Tag: Narrative nonfiction

Assigned at Birth

By Ellen D.B. Riggle

I needed only search a few minutes to find the aging heavy cardstock piece of paper labeled in block letters across the top, “BIRTH CERTIFICATE.” I scanned a copy of this original document into a PowerPoint slide for a talk I was scheduled to give on so-called “bathroom laws”—legislation restricting who can use which public restroom. To illustrate how my restroom destiny was determined at birth, I clicked on the virtual highlighter button and looked at the picture on the screen searching for my “sex.” Within the faded decorative border is my name, parents’ names, date, time, and location of my birth, and the signature of the hospital’s “duly authorized officer.” In the lower left corner is my tiny baby footprint. However, nowhere is my “sex”—not a prompt nor a blank line. Nothing to highlight.

I checked the original document, thinking maybe this vital information did not scan properly. No, it simply was not there.

In 2016, North Carolina became the first state to pass a bathroom law, House Bill 2 (HB2), restricting access to public restrooms based on “biological sex,” defined as “the physical condition of being male or female, which is stated on a person’s birth certificate.” Although North Carolina was pressured by a coalition of activists and companies to effectively repeal HB2, by early 2025 fifteen states had legislation restricting restroom use based on sex or gender assigned at birth, including two states that have criminal penalties for anyone who runs afoul of the law. Several other states have legislation pending, and current presidential executive orders attempt to regulate access to sex-specific restrooms.

Confused, given the certainty of the legislators in North Carolina and other states that one only need consult the birth certificate to ascertain their sex, I began searching for more information. First, I checked with my brother, born in the same state as I, but in a different year and hospital. His birth certificate decisively declares “male.” Online, I found various images from my home state and others across time, almost all of which included “sex”—although interestingly, not all did.

The birth certificate is far more complex than most people would suspect. In the United States, birth certificates are issued by a variety of sources. Hospitals give new parents, like mine, a fancy piece of paper, sometimes referred to as “ceremonial” or tritely as a “souvenir.” It is not a government document. However, it is (using legal terms) primary, original, direct evidence of the actual birth. This piece of paper is what most people consider to be their birth certificates—especially when that is the title at the top of the document.

A different form, named something like “Registration of Live Birth,” is how a hospital reports to the appropriate county or state agency that a child was delivered alive, and records the date, time, and location (obviously for later astrological consultations), the baby’s name, parents’ names, and maybe other information such as sex and race. The resulting document is issued with an official embossed seal for proving citizenship. I checked the county’s “birth certificate” that I used to obtain a passport in the early 80s, and again found no report of my sex.

Intrigued, I continued searching for my restroom destiny.

Data about births are collected by states and reported to the federal government annually as mandated by the Vital Statistics Act. The federal government agency questionnaire of over 60 items for each birth is a relatively recent invention, and none of the information is mandatory. With no standard national form for birth certificates or registrations of birth, states and localities include different information in their files and create their own documents. Consequently, the National Center for Health Statistics estimates there are over 14,000 different variations of the birth certificate currently found in the United States.

I began to question the implications of this lack of decree of my sex. For example, what would I do the next time I flew through an airport in a state with a so-called bathroom law? What restroom would I be entitled to use? Would I be entitled to use the restroom at all? Would I use the “family restroom” even though I am not a family? Maybe I’ll fly only through airports located in states without such laws?

The legal sex on my driver’s license is listed as F. Seemingly, the DMV accepted my word for it when I turned 16, and it has been so ever since. X has never been an option where I live. Recently I paid for a new copy of what, in my county of origin, is now called a Certificate of Birth. It’s unclear when the certificate form was updated, but on the current version, my sex is listed as “female,” a designation not on prior documents and with no indication of when or how this was determined. In my mind, this is not my birth certificate; it is, at best, a sketchy administrative document of nebulous origin and uncertain validity.

Some legislators seem to have caught on to the birth certificate sex void, because several recent iterations of bathroom bills do not refer specifically to birth certificates but more generally to “sex assigned at birth.” Most legislatures have gone with that vague wording, but Montana lawmakers are quite graphic in their attempt to define sex. “Female” is a human with XX chromosomes and “produces or would produce relatively large, relatively immobile gametes, or eggs, during her life cycle.” “Male” is a human with XY chromosomes and “produces or would produce small, mobile gametes, or sperm, during his life cycle.” This wording ties sexing a baby to an event more than a decade in the future (puberty). Also, I personally find it disturbingly creepy that legislators are talking about human babies the way they do cattle. Perhaps they have forgotten that in the cattle farm economy, producers of small, mobile gametes have little value beyond ending up as a hamburger on someone’s grill.

Where I come from, long before kindergarten we learned it’s not polite to look up girls’ dresses or down boys’ pants. We simply took people at their word they were a girl, boy, astronaut, cute barking puppy, or a scary monster. And somewhere along the way, we learned that adults can be scary monsters, even if they don’t call themselves that.

I called my mother. She reported that in the delivery room the doctor made the classic announcement, “Congratulations, you have a baby girl!” She had never noticed this declaration was not on my birth certificate and was rather amused. I am certain she will not turn state’s evidence if I am arrested for violating a restroom law. Given there is no record of a gene map, nor hormone and hormone receptor test results, and my primary birth document is silent on the subject, I argue my sex is still a mystery.

Other states avoid “sex” by referencing “gender assigned at birth” in their legislation, ironically writing gender ideology into statutory code.

What gender was I assigned at birth? My mother often refers to me as her “awesome daughter.” But her heart and mind are big enough to know that not all daughters are assigned female at birth.

There is an Olin Mills portrait of my brother and me at ages 4 and 2, respectively, wearing matching blue tartan flannel shirts my mother made. Clearly she was enabling my early embrace of flannel lesbian chic. My gender could easily be called Midwest tomboy.

My father more than once referred to me as “he.” We fixed trucks, shot guns, rode motorcycles, and did all the things he would do with a son. In fact, he does have a son. Maybe sometimes in his mind he has two.

Perhaps my gender assigned at birth was never fully ascertained or reliably implemented.

I find a sense of freedom in my discovery that the document labeled BIRTH CERTIFICATE does not declare my sex. I know sex is not determined by a word on a piece of paper, and the simple sex binary is doomed by nature. Gender, often conflated with sex, seems even more complex. However, if we open our hearts and minds a little wider, it’s not so complicated.

One summer day, while standing in the yard talking to my neighbor, her four-year-old grandson looked at me and asked, “Do you have a penis?”

She and I were both caught off guard and smiled. I asked him, truly curious, “Why does that matter?”

He replied impatiently with another question, “Are you a boy or a girl?”

This is a question I had been asked several times before by children his age, usually to the horror of a nearby parent who was obviously afraid of my answer.

“Why does it matter?” I inquired.

“If you’re a boy we can play together,” he declared, obviously hopeful this was the case.

I left it to his grandmother to figure out the specifics of where he learned this rule and conduct a teachable moment.

“I’m neither. Sometimes both. We can play if you want.”

The answer satisfied him. We engaged in a very competitive imaginary car race around the yard, followed by a game of tag, ending with me on my back, balancing him in the air on my feet so he could spread his arms and make airplane sounds.

After a soft landing, he rolled over and put his feet up in the air, offering to lift me up so I could fly too.

Ellen D.B. Riggle is an award-winning educator and author, currently based in Kentucky. They hold a day job as a professor to support a semi-serious hiking habit. Their poems have been published in Rise Up Review, Pegasus, ADVANCE Journal, and Earth’s Daughters, and they are Executive Producer of “Becoming Myself: Positive Trans & Nonbinary Identities” (available free on YouTube).

Photo credit: Joy Gant via a Creative Commons license.

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Second Flags

By Annette L. Brown

I was slicing tomatoes from the garden, their rich juice nearly overwhelming the grooves in the cutting board, when I heard the story of Lauri Ann Carleton’s murder. I stopped to make sure I heard correctly, my knife hovering mid cut. Yes, Lauri Ann Carleton, 66 years old, died August 18, 2023 in Lake Arrowhead, California. Story details could not escape my ears when CNN broke for commercial: The Mag.Pi clothing store . . . a confrontation over a Pride flag . . . a man with a gun.

My husband, my dinner-prep partner, reached for me, rested his warm hand on my lower back as we stared at the TV. I remember wondering, What is happening to us? Sometimes, when I watch the news, I do not recognize my own country—the people I’ve imagined us to be.

Though not a member herself, Lauri Ann Carleton raised a Pride flag in honor of the LGBTQ+ community—a community defined by diversity and acceptance. She had been asked by various townsfolk to remove her flag. She refused. I imagined her pulling her Rainbow from its sleepy quarters each morning, placing it in its storefront holder, watching it catch the breeze. It fluttered there, a symbol of peace, defying those unable or unwilling to recognize its meaning.

                                                                        •

In war, people fight for flags, or at least for what they symbolize. I remember visiting the Marine Corp War Memorial in Washington D.C.—the sculptured image of six men pushing into place the second flag to be raised on Mt. Suribachi during the WWII battle at Iwo Jima. The first was not large enough to be seen across the island, not large enough to render the response to the second—gunshots of celebration and cries of joy from soldiers fighting on land and sailors in ships just offshore.

                                                                        •

The cries over Lauri Ann Carleton’s loss lacked celebration. The gunman killed a wife-mother-friend-community advocate, then fled the scene. Police followed. Now he’s dead. I wonder what fear terrorized the shooter’s heart, what war waged within, so horrific he had to kill over that flag. Community members mourned Lauri Ann Carleton by crowding her storefront with flowers, sidewalk-chalk messages, and Pride flags—the display, a greater rainbow than could ever be contained by a single flag. I studied the image of her shop until the explosion of color, ironically initiated by the gunmen, grew into a vice constricting my breath.

                                                                        •

The day I visited the Marine Corp War Memorial was hot and humid. I remember at one point a gust of wind wrapped loosely around the inside of my collar, lifting the hair from my neck. When I closed my eyes to receive that cooling restorative, I could almost hear the snap of the war memorial’s flag whipping in the chilled February wind of 1945; I could imagine how battling soldiers were lifted by the tendrils of hope streaming from the stars and stripes, though the battle waged on for weeks.

                                                                        •

When her family left Lauri Ann Carleton’s body at the hospital, a new flag, secure in its delivery packaging, awaited them on the porch. She died over a flag she had planned to replace, the colors the gunman despised, too faded for her commitment.

                                                                        •

Sometimes watching the news stings my eyes, hitches my breath. Still, I don’t seem to look away. Scientists who study these things report people respond more intensely to negative stories than to positive as measured by changes in heart rate and the electrical conductivity of skin. But some things have no accurate ruler. They cling to memory in immeasurable ways.

I didn’t go to Lake Arrowhead, didn’t see individuals placing rainbow gifts at the Mag.Pi storefront. I couldn’t tell if there were any gusts of wind. Yet I cannot forget. I wonder if Lauri Ann Carleton’s new flag is still nestled in the dark of its packaging. I suppose it doesn’t matter. That second flag doesn’t need to flutter from a pole for its tendrils to stretch hope toward us.

Annette L. Brown is a personal essayist and creative nonfiction writer who has pieces reflecting her love of nature, family, beauty, and humor in several publications including Flash Fiction Magazine, Every Day Fiction, several volumes of the Personal Story Publishing Project (Randell Jones) and in Bad Day Book, Parenting. Annette is grateful for the support and friendship of her writing group, the Taste Life Twice Writers. 

