Don’t Laugh by Val Bramble
Sometimes Mrs. Bowman rode the school bus to her jobs. She’d be waiting on the road with her children—her daughter, Suzette, and son, Buddy—both of whom I knew to be in High Levels of reading and math, as were…
Sometimes Mrs. Bowman rode the school bus to her jobs. She’d be waiting on the road with her children—her daughter, Suzette, and son, Buddy—both of whom I knew to be in High Levels of reading and math, as were…
“It is possible to control Los Angeles by being the one with the most vivid fantasy about it.” —Theresa Duncan, The Wit of the Staircase 1992 My brother joined the world’s smallest cult. There were precisely two members:…
after Jenny Offill On the hour-long train ride to New York City, you read a book about a divorce that almost but doesn’t quite happen. Your boyfriend says he’s knocked out from miscellaneous paperwork and allergy headaches and his…
MAY Grandma Robbie led Anthem heart-center of the peaches, a quiet intersection between four groves, perfect as the holy cross. The trees weren’t much taller than Anthem. Tall as the big sister she never had. Growing up an only…
“The 2024 election will be all about Taiwan,” our boyfriend, Jeremy, says. We’ve turned off all the lights except the one over the stove in the attached kitchen, and now we’re getting high on the plaid sofa in the…
My wife wants to know what my new job is, the title, so I tell her what the woman at dispatch told me, that I’m a nonemergency medical driver, which means I’m there when the situation isn’t dire, when…
We shall leave, for remembrance, one rusty iron heart. The city’s rusty heart, that holds both the hustler and the square. Takes them both and holds them there. For keeps and a single day. —Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on…
PROLOGUE: RANA Rana cannot speak. She’s eight years old, but Rana is incapable of yelling out to her sister that a smell—a smell not quite like gasoline spilling from the undercarriage of a rusted out four-wheeler, a smell darker…
And that’s when I know what I want to be. Not the cowboy, flailing all spaghetti in the afternoon sun. But the horse bucking and shaking that small man off his back. My father was out of work again.…
In every story we are precocious, fast, little mothers, little women living in questionable child bodies. Men stalk the straps of our training bras sliding off our shoulders. Our mothers scold us for getting ruined or dirty—always reminding us of…
My writing is obsessed with the many-ness of Black femme bodies and experiences. Everywhere I turn there is something, someone, somewhen that urges me to document: the things we’ve passed down, our names, the ways we mother, the ways we love, the ways we grow, the ways we understand our bodies in a country where being both Black and girl endangers us. This essay came to be after I reread Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye for at least the fifth time since I first encountered it in high school. I arrived at this piece thinking about Morrison’s tender and nuanced portrayals of problematic characters; the ways she made us see the flawed and hurt humans we’d categorize as monsters on first thought. For me, Morrison busted open the relationship between beauty and ugliness, between pain and joy as it related to growing up both Black and girl. Pecola Breedlove could have been me. Maureen Peal could be my daughter. Claudia MacTeer could be my little cousin.
In addition to her portrayals of our many-ness, Morrison utilizes moments of cataloguing when readers get presented with an idea and we almost get beat with it. And the beating feels done with love in that it leaves no real scars, but it refuses to let us forget or shake what we’ve encountered. I wanted to emulate that in this essay, I wanted folks not to forget us—not to forget me—when they walked away from this. We all grow up knowing that there were rules, we do our best to follow them, and we learn there are consequences for when we don’t. As children, we seldom ask who made them or where they came from. We’re taught not to question whether or not they make sense. This essay felt like a home in which I was allowed to question; where I could start digging through the source of some of beliefs I was raised to adopt, where I’d start to sift through the ways those teachings materialized for me and the other girls I grew up with into adulthood. I wanted to know how some of the things I knew by the time I was seven years old colored the ways I (we) navigated my (our) Blackness, the way I (we) bargained amongst ourselves trying to substantiate our existences.
I wanted the essay to hold space that we seldom got as children. I wanted to feel the ugly, weird, nasty feelings out loud and with purpose. I wanted to say things like: I understood a version of romantic love not from watching my mother or father or television, but from practicing whatever I thought it was with the other kids in my family. I wanted the essay to make me squirm a bit with thought of having to say the things aloud, to teach me something about a freedom—to telling the raggedy truth and not dress it up for my own comfort or the comfort of other people. While the I is most of the essay’s focus, in conversation with and in admiration of Toni Morrison, I am always writing toward more versions of we.
SHAINA PHENIX is a queer, Black femme poet, other-art-maker, educator from Harlem, NY. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Virginia Tech and is the 2021–2022 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in West Branch Wired, Glass, DIALOGIST, Foglifter Press, Cosmonauts Avenue, Salt Hill Journal, The Pinch Journal, Puerto del Sol, and Frontier Poetry.