upstate New York antique mall, a gentleman described me as a, “good ol’ boy.” Being a Marylander is sometimes confusing.

You could blame the Mason-Dixon Line, a demarcation that resulted from a land dispute between Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware during the latter half of the eighteenth century, one that would have tremendous and far-reaching consequences after becoming the de facto border between North and South, Freedom and Slavery.

For being a relatively small patch of land, Maryland held enormous strategic importance during the Civil War. Considered a semi-loyal “border state,” the territory remained technically in Union hands. Though most of its population was initially sympathetic to the North, there was certainly a strong contingent of Confederate separatists as well.

With its proximity to the nation’s capital, the Old Line State (a nickname bestowed by George Washington) became at times a hotly contested battleground. The Battle of Antietam, the single bloodiest day of the conflict, was fought on Maryland soil. Abraham Lincoln further stoked tension in the region by suspending the right of habeas corpus, which remained a widespread source of animosity even after the War ended. The sixteenth president is much better associated with a different Latin phrase: sic semper tyrannis, the words shouted by John Wilkes Booth, assassin, Marylander.

As a kid growing up in the 1990s, this period of American history became a big part of my educational experience. We’d be loaded onto a rickety, old, yellow school bus and carted off to sites like the Monocacy Battlefield, just outside of my hometown Frederick. In fifth grade my class re-enacted the Battle of Antietam. Donning period appropriate garb then pitching tents in the softball field, we fashioned rifles and bayonets out of construction paper and ate hardtack as we awaited further orders.

Our teachers eventually arranged us in formation, Rebels positioned atop a small hill with Yankees lined up in ranks at the bottom. Everyone was given a number. Our hulking gym teacher, Mr. Bentley, a vein bursting from his forehead, rallied the troops with a booming call to arms, “Charge!”

In retrospect, the set-up was historically accurate if not slightly unsettling. During the final phase of the battle, Union troops marched against a division of Confederates entrenched along a ridge. With dense woods and large rocky outcropping, the Rebels had ample natural cover in addition to holding high ground, making for the perfect defensive position. The boys in blue, on the other hand, were forced to cross a creek over a narrow stone bridge during the assault, leaving them bottlenecked and completely exposed to Confederate fire from above. One survivor described the scene as “a valley of death.” By the evening of September 17, 1862, almost 23,000 men were dead, wounded, or missing.

During our re-enactment, I’d been enlisted to the Confederacy, a fact that in retrospect deeply troubles me. In the wake of the 2017 Charlottesville attack, the catalyst of which was the proposed removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, recalling my ten-year-old self clad in gray and shouting, “Die, Yankees!” makes me feel physically ill.

I remember crouching in the grass on that tiny hill pretending to fire my paper musket. Mr. Bentley shouted out random numbers, “Seventeen! Four! Twenty-two!” If your number was called, you were supposed to drop dead. I watched in a gleeful sort of awe as droves of my friends collapsed into the earth, crying out in imagined agony, their faces contorted in pretend pain. Near the battle’s end, a bird shit on my hat and I started to cry.

Like my time spent masquerading as a Confederate infantryman, the current state slogan for Maryland is so cringeworthy I almost hesitate to write it: “If you’re looking for a merry land, go to Maryland!” It’s trite to the point of embarrassment, almost as bad as the state motto, a blatantly sexist sixteenth-century quip attributed originally to Pope Clement VII: “Fatti maschii, parole femine.” This translates from the Italian as, “Manly deeds, womanly words.” Over the years, there have been numerous attempts to modify this saying to the more gender neutral, “Strong deeds, quiet words,” but these efforts have gone in vain, despite the fact that no one seems able to concretely explain why this quote was even added onto the Maryland state seal in the first place.

I much prefer the old slogan: “More Than You Can Imagine.” As if the little microcosm of America we inhabit is some sort of abstraction, an impossibility  beyond the scope of human comprehension. It’s true that I don’t understand exactly what attracts me to this place, keeps me tethered here. I suspect this inbetweenness, this duality, fits with the way I view myself, Janus-like, a multiplicity, Yankee, Rebel, both, neither.

Matt Lee is an actor, teacher, and writer from Maryland. His writing has appeared at Sleaze Mag, Tragickal, SOFT CARTEL, Philosophical Idiot, and fluland. He has also written and produced numerous original works for the stage. Visit mattleewrites.com for more info.

                                          *
 
Not the first time I loved you, just the first time I met you.
Your breath like dead fish pickled in your alcoholism.
Your knuckles raw from beating someone up the night before.
Your long hair greased from stress and hours.
A single word etched into each of your twelve teeth:
 
I  was  born  to  die  alone  these  thoughts  are  not  my  own
 
I made you smile three times to read the whole poem.
It wasn’t hard to do: smile first
and laugh at a thing you said. I don’t remember what it was.
That makes me a bad person. Worse than you maybe.
I don’t usually fall in the dark
but in the freak of the night I had a pang—
a longing to believe that we are more than they claim
or at least that one of us might be.
 
                                                *
 
Not the first time I loved you but when I was deep in love with you.
My hand, caught in a bad dream, running across the metal plate
that the doctors placed above your burning brain;
the times you tried to drain the ghosts yourself
through the holes someone made in your skull.
 
But  they  could  not  see  you  so  the  help  was  only  hurt
 
And if I’m being honest, there might have been a sliver of me
that wanted to believe certain people are unlovable
so I might could maybe call myself a miracle worker.
Your swollen foot pressed deep into the gas pedal.
The speedometer breaking; the ignited city pulsing through us.
You screaming at the windshield that you wanted to murder the whole world.
And it would be easy enough to be horrified but instead
I only whispered in your ear that crows don’t fly south for the winter.
 
                                                *
 
Not the first time I loved you, just the first time I doubted you.
When you tried to drown me in the bathtub, calling it the ocean.
Calling it a baptism or a long time coming.
Your skin turned lizard beneath the bathroom lighting
and as I lay there, supine and scared, I began to notice:
 
All  this  violence  was  too  vague  all  these  fears  were  too  specific
 
And what scared me wasn’t you and it wasn’t dying
but something threatening in the underbelly of the water.
My reflection choking on the air above me.
I wanted to sink to the bottom of the ocean.
I wanted to rise to the top of the atmosphere.
Then you let go of my chest
and I rose to meet myself in the space inside the surface tension.
I took a breath and saw you wrapped up in yourself crying on the floor
and I pulled the plug and watched the water flow down the drain.
 
                                                *
 
Not the first time I loved you but the time that I left you.
We drove all night and lay in the dying dark;
I, drunk and hungry, you coughing up blood onto the side of the freeway.
As daylight suffocated the stars
I ran my aching tongue along your teeth:
 
I  was  born  to  die  alone  these  thoughts  are  not  my  own
 
The birds began to sing the morning and I felt your breath turn heavy
and my left hand pulled the keys from your pocket
as my right hand circled the broken circle of your face.
The engine humming, the road passing beneath me, you alone in that ditch.
This makes me a bad person, worse than you maybe.
I didn’t think about the first time I loved you.
I didn’t think about anything at all, only stared ahead.
The planet curved with cruelty, carrying me with it.
 
                                                *

Trevor Plate spent his childhood on the island of Guam before moving to the mainland at eighteen. Now he lives all over the country while he continues to write poetry. His poems have previously appeared in Maudlin House, Boston Accent, and The Ilanot Review.