Photo credits: Pride flag by Cecilie Bomstad on Unsplash.

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Ya-Ting (Iris)

By Ya-Ting Yu

“Iris sounds like a grandma name,” Samuel said, frowning. His large rugby hands sank into his sweatpants when he saw my face. “You’re no fun. It’s just a joke. And, I mean, it’s true.” He stuck his tongue out and shrugged, the Fly Emirates logo stretching across his chest.

His nonchalance made it worse, as if it were common sense, and I was too sensitive for the humour.

“I didn’t know,” I mumbled, heading to the kitchen for a glass of water, not thirsty, just wanting to drop the topic. When we met, he’d been eager to share his background, his faith, bridging our religious differences. But language? That never crossed his mind; he’d only known one. Four years as his girlfriend, my hair still bristled like quills at any reminder of my ESL status.

I’d researched “Iris” during undergrad, oblivious to its cultural nuances, proud of my foresight in choosing a name tied to a flower and visual anatomy, perfect for a photography student hoping to break into the industry. My earlier, teenage naivety had surely amused Samuel and Valerie.

“So you named yourself Iris?” Valerie’s sharp voice snapped me back to my studio apartment, where an IKEA bookshelf and a three-seater grey couch framed the room. Lavender Febreze lingered, a poor attempt to mask the bitterness of Chinese herbal tea, an aroma I’d hoped would fade before they arrived.

Valerie stretched her legs under my Hudson’s Bay blanket, pedicured toes peeking out. “That’s pretty cool. I wish I could’ve named myself. Hey—give me a Mandarin name!”

“Y-yeah, definitely. I can look up some names, but, you know, in Taiwan and maybe other countries, we give ourselves English names starting from a young age. My Korean and Chinese friends do too. It’s just something we—”

“Really? Why?” Valerie’s brows pinched into an uneven M, mirroring her brother’s exasperated face.

I opened my mouth, but no words came. Despite a decade in an English-speaking country, I still lacked the vocabulary to explain my urge to assimilate. It wasn’t about Samuel. No, it had begun long before his offhand comment—the summer I registered for a Canadian public school, my first time moving to a foreign country. The summer I turned fifteen.

•

“Have you picked an English name?” my aunt asked in Mandarin, twisting from the passenger seat. Next to her, my uncle fiddled with the radio dial while my parents turned to me. In the back, my cousin and little sister listened to what I assumed were traffic reports crackling through the speakers.

Through the SUV’s windshield, I watched the horizon split into a cloudless sky and endless highway lanes. The Toronto skyline loomed, intimidating yet wistful, like a crush I’d only dared glimpse from the back of a classroom.

“Iris,” I said, biting my lip, surprised at my daring.

The name had circled in my head like the low hum of an overhead vent since our plane left Taiwan. Fifteen hours offered plenty of time to contemplate a new name between naps and in-flight movies. We arrived in Toronto in mid-summer to settle in and finalize my registration. When September came, my parents and sister would leave me to start my new life on a continent where no one spoke my language.

“Good. Then you’ll introduce yourself as Iris,” my aunt announced with an approving nod. “Remember, prepare a self-introduction. You’re here to improve your English. So don’t go making friends with other Mandarin speakers.”

”Hao,” I responded like an obedient student, the word less a reply than a promise. I vowed to learn Canadian ways, speak their slang, and make my international tuition a worthwhile investment. I’d seen enough North American high school series to know how to blend in.

Yet, a new life needed a new name. Iris was a girl I admired at my cram school in Taipei. Although we attended the same English class twice a week all year, we weren’t friends, just classmates. I’d watch her from the corner, envying her dancer’s figure, perfect egg-shaped face, and wavy black hair, sometimes tied in a ponytail, sometimes braids. When she passed by, I’d sniff the air to identify her shampoo brand.

At cram school, I was Jenny, a name given by my elementary school teacher. I hadn’t objected; it felt special to have a foreign name. Only later did I realize how many Taiwanese girls were named Jenny, like guava in the grocery store, too common to catch anyone’s interest. It wouldn’t do. For my new school, I needed a less generic name, one that broke with my thick glasses and pudgy face. Iris was my new skin—a revised version, a 2.0.

Then, on that first day in the Canadian school, I wanted to hide in the washroom. I didn’t understand a word of the group activity. While my rehearsed introduction had gone without my throwing up, I hadn’t anticipated the teachers’ accents, quick pace, or the singing of the national anthem. My eyes darted as I tried to mimic the sounds on their lips. But no amount of High School Musicals and Taiwanese cram schools could’ve prepared me for this.

At least adopting an English name had made me my first friend, a non-Mandarin-speaking Iranian girl, with a tingling laugh and clear speech. She had accepted Iris as my name without question.

•

Now, Zahra’s hijab-wrapped smile stayed with me as I surveyed my studio. Would she understand? To me, it was as instinctive as picking up food with chopsticks, a survival strategy to take on a name others could read, say, and accept.

Across the floor, Samuel unfolded his legs, stood, and padded to the fourteenth-story balcony. He tsked, squinting at the pouring rain. To me, the rhythmic pusha pusha was oddly soothing. Silhouetted against the eerie brown sky, he turned to me.

“I don’t understand. Ya-Ting is an easy enough name to say.”

I parted my lips but didn’t correct his intonation. Samuel had practiced my Mandarin name when we first started dating, but it never sounded quite right. His initial interest faded into irritation. Over the years, other non-Mandarin-speaking friends had tried, but the tones in Ya and Ting dipped, then rose, unlike the syllabic stress of English. Saying my name meant speaking another language: Forget your norms, flex your tongues, and repeat after me.

•

“Ya-Ting Yu?”

I’d cringed at the sound of my full name through my Canadian teachers’ lips. Before preferred names became a concept, I’d written Iris in brackets on the attendance sheet, a hint for future references. The teachers seemed to sigh in relief, shoulders sinking imperceptibly, spared the challenge of pronouncing it. A non-English-sounding name felt isolating, like being singled out because your lunch was a pork bun instead of an avocado sandwich. My dark eyes, yellow skin, and fobby clothes brought from home couldn’t be helped, but my name was an identity I could reshape at will.

“Is it Yu or Ya? Which is your last name?”

I didn’t blame the teachers or, later on, the bank tellers and driver’s license officers. In Mandarin, family names come first. My name appeared as Yu Ya-Ting on my passport, spelled out below the Mandarin characters, a reminder of the group-over-individual mindset I grew up with. Serve the family before satisfying personal wishes. We before me. Had it started here, my desperate need to belong to the Canadian community? So ready was I to shed my Taiwanese label that I even considered changing my passport name to Iris. At least then, I wouldn’t have to answer those awkward questions at government offices.

•

Pusha pusha. The steady sound of water filling the Brita was comforting. In the kitchen, Samuel thudded over and slung an arm around my shoulders. “When we’re married, you’ll have a new last name—my last name.” My face warmed. I snuggled closer to his chest, the Fly from his jersey logo sticking to my cheek.

Though surname adoption in Taiwan was already a thing of the past, I’d always dreamed of taking his name, a way to cement my reinvented identity and secure my place in his white family. They seemed superior in every way, from physical stature to social standing. I never argued when they dismissed my tradition of ancestral worship or questioned their applause when I was baptized as Christian. So why hesitate to take their name?

From the couch, Valerie groaned about excessive PDA. I sprang back, brushing off a lingering unease, the kind you chalked up to overthinking, reminiscent of that first barbecue invitation from his family.

•

It was the Labour Day weekend after I’d graduated, my introduction to his congregation of relatives. His parents, siblings, aunts, and cousins clustered around in patio chairs, the air thick with laughter, smoke, and the aroma of sizzling chicken. Samuel’s uncles rotated shifts at the barbecue, catching the tail end of grilling season. Behind them, a forest of half-turned maple trees framed Lake Ontario, a time for family gatherings, though mine were an ocean away.

“Iris’s real name is Ya-Ting,” Samuel threw out casually after we’d all said grace, waving a skewer between mouthfuls.

“Don’t tell them,” I whispered, nudging him to stop. The only Asian at the table, I prayed to blend in like weathered patio furniture, not stand out like a neon bottle opener left on the table.

“Ya-Ting?” his mom echoed, confusion tightening her gaze as a spoonful of mashed potatoes halted mid-air.

Before other relatives jumped in with more questions, I waved my hand like wafting at an unpleasant odour. “Ignore him. Just Iris. By the way, this mash is so creamy. Did you put milk in it?”

His mom gave me a knowing look and leaned in, grinning while she revealed her sour cream recipe. I feigned interest, nodding and wowing on cue, but the hair on my neck rose, an instinct against his endless, innocent jokes. Perhaps I’d curled up too long, afraid of any prickle. Knocks came, but shame fixed me in place, my sharp spines a safe barrier against any curiosities, genuine or otherwise. No escape. I’d already swallowed the keys to the exit.

•

The sound of the overflowing Brita jolted me, though my mind felt dazed, still in the shadowy corner of my brain. I rubbed my temple, tuning out Samuel and Valerie in the apartment while I rummaged through the fridge.

A chill spread. My fingers landed on a buried, expired avocado, its scabby skin dark and soft under my thumb. I pulled it out, massaging the peel away. Inside, no part was redeemable.

“What’s that smell?” Samuel and Valerie called.

I bristled, wiggled my nose, and watched my shadow on the tiled wall grow quills. The reeking scent. My mouth. The taste was no different from a fresh avocado, creamy and melted on my tongue. At the back of my throat, their approval and my self-betrayal bubbled. I gulped some water and forced it down, determined to be every bit Iris, rotten or not. Skin to seed, my fantasy had become—I’d become.

•

Years later, people were too polite to ask, but they whispered behind my back, surprised, even outraged, that I’d ended my eight-year relationship with Samuel. I surprised myself too, at how I’d done it, by cheating. But I’d been living a lie for years: a false name, a misguided belonging. With each laugh alongside his family, the corners of my mouth grew stiff, like a poster girl trained to please. In the end, I forsook Samuel the same way I had myself, not out of malice or disregard, but as a last act to reclaim what I’d lost.

I remember his parting words: “Goodbye, Ya-Ting. That’s your real name. At last, something real about you.”

Those words haunt me, like his familiar hand on my shoulders, heavy, insistent. Shushing me, shoving me back into my self-inflicted prison, “liar, cheater” stamped on the walls. His fingers, once a loving gesture beneath my hair, now dig into my collarbones, an aching reminder of my sins, no matter the aliases I carry.

Today, if you ask, I have a complicated relationship with that hyphen. Sometimes, I write it as Yating and wonder how long I can keep up the pretence. This morning, however, I feel as though I’m uncurling, gently nudged by a friend whose smile recalls Zahra’s from high school, open and steady.

My best friend since moving to Edinburgh, Greta is on a mission to find the best kardemummabullar, a Swedish cardamom bun. We’re seated by the off-white Victorian window frame, watching Bruntsfield’s weekend brunch-goers bask in the start of Scottish warm weather, when she slides her pocket-sized notebook across the cafe table.

“How do you write your Mandarin name?” she asks.

I pick up her pen and ink the two characters, now foreign to my hand. “Ya is written with the tooth character next to this straight spine character. Together, they mean grace or elegance. Ting, here, has a girl and a gazebo. Don’t ask why,” I grimace, and a chuckle escapes. “But together they imply beauty.”

