Snap Not when your mother makes you go to the dance. You tell her you’re sick. Really sick this time. See? You’ve broken out in hives. Not when she slathers you in calamine lotion & stuffs you into tights…
When Ford made love to Calla, she felt something in him fight. It wasn’t against her ugliness. That matter was settled business, though Calla, in her youth, had held onto the idea that she was a winter-apple sort of…
Dau used to live in the apartment below me. He had skin so dry it fell like leaves on a windy day, so much he pixelated his floor with tiny fog-colored flakes, each thin and flappy as a plastic…
Esther was sixteen the summer that all the bees in her father’s hives died. Those were the days when she was in love with everything. The curtains in her room, billowing with the morning breeze; the spongy hills leading…
He was standing at the corner where we met every morning to walk to work because we were young and carless. I had gotten on a train and moved 2,000 miles for a walkable city. He had always lived…
Content Warning—self-harm and/or suicide attempt When I visit from the states my cousin Marco becomes wind. In the car to the restaurant where our mothers wait he’s all curls dancing, all cheeks stretching, speeding so fast I’m sure…
People will say Ry must have planned the robbery for weeks. They’ll want purpose and emotion and strategy. They’ll say she had a gun tucked into a pocket. They’ll say she must have been desperate: four kids at home…
In the gathering dusk of an afternoon that still lingers, I followed my father into the woods. He had not prospered in his first attempt to start a nursery business, the crimson-budded azalea liners withering only days after he…
After Lorna Simpson’s Head on Ice series and using language from testimonies of eleven Jane Does in the lawsuit against the handling of their sexual assault cases at Eastern Michigan University. Sandra No woman I know got ready with…
They always knock with questions and promises. They assure me that checking these boxes will only take a few. forward. minutes. But time winds serpentine when so many voices crescendo with each box that asks me to fit inside.…
To illustrate that dynamic identity, I used the refrain of “If I check this box” to reflect the recurring negotiation of marking a government form, inherently taking risks in order to participate in “America.” We feel deeply the danger of the stories that will be told about/for/against us if we divulge our identities and our truths that lay bare the violence of this country—“serpentine” traumas that make and remake us.
I write “we” and “our” with intention. In “Census,” I connect historically oppressed groups through “tacos,” “Kendrick and Tupac,” and “the Pacific” to show that these boxes should not divide and conquer us, but rather should fortify our solidarity against the systemic racism represented by the omnipresent “you.”
This piece is a response to the “you” that has historically silenced me and my peoples, that has not heard us, seen us, or given us what we needed. For once, instead of saying or doing what that “you” has demanded of me, I call out what “I’ll need.” This use of repetition is a call to action—a refusal to remain silent any longer, a chant to heal and galvanize the spirit to keep fighting even when beleaguered.
JADE HIDLE (she/her/hers) is a Vietnamese-Irish-Norwegian-American writer and educator. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Her travel memoir, The Return to Viet Nam, was published by Transcurrent Press in 2016, and her work has also been featured in MQR Mixtape, Southern Humanities Review, Poetry Northwest, Columbia Journal, and the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network. Follow Jade on Instagram @jadethidle.
