The flesh on his arms, like an overripe banana, peels as I drag my nails upward. Ribbons of crimson appear—thin, jagged trails up and down his skin. My brother doesn’t just yell—he shrieks. Not my older brother at all…
I first met Marty Ross-Dolen in spring of 2020 at an online introductory event for Vermont College of Fine Arts (VCFA) MFA in Writing program. We’d each been accepted into VCFA’s Creative Nonfiction program, with goals of working on…
As a lawyer with plenty of life experience, my mother should have known that lizards were a bad choice. Lizards are pets you cannot even pet. Touching them opens the risk of salmonella or something more sinister. Picking up…
It was a hot August morning in 2017 when I finished packing everything I cared to keep into my blue Forester (including cat, dog, and the few boxes of things I hadn’t sold or given away) and left Milwaukee.…
Pilgrims We stumble through the door of our new Florida home at two in the morning, doubled over from exhaustion. My father and grandpa follow closely behind, parking the U-Haul down the street. That makes seven of us in…
The floodlights we found under my father’s workbench. I didn’t want to cut chemistry for the fourth time in two weeks, but Lee was the boss. Lee was Freddie Mercury, and I was only Brian May playing a tennis…
By the time Mama wakes up and Lolo steps outside, the calamansi is already in Gabe’s pocket. Gabe sits cross-legged in the dirt, palms empty. Lolo squints at the tree. “Everything is like this when no one’s looking.” “Like…
One day when I was little, I trespassed the aluminum gate that was next to our little orchard in search of a Frisbee or Nerf ball or some such thing that we had sent flying, accidentally, over the barbed…
Nothing hangs together. There are big holes in the daughter’s memory. She cannot fathom the passage of time. Half a century ago when she was ten, sixty was an old woman. She does not think of herself that way.…
Pac got shot up in ’96, this time on a famous strip in Las Vegas. In three days he’d rise again like Jesus, a Lazarus in the Bible, outside of his hometown claiming victory over Hades. He’d be back…
At a very young age I had some pretty vivid moments that altered my life. I’m from Detroit, Michigan, where in the late ’80s to mid ’90s, murders happened instantaneously across the city streets. Those life-altering endings ran rampant while I was at school and out of school and all during the summers. Learning death as a child was a confusing and devastating process to endure. I tried to keep up with the environment I inherited while processing unfortunate events under the sun. The sun, now outside my barred window, shines into my cell with a recollection of influential factors that I had blindly followed.
A young love interest mixed in with gun violence showed me I had no power to keep the people I tried to hold dear. This love that coincided with death, Starisha being this vessel of a budding understanding, emerged and created a fear in me. I actually thought death was around every corner waiting to get me and those I knew and cared for growing up. The adult me writing the text, visualizing 2Pac staring out a window with an AK-47—as did Malcolm X in one of his prominent photos—collapsed into my younger self that a skinny niggah was supposed to die in most urban anecdotes. I pulled from this expression and entangled it into my future reality. I first wrote my experience down and with it I noticed that that year was full of homicides. That year 2Pac died; my friends and I didn’t believe it. Then Kenny got killed; we believed that because we didn’t see him again. But this baby that I never saw, my first girlfriend having a miscarriage, I believed; I needed to bring that story to the page, which was hard to sit down and do.
I thought, as a youngster, 2Pac was immortal. It was his only way to express a demise for a people. If Zeus was everlasting and had an origin story then 2Pac had to be our origin story, and those who followed behind him had to have one too. I utilized my freewrite about creating the two images inside of one, inside of a younger me.
Writing from a child’s standpoint was an invigorating task. Trauma is an odd thing to explain; it makes us remember and yearn for the “what if” factor about the people who once lived on this planet. In this excerpt, I color the page with youth. I had to recreate a sense of life as death occupied in those spaces, where life was all about learning and evolving in the mental state. Transferring those emotions and smells on the page, bringing life back through text in my excerpt—and making sure the piece could stand alone from its entirety—took revision, rethinking, and repurposing the real question of a concept.
DEMETRIUS BUCKLEY is the winner of the 2021 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Cave Canem Chapbook Prize, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, PEN America, Scalawag, Tahoma Literary Review, The Offing, Southern Review, and elsewhere. His writing has been honored by the Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award and Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition and he has performed his work at the Brooklyn Museum. He is a part of a writing program for incarcerated folks called the Empowerment Avenue. He is currently hopeful.