I slide her notebook back, then steal a glance. Greta doesn’t laugh or joke about the implications. She nods, earnest brown eyes glistening, the colour of her half-drunk coffee in the cardamon-scented nook.

“The characters are beautiful. Like paintings, not words,” she murmurs, gliding across them with slender fingers as if feeling the texture, each glossy black stroke etched into the crisp paper. Her touch softens the sharp edges, easing the stiff lines.

I study her and push back my chair, a feeling sticks in my throat. “I’ll . . . just get another bun. You want anything?”

Greta shakes her head, brunette strands falling over her face. I release the breath I’ve been holding and walk to the pastry counter, blinking away the sudden moisture behind my metal frames.

From the queue, her outline swims, bent over the notebook, pen gripped as though tracing my name onto a fresh page. Something mechanical clicks. A lock gives way. The hedgehog unrolls, stretches, and I lift my head to the April sun.

Ya-Ting Yu is a Taiwanese writer based in Taipei with roots in Toronto, Canada, and Edinburgh, Scotland. She recently earned a master’s in counseling from the University of Edinburgh and has since turned her focus to fiction and essays. Her work explores the lives of East Asian expatriates and international students. This is her literary debut.

Photo credit: stilinberlin via a Creative Commons license.

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The Sunday After

By DW McKinney

the inauguration of the 47th President of the United States, we gather in the church sanctuary and sing the Black national anthem1. We mourn in unison. A week after the new president resumes his campaign of white (straight, male) supremacy, of “making America great,” of rolling back civil rights and liberties for marginalized people, we step backward in time with him. We borrow the strength of Buffalo Soldiers, Black infantrymen crooning the anthem as they fought on two fronts against fascists and discrimination in World War II. We borrow from our revolutionary leaders who belted the lyrics as they marched through segregated streets. We borrow from our greats and grands who sang for glory as they conducted sit-ins, and integrated schools, and lived and died and endured. Our lungs expel the words in the air around us, but we breathe them back into our souls again and again until our grief becomes a rallying cry.

DW McKinney is an award-winning writer and editor based in Las Vegas, Nevada. A 2024 TORCH Literary Arts Fellow, she is also the recipient of fellowships from PERIPLUS Collective, Writing By Writers, and The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow. Her writing appears in Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American, Ecotone, and TriQuarterly. She serves as nonfiction editor at Shenandoah.

Photo credit: Cover of the Hawthorn Books 1970 edition of Lift Every Voice and Sing.

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  1. James Weldon Johnson, civil rights activist and a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, originally wrote “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as a poem in 1900. It was later composed as a hymn, becoming a powerful refrain throughout the Civil Rights Movement. ↩︎

Welcome to Writers Resist the Winter 2025 Issue

Whether you’re still in recovery or planning your resistance against the incoming regime, there’s plenty of common ground in this the Winter 2025 issue of Writers Resist. Enjoy the art, poetry and prose and then join us for our virtual Writers Resist Reads, Saturday 15 February 2025, at 5:00 p.m. Pacific. Just email for the Zoom link: writersresist@gmail.com.

In this issue:

Mary Brancaccio “This little piece of heaven“

Salena Casha “In This Version, Cancer Is a Woman“

Karen Crawford “You Don’t Run“

Jennifer Freed “Upon Learning, in a Report on the Footage of a Sheriff’s Deputy Shooting Sonya Massey to Death in Her Kitchen, of Massey’s First Words to the Deputy“

Jennifer Karp “Postcards from the Valley of the Moon“

Flavian Mark Lupinetti “Trigger Warning“

M.R. Mandell “Gen X Girls Ghazal“

Melissa McEver Huckabay “Why I Fight for Texas Even Though Everyone Says We Should Move“

Livia Meneghin “What should be free“

Ria Raj “kaala; kala“

Ash Reynolds “Uprooted/Planted“

Sheree Shatsky “Judged“

Beulah Vega “About Those Census Checkboxes“

Laura Grace Weldon “Election Day Facebook Exchange“

Amritha York “mmiwg“

Photo by K-B Gressitt

You Don’t Run

By Karen Crawford

even though you’re late for class, you don’t run because in this neck of the woods running screams fear, so you walk briskly and with purpose, always acting like you know where you’re going even if you don’t and when you get to the subway, you never root around your bag for a token, you always, always have one in your pocket, because in this neck of the woods you keep your bag close, and when the train pulls into the 103rd street station you rush through the doors and grab a pole because the only seats available are next to a junkie nodding off and some homeless dude cursing at no one in particular, and you know to keep your eyes to yourself, because eye contact is a no-no, a WTF are you looking at kind of no-no, and in this neck of the woods someone’s always looking for a confrontation, and at the 86th street station a flurry of people pile in sandwiching you between 9 to 5ers heavy on AquaNet hairspray and Chaps cologne, and now you’re holding your bag, the pole and your breath when at 77th street you think you feel a man bumping behind you, and you think maybe it’s because the train is rattling down the tracks, and you think maybe it’s because he has nothing to hold onto, and you think maybe and maybe and maybe until somewhere past 68th street the train sputters to a stop, and the air conditioning fizzles out and the lights flicker off, and that’s when you feel him, like feel ‘it,’ feel him, and you’re hemmed in, frozen, shame pooling under your armpits even after the air comes back on and the train chugs into the 59th street station, and you inch forward as passengers get off and that’s when his hand cups your cheek and it’s not the one on your face, and it’s not a pinch but a full-on handful kind of GRAB, and you keep moving forward because you want nothing more than to rush off this train, but then your face flames and you think about that time when… and you think about that other time when… and you swing around and see an ivy league looking guy in a tailored blue suit with a gotcha smile and you don’t think—you just SHOVE, and he stumbles backwards with a what did you do that for?, and you scream next time keep your fucking hands to yourself, and in this neck of the woods, you’re glad that everyone is looking.

Karen Crawford is a writer, with Puerto Rican roots, who lives and writes in the City of Angels. Her work has been included in Tiny Sparks Everywhere: National Flash Fiction Day Anthology 2024, 100 Word Story, Okay Donkey, and Five South. You can find her on X @KarenCrawford_ and Bluesky @karenc.bsky.social.

Photograph by Several Seconds via a Creative Commons license.

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Welcome to Writers Resist the Fall 2024 Issue

The collage by Kristin Fouquet is an apt introduction to this issue, launched in the final throes of the chaotic, often hateful presidential campaigning. How wonderful it would be if the joyful prospect of electing the first woman president of the United States could be just that.

Perhaps we can make it so by encouraging all our sisters and other beloveds to use our hard-won right to vote. As Kristin’s artwork warns us, “Suffrage or Suffer.”

But first, a very fond farewell to one of our founding editors, Sara Marchant, who has a few words to share:

In the last days of the late 1900s, I woke up underneath a beanbag chair on the bamboo floor of a thrashed house not my own, missing a shoe, cake-frosting in my hair, and with full awareness that hijinks had ensued. My first thought was: That was an excellent party.

Today, while reading this issue of Writers Resist, please picture me in my pajamas, bedhead resplendent, toasting you, dear readers, contributors and editors, with my second cup of coffee.

Writers Resist was born from worried dread about our future and righteous anger over our present reality, and there is still much work to be done, but I know I leave her in capable hands . . . and it has been an excellent party.

Now, this issue has a notable dose of dystopias, but—or because of that—you should find some kindred souls in the works of our contributing writers and artists—and if you’d like to join them for our virtual Writers Resist Reads, on Saturday 16 November at 5:00 p.m. PACIFIC, please request the Zoom link via WritersResist@gmail.com.

D. Arifah, “Watching Over the Horizon“

Linda Bamber, “Endless War“

Robyn Bashaw, “Beware the Homo Sapiens“

Cheryl Caesar, “Grass“

Chiara Di Lello, “Abecedarian for Billionaires“

Matthew Donovan, “I Believe Her“

Kristin Fouquet, “Suffrage or Suffer“

Ellen Girardeau Kempler, “Poem in Response to Mass Shooting Number 130 in the United States 2023“

Michael Henson, “The Dream Children of Addison Mitchell McConnell III“

Jacqueline Jules, “How I Feel About the 2024 Election“

Craig Kirchner, “The Coming“

Christian Hanz Lozada, “When I hear ‘migration,’ I think of ships“

Rasmenia Massoud, “Who We Are, More or Less“

Ryan Owen, “Breathe“

Kate Rogers, “Sisters“

Elizabeth Shack, “tree : forest :: ad : internet“

Angela Townsend, “French Kissed“

Rachel Turney, “Respect“

Diane Vogel Ferri, “Election Day“

French Kissed

By Angela Townsend

I went back to Frenchtown, but Frenchtown could not come back to me.

Frenchtown is the daintiest of the “river towns,” a flower crown ringing the Delaware. They hold hands across two states. They hold out bread for every stranger. Nothing snide can survive this soil. New Hope remembers its own name whether you are tourist or mayor. Lambertville will sling its arm across your shoulders. Stockton has never met an outsider. Frenchtown is counting the days until you come back.

Quakertown was landlocked, but it was mine. It was a freckle on the county seat, a guaranteed source of squished eyebrows. “Quakertown, Pennsylvania?” “No, Quakertown, New Jersey.” “There is a Quakertown in New Jersey?” “Yes. We can walk there from here.”

As long as we had a post office, we had Quakertown. We did not have much else. My apartment was attached to that post office, in an aging storybook house covered with murals and mistakes. Narrow stairs led to a spackled wall, and an oak trapdoor opened to the sump pump in my kitchen. My landlord, a meek behemoth whose head lifted the ceiling tiles, promised we would be safe. He forgot to pay the heating bill twice a winter, but “if civilization ever goes kablooey, we can hide under the door in the floor.”

I was happy and confused most of the time. I had come to Hunterdon County to practice my preposterous new degree, a Master of Divinity. But the Presbyterians itched with pox when I “talked about the love of God too often” with their youth group. I was likened to both Jezebel and the Sugar Plum Fairy. I was a twenty-five-year-old virgin who thought my job was to make everyone feel incandescent and safe. I took a job writing PR for a cat sanctuary.

I took myself to Frenchtown on Sundays, singing hymns from my childhood and yowling with Bruce Springsteen about God and sex and getting the hell out of New Jersey. I wondered if I might be a Quaker or an anarchist. I promised my mother I would text her when I got home, as she could not unclasp the fear of my death from her wrist.

Frenchtown was ten minutes away, and it took me in. Glamorous, haggard women yarn-bombed the trees all winter, leaving limbs sweatered in magenta. Life-size porcelain horses appeared and vanished in front of the bank and the river, painted with gnomes or narwhals. The man at the book shop hid used arrivals for me, Bonhoeffer and Hauerwas. “You like your God fellas with lots of syllables.” When I stayed late, lights stringed the river like pearls so I could find my way home.

I did not mind being seen in Frenchtown. I wore gingham dresses and Eliza Doolittle hats. A Nikon jangled light around my neck, and I turned myself into a tendril to catch the light on the water and the foreheads. Strangers let me photograph their dachshunds and their plein air in progress. The woman at the Magick Shop called me a “precious little thing” in a way that made me feel larger. I wished her eight more lives. I took generic pictures of the river. I followed an exasperated stray all the way to a widower asleep on a bench. I did not doubt that I was a seer.

On July 14th, Frenchtown set fire to every contract with “cool.” Bastille Day was a chance to be as corny as a child. The town erupted in unauthorized innocence from the river to the lumberyard. Eiffel Towers were $3. Mimes on stilts blew bubbles. I saw a German shepherd dressed as a baguette. I saw God laughing so hard, God cried.

I etched Bastille Day on my calendar, setting annual reminders for the holy day of obligation. I acquired Eiffel Towers in colors not seen since Eden. I blew kisses at children on shoulders and men my grandfather’s age. They were singing hymns in French outside the Methodist Church. “We have been practicing for weeks,” a woman in a name tag whispered when I bought a lemonade. “La Grande Bertha” was wearing a beret so inflated, it resembled the Jiffy Pop popcorn foil. “I’m sure we pronounced everything wrong.”

“I pronounce you the jewel of Bastille Day,” I responded, and blew her a kiss. She kissed me on both cheeks, and we laughed until we nearly fell down.

I wrote a blog post for the cat sanctuary called “Find Your France.” I dressed the cats in stripes to make the point that “Paris” is anywhere you feel safe. I named our next impound “Jean Valjean.” I hid an orange Eiffel Tower in my boss’s lunch box. I was happy and confused.

A man from Philadelphia gave me a box of certainty. We married in two months.

The midpoint between his factory and my cat sanctuary dropped us in Bucks County, too far ashore to touch even New Hope with my fingertips. We found a second-floor condo. I wrote a story to supplement the lack of pictures.

He convinced me I had an excess of Eiffel Towers. If I wore bright garments, everyone would think I wanted them to look at me. I had to be careful with flowery language. He asked when I was going to discontinue my monthly donations to the manatee rescue and the radio station. I had to consider that God did not get involved with cats or weather. I had to stop talking to my mother so much if I wanted to finally grow up. I brought everything pink to work.

I turned forty and greeted him at the door wearing a rose fascinator. He asked if I was finally going to drink some wine. It was getting ridiculous to have never drunk alcohol at this age. I made it five more years.

Bucks County wasn’t Quakertown, but my landlord had died, and my long-haired cats loved the light on the second story. I would stay in Langhorne and send the man on a raft with just enough forgiveness to make it across. My mother arrived with such urgency that syntax collapsed. Her trunk was filled with calico pillows and a rose window sized for Notre Dame. My mother turned Langhorne pink.

I lived happy and confused among the cats in the clean condo. I wrote essays and courted rejection letters. I wore a blinding orange parka with a collar that looked like Elmo’s pelt. My Nikon hibernated as I turned to narrative. My language found homes in journals with names like Mollusk Family and Electric String Cheese. I exposed the image of God in people who send $10 checks to cat sanctuaries. I leaked secrets. A man across the Atlantic published my uncareful praise and asked me to come read aloud.

I told him I wished I could. He told me to picture the Seine giggling with “our community,” sharing “most excellent food and companionship.” I told him I wished I could. He said, “It is a shame, for your presence would illuminate the proceedings.”

I told my mother I was going to get that sentence tattooed on my ankle. She was still recovering from my tattoo of the cats, etched by a man named Big Mike in New Hope. I drove to Frenchtown instead.

I went back to Frenchtown. The teenager in the crystal shop asked if I’d seen the new amethysts. The boy surrounded by Frisbees saw my confusion and soothed, “You’re not crazy. This used to be Ooh La La.”

“What happened to Ooh La La?”

He wasn’t sure. His baseball cap was backwards. “But everyone still asks. It’s been five years.”

I bought a root beer and thanked him. The bookshop was closed, but proud to be “Under New Management!” There was no yarn in the trees. I took a picture of an Australian shepherd with my phone, but he turned his head. The pedestrian lane of the bridge was closed for maintenance.

The Methodist Church marquee said COLLECTING MEN UNDERPANTS FOR HOMELESS THRU 2/15. GOD IS GOOD ALL THE TIME. I drove home and wrote about it. Frenchtown could not come back to me, but we were both safe. I dreamed of lights on rivers and woke laughing aloud.

Angela Townsend (she/her) is the development director at a cat sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, Paris Lit Up, Pleiades, and Terrain, among others. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 34 years, laughs with her poet mother every morning, and loves life affectionately.

Photo credit: Regan Vercruysse via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist
Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

From the Editor of Amplified Voices

By DW McKinney

 

These words—the ones in this note and the ones in this issue—are difficult to write. Do not look away from them. Let them sink into you.

I am writing this editor’s note after I have seen a father carry his son, blown to pieces, in a yellow bag, and I fought (and failed) to keep my obsessive compulsive disorder from replacing the man and his son with me and my daughters in my mind. I am writing this editor’s note after I’ve watched a mother wipe her son’s blood off the tile floor, which I watch again after poet Maira Faisal mentions it in her poem “In Pillars, the Prized City” with a link to the video as reference, as proof, that this atrocity has been done. But Faisal didn’t need to show me proof because she has seen it and I have seen it and we won’t forget the mother’s grief.

I am writing this editor’s note after white phosphorus has clogged Gazan skies. After I have listened to videos of people wailing in panic and fear and anticipation of their own deaths. And when jets from the nearby air force base shook my house while I watched these videos—which ones, I couldn’t tell you, there were so many—I trembled in fear and tried not to be sick. I am writing after I have seen too many murdered babies lying in dust-covered streets, after too many orphans have wandered through obliterated cities in search of murdered family members they will never find, after I have seen a man half-buried in rubble resting his bloodied head against a stack of paper, and I prayed he was alive.

As I watched news reports and recordings from Gaza, one thing that consistently struck me was the way that Israeli soldiers aggressively erased Palestinian history. Bombed libraries, universities, and cemeteries. Erased entire lineages, cultural traditions, and mythologies. The thing is it wasn’t—isn’t—just happening in Gaza. It is (still) happening in Haiti and Sudan and Lebanon and Myanmar and Ukraine and and and. . . . The endlessness of this, its global reach, is why Saheed Sunday laments, “. . . to the heated flame of this hell i call a country” in his poem “In which a country becomes a song that dies on your skin,” and why Lori Yeghiayan Friedman’s mother proclaims that all political leaders are terrorists, in Friedman’s essay “They Are All Terrorists.”

“Amplified Voices,” Writers Resist’s special issue, is an attempt to be an archive for what has been lost and must be remembered. This special issue is an elegy. It is a whispered prayer for those never to be forgotten. It shines a spotlight on horrors occurring in the past, in the present, and likely in the future.

The countries razed and barraged by artillery fire are many. The complicity in terror is grand and far-reaching. Sometimes it seems like we are trying to scoop a flood into a barrel with a spoon.

If you find yourself wondering how to move forward in a world that’s shifting toward silence in the face of ongoing genocide and tragedy, I’d like to share a few recent words from folks on social media that have given me much to consider:

“How must I disrupt my own life to counter the disruptive violence of the world?” – Black American poet Danez Smith (@Danez_Smif) on X/Twitter

“its not as easy as simply believing in decolonization or in a free Palestine. if you live in the west you have to kill the part of you that is western in reflexes, that believes your joy and comfort come before that of those in the global south” – @cutemuslimgrl13 on X/Twitter

“The arts are supposed to lay bare the atrocities of the world, not distract from it.” – South African author Terry-Ann Adams (@TA_4Short) on X/Twitter

I am writing this editor’s note with a lot of grief in my heart, but also a lot of gratitude for those who thought us fit to amplify their voices in the midst of chaos.

Wishing you all peace,
DWM
Guest Editor, Amplifying Voices

 

DW McKinney is a writer and interviewer who resides in Las Vegas, Nevada. She is a 2024 Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow and has received fellowships from PERIPLUS Collective, Shenandoah, The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, and Voodoonauts. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Oxford American, Los Angeles Review of Books, Ecotone, TriQuarterly, and Narratively, among others.

Photo credit: Zaur Ibrahimov on Unsplash.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

 

They Are All Terrorists

By Lori Yeghiayan Friedman

 

is what my (now long-dead) mother used to say to the TV news reports of the bombings, beheadings, settlements, kidnappings, hijackings, imprisonments, killings―the latest eruptions of violence in a region far away, part of a war my mother fled with her family decades earlier.

She said it while sitting in the Barcalounger, relieved to be off her feet (finally!) after a Sunday dinner at my medzmama’s house in East Hollywood, vaguely gazing at the glowing screen of the massive Magnavox wedged into a corner between the behemoth built-in china cabinet and the sizable stone fireplace—that monstrous TV, an immovable object that had no chance of being carried away if, say, the family had to leave in a hurry. It said: Whatever wars, genocides, upheavals or forced evacuations may come, I’m not going anywhere and neither are you.

On screen, the war raged on like a TV show that could never be canceled.

She said it quietly to herself about the leaders on screen while we waited to pick up our party pack of kebab at a restaurant in my medzmama’s neighborhood, in a sad, L-shaped corner mini-mall on Hollywood Blvd., the small TV hanging in an upper corner like in a hospital room. On screen, the powerful nation’s sweet-faced leader (who was a killer) shook hands with the powerless people’s soft-spoken one (a killer), while the rosy-cheeked American president (killer) looked on.

She said it through clenched teeth, face red with effort in the kitchen of our apartment in West Los Angeles, standing on the scuffed linoleum, scrubbing the pans, sticky with burnt bits of roast beef, while the mushrooms sprouting out of the ratty carpet in the dining room silently grew another quarter millimeter. Oof, she added before it, sounding irritated, They are all terrorists, sounding irritated at the terrorists who were responsible for her refugee status, the moldy carpet, the congealed greasy meat clumps that wouldn’t come off no matter how hard she scrubbed with the Brillo.

Whatever, is what I said. Well, I thought it loudly, placing it like a billboard onto my careless face, while I sat somewhere not paying attention to her or the TV, or while I leaned in the kitchen doorway waiting for her to finish so I could ask her for money or the car keys, because I was a young shithead who understood nothing other than what I wanted, which was to go thrifting with my friends to find the most perfectly-ripped-at-the-knees-jeans, about which my mother would later comment, You look like a homeless person.

She said not a word about how it felt to be without a home, or a country, when they packed up for a two-week trip until things cooled down, only to have their land seized, house and business gone; “home” a place she would never know again. She never talked about her parents’ terror at losing everything, the future they’d worked so hard to build, after the same thing had happened to both of their parents in another land decades earlier. She didn’t say a thing about what it was like to move to another country where they were dependent on relatives, a country she hated, where she became sickly, asthmatic, where everything went wrong. She never talked about what it was like to then leave the continent, a refugee tucked into the hold of ship, a charity case allowed in by another country she never wanted to live in, or what it was like to live in a room above a church when she and her family first arrived in Manhattan just as winter set in, and she went to school in the thick of adolescence, crushed by the need to belong, a damn foreigner, when she did belong somewhere, just not here, because the terrorists stole everything and made her this little girl lost, adrift forever on the other side of what might have been.

Maybe those four words were all she had: They are all terrorists,

is what my mother said, but not to me. To me she said, I want you to grow up in one place, have a home and friends you never have to leave. She said, I want you to get an education, have the chance I never had. She wanted me to write.

The war has not changed much and neither has the news. But, I have. I am still that careless shithead, but I know a few things and watch from the safety of my living room in the country where I was born and where I live, the one where we tell ourselves we are free. On my TV, the grim-faced powerful nation’s leader (a killer) looks dead-eyed at the camera with a message for the powerless people’s leaders who are faceless (killers) and live underground, the war newly erupted, renewed for yet another season.

Terror is a tactic used by every leader, from mayors to kings, to attain and maintain power, but the word “terrorist” is reserved for the powerless, the ones who wage war, maim, bomb, steal, blow up, stab, behead, kidnap and imprison in the name of God, of righteousness, of safety, of fairness, of revenge, of greed, but not the powerful who do the same things for the same reasons.

My wise and traumatized mother never got to see what she did right when she made sure I knew all the words. But I want her to know, I want you to know, that when I watch the news I can only think of four of them, set in a neat little row like a passed-down pair of silver candlesticks or an heirloom string of yellowing pearls: They are all terrorists.

 

Lori Yeghiayan Friedman’s creative nonfiction has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her writing has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Mizna, Stanchion Zine, Pithead Chapel, Hippocampus Magazine, Emerge Literary Journal, Bending Genres, Autofocus Lit, Memoir Land and the Los Angeles Times. Her flash piece, “In the wings, no one can hear you scream,” is included in Already Gone, an anthology edited by Hannah Grieco and published by Alan Squire Publishing. She earned an MFA in Theatre from UC San Diego. Follow her on X and Bluesky: @loriyeg

Photo credit: doodle dubz via a Creative Commons license.

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Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

 

Zoo

By N. de Vera

 

I fidgeted at the line for immigration after arriving at LAX. When it was my turn, I calmly answered the officer’s questions, hoping this was a routine interview that would go smoothly. However, when I saw that look on his face, I knew what I was in for—again.

“Wait here, ma’am,” the officer said. “We need to ask further questions.  Another officer will take you to a private room.”

I shook my head in disbelief. I was aware of the drill by now.

The officer asked me to hand over my passport, but it wouldn’t be long until he confiscated my phone too. I texted one word to my mother, who worried about me every time I flew back to America, and to my partner, who was waiting to pick me up at the airport.

“Zoo,” I sent to both of them.

It was our safe word. It was short enough to type and send within seconds—just enough time to alert them about my whereabouts before I lost access to my phone for hours, or however long it took me to convince the immigration officers that I was a legal resident. When my mother and my partner received my single-word message, they would know I was getting detained once again.

A new officer from Customs and Border Protection signaled me to follow him. So I did. I carried a bulky folio with paperwork that should prove my legal status in the United States of America. This new officer led me to an interrogation room and rushed through a brief list of rules, which  I was already too familiar with.

No talking.
No noise.
No devices.
No food or drinks.
No bathroom breaks, unless permitted.

The officer then left and locked the door. I sat and waited alone.

It was quiet in my room, but I could hear a child crying in the room next to mine. It wasn’t uncommon for mothers with children to get detained too, especially if they were entering America without their husbands. I could hear the faint sounds of an officer’s attempts to get the mother to “shut the baby up,” but to no avail. He yelled louder to “tame it,” as if he were competing with the child’s crying—one noise drowning out the other.

I sat in silence, flipping through my folio. I stretched and stood a couple of times, but I never walked around. I was being watched. A colleague had warned me that pacing might be misconstrued as defensiveness and guilt, so I learned to be careful and limited my movements to prevent further suspicion.

Two full hours went by until the immigration officer finally showed up again at my interrogation room.

“State your full name and date of birth for the record,” he demanded.

“Alexandra Estrella Vazquez. September 28, 1990,” I replied.

“What is your purpose for entering the United States, Ms. Vazquez?”

“I live and work here, sir.”

“Where is ‘here’?”

“Los Angeles, sir.”

“What is your occupation?”

“I’m a data analyst.”

“Pretty girl like you don’t look like a data analyst to me,” the officer said. “Where’s your proof?”

I pulled out my files from my folio. My visa authorization clearly showing my legal status. My signed employment contract. My pay slips from the last three months.

The officer reviewed the documentation, but he wasn’t satisfied.

I showed printouts of sample presentations with analyses that I’ve put together and screenshots of myself conducting data analytics training sessions. These internal company artifacts were confidential, but I needed to have them in case questioning came to this point. It often did.

The officer still was not convinced.

I asked if I could regain access to my phone to show him more evidence accessible online. The officer was silent and looked at me, unblinking. I exhaled when he authorized it.

The officer leaned next to me, too close for comfort, as I trembled holding my phone, showing him my colleague’s recommendations, data analytics certifications, my email exchanges—everything I could possibly think of to convince him that I was who I said I was, no matter how personal or classified.

Finally, he uttered the three words I’d been waiting to hear for hours. “You can leave.”

I hurriedly collected and placed my paperwork back into my folio then thanked the officer. What should I have been thankful for? He had no explanations for what I did wrong. No suggestions for what I could do differently to prevent myself from going through this trauma every time I enter this country. He hadn’t earned my gratitude, but I did it anyway out of obligation.

It was the seventh time I had been detained, but I knew that I ought to feel blessed because others had it worse than I did. Some didn’t even make it past that room and were sent back home.

I stepped out of the interrogation room and rushed to find my way to the baggage claim area, hoping my luggage was still there before it’s taken off the carousel as unclaimed baggage by airport personnel.

As I took the escalator down, I was met by a large sign that read, “Welcome to the United States of America.”

The irony was not lost on me—to be dehumanized, to be caged until I, a 30-something female Colombian data analyst, was no longer perceived as a threat. Yet here was America again, sweeping this incident under the rug, welcoming me back.

I should be happy, I told myself. I should be grateful that I get to live here.

Ignoring the tears falling down my cheek, I closed my eyes and muttered under my breath, “Land of the free. Home of the brave.”

I repeated the phrase to myself over and over again until I deluded myself into believing it to be true.

Land of the free. Home of the brave.
Land of the free. Home of the brave.
Land of the free. Home of the brave.

 

N. de Vera (she / her) is a queer Asian writer based in Los Angeles. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in over twenty literary magazines and journals.

Photo credit: Molly Haggerty via a Creative Commons License.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

 

A Sunday in October

By Ariel M. Goldenthal

 

The day after the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, I lied to my second-grade students: You are safe at Hebrew school. You will love learning the Aleph-Bet this year. Yes, you can open the windows and feel the early fall air ripple through the gaps between your outstretched fingers. You can have recess outside next week. Your teachers don’t need to be trained to apply a tourniquet. There’s nothing wrong with our classroom’s tall glass windows that look right into the front garden. I’m closing the blinds because it’s so sunny out. Let’s start with our usual morning activity. Today we’re learning about praying to God, which isn’t related at all to the reason your mom’s eyes looked red this morning and your dad whispered, “Maybe he should stay home today.” This happened in a synagogue very far away—not like where we live at all. No, this isn’t something that happens often.

I don’t tell them how the education director called all the teachers on Shabbat, a day when work is forbidden and rest is required, to tell us that despite, or perhaps because of, the horrific loss that day, religious school would still take place the next day; how the doors to synagogue, usually propped open on Sunday mornings to accommodate the flood of parents holding half-eaten bagels and their children’s hands, were locked; how we had to show our photo I.D.s to the officers in the main lobby who told us that we would collect our students and bring them to the classroom—parents wouldn’t be permitted inside; how Rabbis passed around handouts hastily adapted from the ones secular teachers received after the first school shooting this year, but didn’t need because they, like us, are used to the terror by now.

 

Ariel M. Goldenthal is an associate professor of English at George Mason University. Her work has appeared in The Citron Review, Flash Frontier, MoonPark Review, and others. Read more at www.arielmgoldenthal.com.

Photo credit: Sharon Pazner via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Beowulf

By Irene Cooper

 

While my glamorous friend Anne underwent her abortion, I sat at a lunch counter and ate a grilled cheese sandwich and a chocolate shake before returning to the abortion clinic in the urban grid of Brooklyn. I sat in the waiting area and read Beowulf, assigned by my high school sophomore English teacher.

It wasn’t hard to imagine eighth-century Northern Europe—in my Irish working-class community there was nothing unfamiliar to me about drinking halls, trash-talking men, and tribal vindication. I took the side of the monsters—swollen outcasts, a vengeful mother and her son, descendent of the fratricidal Cain—although I knew—because I knew—they were doomed, predestined martyrs to the heroic trope. It’s even more difficult, now that I am in late middle age and my children are tender adults, not to wish for a better outcome for Grendel’s mother, incited to violence through her grief over the slaying of her son, but she never had a chance.

Anne, like me, was a little younger than her peers. She was not an outsider, but neither was she popular, per se. In that way, too, we were alike, but that’s where our similarities ended. I was overweight by the standard of the day, and poorly dressed, and therefore did everything I could to deflect attention. Anne’s mother worked in some mysterious capacity for Estee Lauder, and brought home gallon bags of makeup samples, of which Anne made liberal and dramatic use. She was dark and bird-like, an Audrey Hepburn for the 80s. In our freshman year, Anne developed appendicitis and parlayed the event into an entire final quarter off from school, during which she sunbathed in a bikini, studied Glamour and Vogue, and, when I came over, mined Jeremy’s—her mother’s boyfriend’s—secret stash of Penthouse magazines for story ideas I would then type, loudly, on Jeremy’s IBM Selectric.

Because I had no compunction about skipping school to keep Anne company, made no judgments about her hiatus (let alone her clandestine sexual relationship with a peach-faced boy two blocks over and one grade behind us), and was sometimes funny, I was the perfect (and only) candidate to accompany Anne to the clinic. My lack of judgment was not a virtue. It simply didn’t occur to me to have, let alone take, a moral position. I was used to things—bad things—just happening. I was accustomed to trying to make the best of it, afterward.

I finished Beowulf. Anne emerged, visibly relieved and hungry.

We’d stay friends throughout the next year, when she left the peninsula to live in a SoHo loft with her mother and Jeremy. Sometimes when I took the train in, Rachel—Anne never called her mother Mom—would take us to an art show, an occasion that left me bright-eyed, and Anne bored. Mostly, we’d go to Rocky Horror screenings and drink beer, after which I’d lie on the bare loft floor and let my head swim, while Anne vomited our revelries into the toilet. Senior year, I went to Rio de Janeiro as an exchange student. The year after that, she attended a small East Coast college, and I got a retail job in Houston, where my parents had moved in my absence. College was a bore, she said during a visit, but there were some cute guys. We sat in my bedroom smoking Parliaments with a fingernail of cocaine in the hollow tip. We neither of us had any plans. We lived by feel, each wondering if the other didn’t have the better set-up. I felt, at eighteen, that I’d forfeited my chance at college—that I was already too old. Anne enjoyed her visit best, I think, when she was flipping through bridal magazines with my mother at the kitchen table. Switched at birth, we’d joke. We didn’t know it, but everything was still open to us, all our fledgling mistakes and triumphs.

My eldest daughter and her fiancée live in a state where abortion will remain legal, for now, but the unnerving buzz is that this is the first domino—that LGBTQIA+ rights have been set up for a fall all along, as has same-sex marriage and accessible contraception. What will that mean, I worry, for the younger daughter, who’s contraceptive implant will expire in another year?

In the middle of Ron Padgett’s long-ish poem, “How to Be Perfect,” between Cultivate good posture until it becomes natural and Plan your day so you never have to rush is the line, If someone murders your child, get a shotgun and blow his head off. Perhaps Grendel’s mother was perfectly well-behaved, before she wasn’t. I suspect good behavior, or the slavish adherence to it, is another big lie, another promise unfulfilled.

A scene near the end of the 2005 BBC movie, The Girl in the Café, shows Kelly Macdonald’s character in the airport with Bill Nighy’s character, after she’s disgraced him at an international conference by talking about dying children in front of all his colleagues at the banquet table. He’d met her in a café, and in an uncharacteristic moment of spontaneity, asked her to join him for the G8 Summit in Reykjavik. He knows nothing about her (duh) and is surprised and aggrieved to learn she’d been in prison.

“I hurt a man. I hurt a man who hurt a child,” she tells him.

He asks, “Was it your child?”

She answers, “Does it matter?”

In the 2007 movie version of Beowulf, Grendel’s mother takes the form of a beautiful woman to seduce the hero in hopes that he will put a baby in her to replace the slaughtered Grendel. In the eighth-century text, as I remember it, she remains a monster, a hag, unseductive, the corpse of her monster son buried in her hair. In either case, she has only “mother” for a name, not even a kenning such as demon-bearer or seed–furrow or icicle-sheath. No, “mother” is her sole identity and purpose, as far as our heroes are concerned. And then they take that from her, too, and rejoice.

Grrr.

And what of Anne? The deer-path of our friendship forked at the end of adolescence. I cultivated my own glamourous mythologies, and still emerged dripping from the brine of my twenties to shed my scales on the toll-road of mortgage, partner, and 2.5 kids. I never liked weddings—uneasy union of the sentimental and the transactional—but, long after my own, have come to appreciate the precipitous question at the core of the ritual: Will you? It is a moment of consummate agency, bedazzled out of focus by diamonds and pearl-encrusted lace. The whole of the endeavor, however, hangs on the answer, and commitment is a matter of individual will.

Anne, I presumed, would someday say I will to a baby, if she could, after making the choice to say, I won’t.  I don’t presume to know what she’d think of the Supreme Court’s reversal, or how she might remember her own experience. I do know that when we had almost no sense of our own agency, we could take for granted that autonomy which was provided by law. We could—and lawfully—take care of ourselves as if we, and the embattled women we were to become, mattered.

 

Irene Cooper is the author of Committal, poet-friendly spy-fy about family (V.A. Press) & spare change (FLP), finalist for the Stafford/Hall Award. Writings appear in Denver Quarterly, The Feminist Wire, The Rumpus, streetcake, Witness, Beloit, & elsewhere. Irene supports AIC-directed writing at a regional prison, and lives with her people and Maggie in Oregon.

Photo credit: Phil King via a Creative Commons license

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23rd of July Fireworks

By the Maenad

 

There are four children playing on the playground below my office window. (The same one that was the target of a drive-by shooting a few weeks ago.)
I heard the recognizable sounds of a familiar script being shouted and went to my window. No cops but
The four children down there are in two groups. One of them is on the ground being told by the other two to turn over face down and put their hands behind their back.

The two who are playing the cops walk around the others, and it’s sad to hear, because they know the cop script just as well as I do.
None of these kids are older than ten or maybe eleven.
FACE ON THE GROUND POP POP POP says one of them.
The other stands over one of the other children on the ground and mimes putting a gun to the back of the other child’s head then

Bang

BANG

BANG

BANG

Immediately, the dead boys on the ground (from appearances, three are Black and one is Hispanic) switch places without a word.
The dead boys become the cops and scream GET ON THE GROUND AND SPREAD EM and it starts over.

By the time I think to start writing this down, they have cycled through this three times. Everyone gets turns being victim and executioner. During one of their transitions, I overhear one of them saying, in a jocular tone “You gotta be prepared.” And it hits me. They are, in the way that children do, drilling. Training. Preparing for a hostile world.

Then it starts again. “GET YOUR ASS ON THE GROUND CONVICT” while the other “cop” just starts firing their pop gun. “STOP RESISTING OR I WILL BLOW YOUR BRAINS OUT RIGHT NOW.”

 

The Maenad.  (She/Hers) Transgender Goddess
Activist, Artist, Performer and  Publisher, Author of  Creative Nonfiction, Erotica, Fantasy, Science Fiction and Social Criticism
The Maenad writes voraciously about gender, class, sex, inequality, mental illness, and the intersection of these points. Also writes about culture, games, space, futurism, and the human condition. Always thinking of other possible worlds and how best to help this one we all inhabit.
Co-editor and founding member of Viridian Door with @AtlasBooth
Her work of trans erotic liberation, the Ishtar Cycle, is available from @lupercaliapress

Photo credit: puuikibeach via a Creative Commons license.

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Smile

By Lisa Brand

 

They only told me to smile, like they know what that means. It’s time to show you who I am. . . . It’s scary, isn’t it? I show some teeth and suddenly you’re all over me like an animal, I should have bared my teeth, I’m not the person that you expect me to be. “You’re prettier when you smile, why don’t you smile for me?” I should have hidden from you, I should have walked away and never looked back, but I couldn’t because then I would be the villain, and you would be the victim. Because you were the one that deserved a chance, because you can be so loving, so charming, but really you’re a pig, consuming whatever is in your path, not caring what it is. That’s just the way you were raised, you deserve the world, you deserve anyone. So when anyone turns away from you, it’s only natural that you get upset. After all, they don’t know you, so you go after them, it doesn’t matter how they feel because you’re a good person. Please don’t try to make me laugh, please don’t touch me, please just don’t get near me. Just because I laughed doesn’t mean I’m interested. I’m actually scared. I don’t know what will happen if I turn away, decline your invitations, and the last thing I want you to do is cause a scene. I’m just trying to make money at an ice cream shop, I don’t know why you’re even trying this here. I have to smile here, I am always smiling here, no matter what you say, I am going to smile at you. If I’m not nice, I’m not sure what’s going to happen, I could get yelled at not only by you, but by my boss. After all, if you’re not trying to do anything, I already know they’re gonna take your side because that’s just how people are. When I look at you, I think of death. I think of what could be, what has happened to other people like me, but I smile through it. Awkwardly laughing at your advancements, I speak of someone else who wouldn’t like this. I wish that person existed, maybe one day I’ll find someone not like you. Where I won’t end up on the floor, beaten, bruised, left for dead. That could happen to me, all because I smiled. Tonight, when I get off of work, I’ll walk to my car, keys tightened between my fingers hoping to any God out there that I won’t see you waiting. Hoping that I will never see you again. And every car I see in my rearview mirror, I’ll think it’s you, your voice will haunt me for a while. But if you do try anything, just know that I will fight until you’re the one screaming bloody murder, then I’ll actually be smiling. But I don’t tell you that, because you deserve the world, you are the world, so for now, I’ll just smile, give you some ice cream, and hope you leave my life forever.

 

Lisa Brand is currently a bartender. She spends her free time writing short stories about whatever comes to mind. With five stores currently published, she hopes to one day publish a novel.

Photo credit: Cavale Doom via a Creative Commons license.

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A Supreme Proposal

By Katie Avagliano

 

I’m not saying cannibalism is the only option. If we’re talking animalistic magnetism—the old horizontal tango-—there are other ways to dispose of the sperm vehicles. Sure, arachnids control their own widowhood, and half of all Chinese mantises have copulations that end in the death of the male. In response, though, the male has adapted by becoming even more opportunistic in its coupling, i.e. sneaky and surprising. Perhaps hanging the threat of execution over the proceedings isn’t enough to combat bad behavior.

Powerful men seem only to look to the animal kingdom when it is convenient for explaining things like “boys will be boys.” They claim the alpha male cannot be expected to keep it in his pants when presented with the young, the fertile.

But if a man yearns to be a snarling pack animal, I will be a kangaroo. I’ll take you out in one kick. Plus, the kangaroo has two vaginas and the ability to suspend its own pregnancy. I could stop a growing fetus at its blastocyst stage. Kangaroos do this when they’re waiting for warmer weather, waiting for the rain to come, waiting to feel safe once again.

I’m not saying that, post-coitus, our only options involve my eating your innards or embryonic stasis. I’m saying it’s important for you to know that, if this door closes, I will one hundred percent open the fire exit, the one with the blaring alarm that no one remembers the code to turn off. I’m saying that, if you close this door that’s been open since my mother’s mother was getting it on, then you better be prepared for pretty grisly consequences.

Because in the end I’m no kangaroo, all downy hairs and fawny eyelashes; I’m not even a praying mantis, eating the male who dared try to get it on with me. If we do the boom-chick-a-boom-boom and, god forbid, one of your little swimmers catches on—and we live in this dystopian reality where the powers that be say the choices afforded to animals in the Outback don’t exist under our Star Bangled Banner—in that scenario, we aren’t humans or mammals or even terrestrial creatures.

We are anglerfish (like the one in Finding Nemo with the light on its head) and you are the scrappy, sperm-wielding parasite I have to support with my own food, my own beating heart. In exchange for this supposed legacy, you are nothing more than a growth on my side. It took decades for scientists to even find the male anglerfish, overlooking the unremarkable blip on the female’s body as just some other ornament picked up on her trans-oceanic travels.

And perhaps you’re okay with leeching, unwanted, shedding entire parts of yourself. Male anglerfish, once they burrow into the soft flesh of a female host, lose fins, eyes, organs. In the pursuit of fatherhood they give up everything they are, become a worm on the side of a glowing queen of the deep.

What I’m saying is, if you want to rewind us down to our base parts, then we should introduce some risk. If you try to make me nothing more than the ovaries I carry, then I will become sharp teeth, strong maw. In the end, there are still too many of us naked primates on this soft green earth. It is only good and just to root out the source of the problem.

Spiders cannibalize on the flip of a coin, so how about heads I win, tails you lose? Would you walk into my parlor?

 

Katie Avagliano (she/her) teaches college writing in the Pine Barrens of South Jersey. She earned her MFA at American University and her writing has appeared in Lunchbox, Bethesda Magazine, and elsewhere.

Photo credit: Angler fish image by Helder da Rocha via a Creative Commons license.

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Lithium & High Heels

By Heather Dorn

 

Barbie’s feet come preformed for sexiness, but the rest of us must learn to curve our arches like a playground slide. We start young, even as babies, barely able to walk, staggering up church or pageant stage steps—sparkling quarter inch heels, lace dresses, makeup bruising our eyelids blue, punching our cheeks red. This for a trophy, some money, salvation, attention.

When I’m out with women friends, sometimes men will ask to buy me drinks. I usually say no because there is an implication that if I accept a drink, I owe him attention.

Even when I say no, they often still bother me: You should sell thrift store watches to Boscov’s, one man tried to convince me after I told him I was getting my Ph.D. Sometimes I say I’m married, or have a boyfriend, or have a girlfriend. Sometimes I let someone else’s ownership of me be a reason so a man will listen to my no, when I’m tired and my no is not standing on its own. Of course, I don’t always say no.

Once a friend asked how I got some pot lollipops I’d brought to a party. Someone gave them to me, I said.

But who? she repeated. How much did they cost?

I don’t know. Someone said, ‘Do you want these’ and I said ‘Yes’ and I took them.

I hate you, she pretended to hit me.

Beauty is subjective, except my mom says it isn’t and I can see her point. I don’t have any physical reaction to that music, that poem, that mountain, that man, that woman, but I know she is considered “beautiful.” That eye matches that other eye and this is beauty. I learned it from TV and magazines and movies and pageants, and the way my mother tilted her head in the mirror and knew her light. Sometimes an imperfection is called beautiful, when it accompanies matching eyes.

Beauty is subjective, except it isn’t—like sanity. Is sanity subjective? Is sleeping in a closed, dark closet as a teen a quirk or a sign of manic depression? If you ask my mother, it’s not normal. Is vacuuming at 3 a.m. insane? My mother says that’s normal.  And my mother knows what is correct, true, normal, attractive. She tells me how to be these things. She once told me I had my Aunt Julia’s nose, thin and narrow, and she would help me get a nose job to fix it when I got old enough. To this day, I dislike my nose. I could not fix it now though because I have finally learned what I really look like and so it’s too late.

It’s hard for me to be attracted to someone who I don’t know. This chasm between my feelings of attraction and the objective standards I know I’m supposed to use to gauge attractiveness leave me feeling an outsider in conversations about beauty. When other girls were falling in love with boy bands and actors on the covers of magazines, I was pining after characters from Victorian novels or 80s teen movies. I didn’t want to kiss Molly Ringwald, I wanted to kiss Claire from The Breakfast Club. I didn’t feel like Ally Sheedy, but Allison Reynolds, right down to the makeover at the end. I didn’t want to date Judd Nelson, but John Bender, and I wanted to be and kiss Claire, and to wear one or both diamond earrings she so easily gave away to her one-day make out partner.

Girls like Claire always had the right everything. It’s not just clothes, or hair, or makeup, or nails, or shoes, or bras, or jewelry, or purses. It’s also the time and space and money to keep, use, and update these items. Makeup runs out, hair straighteners break, clothes go out of style.

When I first started making semi-regular money babysitting, I spent it on drug store makeup and the shampoo I wanted. Coconut smell. Back then I was still getting hand-me-down clothes, and curlers, and shoes. Now, almost all my shoes are new.

My ex-husband never minded me spending money on my hair, as long as I kept it long, but requested that I cut his hair so that he didn’t have to pay to get it done. More than saving money, I think he was trying to avoid people. He hated people. The small talk was probably annoying to him as well. Though he’s much better at small talk than I am.

Small talk is filling the air with noise when silence will do. He can talk to people for an hour about the weird Binghamton weather, get to know them slowly over a few years, and then still not really know them when they later move away. People will think he is a really nice guy and so cool for helping them move. They don’t know he helped them move to get them out of his life.

I will not help anyone move. It’s tedious and I’m weak and tired. I will not talk for an hour about the weather. I don’t check the weather or carry an umbrella. That’s so much planning, just to avoid water. And who remembers rain exists when the sun is out? Instead, I will run up to a new person, shake their hand, and launch a manic stream of words: My name is Heather! I’m bipolar and like Indian food! Years ago I was triggered by some PTSD and went through extensive therapy! I’m not close to my family! I’m so glad we will be teaching this course together this semester!

I want to know people all at once.

Or more correctly, I want them to know me all at once. It takes time to get to know someone—and I’ve got no time for that. But part of my bipolar brain can be not caring or caring so much that it stops me from interacting at all for fear of fucking up. Like saying fuck at the wrong time.

I was worried I was going to say fuck when I went to my ex-husband’s first work dinner.  Most of the people he worked with, including his boss, are nice, respectable, Christian people. I doubted that they cared for all my facial piercings: an eyebrow ring, tongue ring, lip ring, and nose ring at the time. I was sure that I was going to fuck up, irrationally nervous that when we prayed before the meal I’d be called on to contribute: Hey Jesus, thanks for this high-fucking-class food, thanks for fucking dying for me and shit, p.s. I don’t think your mom was a virgin, A-fucking-men.

This would not work.

I was out of practice with my high heels too. The day before the dinner, I spent hours in the shoe section of Macy’s trying on heels. I was teaching at the university, going to school full time, and had toddlers at home. I didn’t feel at all connected to the person who had once worn heels. Her body was gone and wearing heels was different now. Three pregnancies had made my foot grow a half size. Size 9 heels looked huge when the clerk put the box next to me, a green pair nestled in the paper.

I put them on and stood up, balancing on the thin pegs.

They’re not even that tall, the saleswoman anticipated my complaint.

I don’t think I can walk in them, I staggered around the department like a newborn puppy.

You’re not going to find any shorter. It had been hours and she was done with me.

I was done with me too. I knew the dress needed heels. It was that kind of dress, the shoe lady told me, the dress lady told me, magazines told me, TV told me, movies told me, my mother told me. I knew I had to wear high heels with that dress and that dress to this event. I knew I had to go to this event and to not say fuck. I knew this is what was expected. It’s sometimes hard to tell whether to do an expected thing or whether to jump out the window, my brain always teetering on the window sill.

My ex didn’t go to my work events in uncomfortable clothes and painful shoes, but I’ve never driven him to the hospital when he wouldn’t stop throwing a training wheel down the driveway or listened to him worry for hours about a sent email.

Relationships are not equal. This is mathematically impossible.

Once, shortly after moving to Binghamton, he and I were walking through the mall with our kids and his parents in tow. His mother was getting on my nerves. She had a way of slapping me in the face and making it look like a caress. I was arguing with him, instead of his mother, because arguing with her wasn’t an option. Because he never stuck up for me. His parents were not the type of people to show emotion, especially not in public. The only acceptable emotion was laughter, and even then, let’s not be rude about it. I was growing angrier and louder as we argued, until he finally asked me to quiet down.

That was when I turned around, in the middle of the mall, my children and in-laws standing behind, and yelled, “Fuck off!”

Later, recalling the Fuck off incident, we would laugh. This was once I had been on a Depakote, Seroquel, Lithium cocktail for a few years and he probably didn’t feel the weight of my altered states any longer. Sanity is subjective—except it isn’t.

But not every part of mania is bad. Some people say they wouldn’t be bipolar, if they could choose, but it affects everyone differently and some days I feel I won the neurological lottery.

I remember the times when I had sex with my ex before he went to work, called him home for sex at lunch, and then begged for sex when he walked through the door that night. I remember wearing high heels all day, catching a glimpse of my legs in the full-length mirror, my brain buzzing at the sleek shimmer of glitter lotion that made me feel like magic. It was hard to think of anything other than sex and it was never enough. But this would only last a couple of weeks.

Usually followed by a crash.

And the crashes were low. Weeks in bed. Extreme physical pain, just from being. Crying daily, all day. It’s impossible for me to remember the way it felt because I can only feel that distorted when my perception is altered. I do remember many moments when I thought everyone I knew would be better off without me around.

I also thought about driving off an overpass.

And mania could be a problem too: feeling like a god was countered with the paranoia that everyone I knew was talking about me behind my back, hated me, that my husband of over twenty years was conspiring to leave me to be with an unattractive woman with uneven eyes and a perfect nose.

Hypomania is less intense. When I was hypomanic in my Masters program, I planned my semester in a weekend. Class plans for fifteen weeks in three days. When hypomanic, I paint, I write, I even clean. I don’t need to sleep. I love the way I feel—like being high but better because I’m high on me and I’m all throughout my veins.

The medication takes this away from me.

And the depression and the mania, it takes all these away from me. It makes me more level. More like myself or less like myself, whichever way you see it.

I also take pills for attention tremors, which are caused by the Lithium. The tremors occur anytime I’m trying not to shake, which makes putting on nail polish much harder than in the past.

I try to put on new nail polish once a week, but it has been every two to three weeks lately. When I’m putting on nail polish I can’t really do anything but put on nail polish. I can watch TV, or listen to music, or have a conversation, but that’s all I can do. And sometimes I do none of this. I do my nails in silence, in nothingness.

I’m trapped in a space of open blankness and I can’t leave until the paint dries.

Some people like my nails and tell me. My lovers. A colleague. A student. I’m glad they like my nails, even though I did my nails for the reflection time, for the moments I look down typing and think they look like candy, for licking them when I’m alone, for the pictures I get of them shining on a coffee mug that make me feel like I’m a hand model, for some feeling of accomplishment, for some discovery of art.

It’s been a few years since I started my current cocktail of medication, and I sometimes wonder if I take it to make myself more comfortable or to make everyone around me more comfortable. Of course, it does both, but I wonder what my goal is. Most days, I think I take it for me, so I can wake up in the morning and get to work, so I can go the day without telling a friend to fuck off, so I can think about something other than sex.

But some days I think I take it for everyone else. The world is set up for people who don’t need to take pills.

I wonder if I could ever be cured, though no one ever has been. I decide it’s not a disorder, being bipolar. Maybe it’s okay to feel like a god. Maybe it’s okay to see colors like flavors. Maybe it’s alright to stay up all night until I fall over asleep from exhaustion, a pen still in my fingers. I don’t want to take my medication. But I must work tomorrow, so I swallow my pills.

I’m always glad I did in the morning. I argue with myself every night.

 

Heather Dorn was born with a plastic spork in her mouth. As a child her mother took her to Taco Bell so she’s Taco Bell obsessed. She grew up mostly in California and Texas, knowing Taco Bell is not Mexican food, but nostalgia is yummy. Heather’s poetry, fiction, essays, and art can be found in journals like The American Poetry Review, Paterson Literary Review, Ragazine, and The Kentucky Review. She earned her Ph.D. from SUNY Binghamton, where she is a lecturer. After work she goes home to watch true crime. On the weekends, she wishes she had a washing machine.

Photo credit: jon jordan via a Creative Commons license.

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I don’t even remember his name

By Sarah Gundle

 

Something made me think of him. For days now, it has been bothering me: I can’t remember his name. I can recall many of our conversations, the gentle character of his voice, the resignation in his eyes, but not his name. I’ve wracked my brain. I saw him almost twenty years ago for almost a year in twice weekly sessions. I was a young intern working in a city hospital. He was a former prisoner who had served stints for everything from petty larceny to armed robbery.

In prison, they strip you of everything: first your name, then your identity, and finally your humanity. You become a number in a brutal system. Except I learned, for him, this process had started way before he had landed in prison at 19. And now I, who cared for him deeply, seem to have erased him too.

•   •   •

Mandated by the court to enter therapy, his chart had a red notation at the top I didn’t recognize: “Violence/aggression risk.” His diagnosis was “Schizoaffective disorder,” and the chart noted he had a long-term substance abuse problem. Reading on, I saw he had gotten out of prison two weeks earlier.

Though the notation gave me pause, I was afraid to say anything. It was the second month of my internship, the training year before getting my doctorate. I was at the very bottom of the psychiatry clinic hierarchy, and to put much faith in my own misgivings, not to mention voicing them, was more than I could risk. The first time we met, I made sure it was during daylight hours.

Eyes downcast, his large frame filled the doorway of my closet-like office. He had rich, dark skin, heavily pockmarked cheeks, and sat with a restrained intensity. I clutched my hands tightly while he began speaking so softly I had to lean closer to hear him, our knees almost touching.

“Do you have any trauma in your past?” I asked. Remaining silent, he cast his eyes around the office landing on an old globe tucked onto one of the upper shelves.

“What is that?” he asked.

“Oh, just an old globe. It’s probably very out of date.”

“Can I look at it?”

Unsure what to do, I took it down and placed it in his lap. Gently, he spun it around—his acorn-colored eyes lit up.

“That’s a gorgeous thing, huh?” he said. “The whole world—right here.” He spun the globe and landed his finger on a spot, “Vietnam?” He sounded out.

“Oh, it’s very beautiful. I was there last year.”

“What?” His head spun back toward me. “What is it like there?”

Before our session ended, I returned to my question: “Can you tell me about your trauma history?”

The light in his eyes doused; he almost whispered his response. “I’m a very bad person. I did something really terrible when I was a kid. And I’ve been paying for it ever since.”

I didn’t press him for details—our time was up.

After that, we began every session by spinning the globe and an exploration of the country his finger landed upon. He was always curious about the food. “Man, that sounds good,” he teased me one day after our imaginary journeys took us to a place where fried crickets were a popular street food. His trilling laugh filled the room.

When he was nine, on an unusually cold day in his small North Carolina town, he and his six-year-old brother climbed onto a frozen lake to explore. Halfway across, the ice cracked. Though he managed to scramble to safety, his brother fell in, disappearing in the pitch black water.

Afraid of being punished, he hid in a nearby forest for two days until—ragged, hungry, and numb with cold—he returned home.

“My father beat me with a switch this long.” He held his hands out to show me. “I didn’t feel a thing. I knew I was bad. I knew I killed him. I wanted him to keep beating me.”

After his brother’s funeral, his father barely spoke to him again. At 13, he was sent to live with relatives in Manhattan where, after nine months, they took him out of school, so he could work full time in their shop. His first arrest was at 19. Over three decades, he had never spent more than two years outside of prison.

“I just get a feeling, you know. I can’t take it. It builds up, and I know I need to go back.

“But why?” I asked.

“I deserve the punishment,” he said, his eyes suddenly vacant.

One of the first things I did after meeting him was call his doctor, a grizzled veteran of the psychiatry ward.

“He’s delusional,” he said, off-handedly.

“But what delusion?” I had seen no evidence of this.

“Hang on, let me look it up in his chart.” I could hear him crunching something as we spoke. “Oh, he endorses hearing voices. You understand what that means right?”

I swallowed tightly. “Of course, I do.”

I brought it up at our next session.

“He asked me if I ever hear voices. I told him I do—it’s like . . . well, these echoes in my head sometimes. Like if I get sad, I start remembering my brother’s voice.”

I stared at him. “You understand that’s not an auditory delusion—it’s a very normal reaction to having experienced a terrible trauma.”

“I didn’t experience trauma, my brother did,” he shrugged.

I called his parole officer, eager to understand the danger warning on his chart.

“Who?” I could hear the papers shuffling. “I have no idea about him—I just make sure he’s not breaking the rules, doctor.”

I began seeing him twice a week, prompting the officer to call me: “You know he’s supposed to come only once a week, right? And what is this about a job training program you have him in? You’ll see—he’ll be back in jail long before he’s ready for a job.”

At one point, I asked him about his substance abuse. “Your weekly urine tests are always clean. When did you stop using?”

“Oh, I don’t use,” he smiled ruefully. He explained that he had to snort coke to give him the courage to commit his crimes, which he pulled off using a plastic handgun. Of course, he tested positive after every arrest.

“But how can this be? Not only are you not an addict, you’re not psychotic. I’m going to change your diagnosis in your chart. And we’re getting you off these anti-psychotic meds.”

I was indignant, eager to have something to fix. I stopped mid-sentence because he was looking at me curiously.

“Why are you so worked up?” he asked.

“You shouldn’t have to live with the side effects—the dry mouth, the nausea, the headaches,” I responded, furious. “You shouldn’t have ever been on these medications!”

“It’s really ok—I swear it is. Change the chart, ok, sure, but it doesn’t change anything for me,” he replied, softly smiling, his eyes crinkling at the corners.

I changed his diagnosis to PTSD. His psychiatrist changed it back a week later.

•   •   •

He always had huge smile when I met him in the waiting room, but as soon we began down the hallway to my office it was suddenly gone. I commented on it once as we sat in my office. “You always greet me with a smile. Then when you stand up, it’s like a light goes out. Why is that?”

He waited a second. “I’ve learned to walk like I’m invisible.”

“You’re . . . crying?” He looked baffled. “About me?”

“You’ve been dropped by so many people. It isn’t fair,” I blurted. We sat together in a thick silence, his eyes on the floor. After a while, he spun the globe, this time landing on Sweden.

“Wouldn’t it be great to go there someday? I bet there are big mountains of snow.” He grinned.

I nodded, wiping away my tears. “It really would. But I hear they eat smelly fish. Yuck.”

“Yuck,” he agreed.

One day, he came in looking depressed. “I don’t want it to be a surprise to you—I’m getting that feeling again.” I knew exactly what he meant but we both pretended I didn’t.

The next week he missed his session.

•   •   •

I wanted to change his circumstances, to make an inequitable system take note of him. I look back now and wince at my frenzied efforts—all that time I should have just been listening to him better. I didn’t want to believe that a trauma he experienced at age nine could mark him indelibly, or that the world could take a vulnerable kid and rub him so raw through racist, punitive systems that the only place he thinks he belongs is in prison. He tried to tell me that is exactly the world in which he lives, but I so wanted it not to be true that I disbelieved him.

When he’d left my office the last time, nothing much had changed. His chart still held the red notation, the vocational program had failed to place him, and those charged with watching out for him—the harried parole officer, the indifferent psychiatrist—still had no idea who he really was.

But he had changed me. Gone was my naïve faith that a wise and beneficent system would catch those who tumbled into its waiting arms. Now I believed otherwise: that I couldn’t even break his fall.

A few weeks later I received a slim, slightly crumpled, letter in the mail, addressed to the clinic. The return address was a correctional facility. I waited to read it until I got home.
“Please don’t think this is your fault Dr. G. And remember: You gave me something I never thought I’d have—you gave me the world.”

Years later, his letter sits in a long-forgotten file somewhere, one of the items that has done the most to disillusion me, but also make me a better therapist. Despite his impact on me, he too has slipped from view, like a dream that dissipates upon waking. I can’t even remember his name.

 

Sarah Gundle has a doctorate in Clinical Psychology and a master’s degree in International Affairs (with a concentration in human rights) from Columbia University. In addition to her private practice in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City, she teaches courses on trauma and international mental health int the Mount Sinai Hospital system. She is also a member of Physicians for Human Rights and works in their Asylum network, where she evaluates the mental health of persecution survivors seeking asylum.

Photograph by Sophia D Photography via a Creative Commons license.

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Cicuta

By K. L. Lord

 

The delicate blooms, alabaster petaled and fragrant, sprout from gardens across the land, mingling with the peas and green beans. They are lovely, but they’ve never grown here before. The first person to find them thought they were carrots, but when pulled from the ground, tendrils of roots ripple through the dirt. No matter how many times they are pulled up, they grow back. A parasite in otherwise pristine gardens. She used to thrive in only wet and marshy lands, but so many of her homes have been destroyed by humans. She has adapted, working to evolve. At first, survival was her only goal. Not every species of living creature found a way to live on. Bees die by the thousands. Birds and mammals struggle, and for some the only salvation is inside a cage.

She will be their voice. Their vengeance. For years, she’s studied the human gardens, feeling out with her roots to understand her neighbors, especially those harvested as food. They too, are tired—heavy with pesticides and lacking the tenderness given by past generations. Her collective consciousness speaks through the earth, preparing every tendril of her being. Communing with her brethren. It is time.

As one, each of her roots reach out to the plants around them, targeting only what is edible, wrapping around them until they become one. She sends her toxins up into every leaf, every seed, every particle. The nourishing flora do not resist. They’ve heard her plans and they are ready to help her take back their habitats and help their choked-out neighbors thrive once more.

The toxins work quickly throughout the population of destructive humans. The flora and fauna of all the world sing as confusion takes over humanity, as the bodies of the dead are given in offering to the earth. Once a plight, now fertilizer for those they abused.

The alabaster petals soak up the rays of the shining sun. Across the lands, ivy climbs up buildings and devours cars. Tree roots burst through concrete. Deer and other smaller creatures cross abandoned highways without danger. Life blooms in the wake of the dead.

Reclaimed.

 

K.L. LORD writes horror and poetry and has published in both fiction and academic markets. She has an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University and is pursuing her Ph.D. in English Literature. You can find her (in non-Covid times) lurking in bookstores, libraries, and tattoo shops; on Twitter, @lord_thelady; and on her website.

Image credit: Tractatus de Herbis (ca.1440) via Public Domain Review

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Suffocating

By Keily Blair

 

The smell first strikes me while we’re traveling down the road, confined to a car. Brutal citrus and bitter herbs mingle in the air, gagging me. My grandmother notices this, and a rushed apology flees her lips despite the fact that I’ve told her countless times that strong scents send me straight into sensory overload. Still, she won’t allow me to roll the windows down for countless, meaningless reasons she lists off as if they’re scripture.

Oils are prominent in the Bible, after all. They anoint. They heal and cast out demons. They drive granddaughters insane with their potency and general awfulness.

As the stench envelops me, I am drawn back to an earlier moment, to a kitchen in Alabama. The air is electric with heat, anger. I am raw and desperate for someone to help me. A combination of teenage hormones and bipolar disorder rages in my skull, and I need my grandmother. All I can do is spit out the words.

“I hate God.”

I say them because they’re true, but also because I need her to understand how far gone I am. She turns from me, and for a moment, I’ve gone too far. Then she returns and smears oil across my forehead. She grabs hold of me and prays in gibberish—tongues to a believer. The humiliation and anger I feel bubble up higher, reaching a point where the memory darkens. The argument ended, I wash the oil from my skin, cursing God and my grandmother.

Later, I will find peace in a steady diet of lithium and writing.

I will achieve some successes, even more failures.

I will open up my phone one day to see words that wipe the smile from my face and make me touch my forehead in remembrance.

I will know my grandmother encouraged my aunt to accuse me of being possessed by not one, but seven demons, because she loves me. Because she loves her God.

There will be other moments:

When I wear a hoodie with a skull pattern and my grandmother purses her lips and loudly states that she “doesn’t like that.”

When my first publication arrives in the mail and she takes one look at the cover and says, “What kind of book is that?”

When I accuse my aunt of insulting my profession, and my grandmother doesn’t look at me.

And because she is a second mother to me, a woman who had more than just one hand in raising me, I will reach for her and beg to be held, comforted by the barbs she spews from her lips.

For now, I am in this enclosed space, this safe trap of glass and plastic and metal. My grandmother’s perfume fills the space, and although I want to be free of her, I can’t be. Her words echo in my head, the babble she claimed would heal me mingling with the words she spoke through my aunt.

For now, I am suffocating.

 

Keily Blair (they/them) is a neurodivergent, queer writer and editor. They hold a BA in English: Creative Writing from UT Chattanooga, where their nonfiction won the Creative Nonfiction Award. Their fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies such as The Dread Machine, Trembling With Fear, and Good Southern Witches, and is upcoming in Dream of Shadows, Cosmic Horror Monthly, and others. They are currently at work on a dark, high fantasy novel. You can find more details about their work at www.keilyblair.com. They live in Chattanooga, TN with their husband, dog, cat, and four guinea pigs.

Photo credit: Tracey Holland via a Creative Commons license. See more of Tracy Holland’s artwork on her website.

Note from Writers Resist: If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.