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The Wall and the Air: Meditations on Post-Poverty Life.

Hold the wall. Your fingertips should always graze the tile. It is unsanitary. Do not lift your fingers to your mouth or to your eyes. You could become infected; you could die. The walls underground are filmy with sewage, are coated in the filth of those who’ve died and who’ve survived. Survivors hold the wall. They do not allow themselves to forget where they are. They know that no wall is endless, that someday their fingers will again find air.

You will be hungry, often. The occasional mole person you pass will show you all the manholes, will tell you where the dumpsters are the richest. And you will decide whether it is worth it to breach these stark parameters and dive. This act will prolong your stay; but sometimes, the lengthier stay is the wisest. Sometimes the lengthier stay will be your last. You will determine whether or not you’d rather starve or eat what is surely the innards of rats, proffered in the thin skins of sausages. If you have a bit of money, you will count the costs of low-cost markets, of bread two days past molding, of fruit not just bruised but left to rot. Your children must eat when you will not. Try not to be ashamed of what you feed them. Humiliation does not kill as quickly as hunger. After they are sated, do eat their crusts.

When you are alone, when money is no longer your currency, when you’ve seen too few people with whom you might barter, when you no longer understand the function of days, this is when you are closest to the feel of nothing, to an opening through which you can grovel and claw, escape.

But it does not end with air. Freedom is never as simple as breath. Breath is a beginning. You have exited into the world of the employed, a world you once knew well and have forgotten. For so long, this has been a citadel on the other side of a sea. The underground has been neither a bridge nor a buoy. And here, you can no longer feel the walls.

Soon enough, a way, however winding, will become apparent. Employment is an invitation; depending on its type, it will arrive on filigreed parchment or on an inscrutable scrap. But neither the invitation nor the work will reacclimate you to air’s architecture. It will be the pay and how far you can stretch it. It will be how you behave, above ground, when there is nothing left.

You will remember how thoroughly forgotten you were when you were too poor to be more than cellophane to the people who now use expense accounts to treat you to lunch. You will avoid mirrors, because they portend a regression into your more desperate self. It is in the shabbiness of a too-worn dress, in the raggedy soles of your only shoes. It is in the hair and the skin and eyes — you swear it — that film that cannot quite scrub off. It isn’t permanent for people like you, up here, experiencing air. Poverty above ground is a different beast’s belly. Roomier. You can slosh around; you can wait. This beast regurgitates. And when it does, you will find yourself, at least temporarily, free.

But there is something wrong in a world where some live in constant fear of being swallowed whole while others remain blissfully unaware of the rampage. If you have ever been poor, if you have scraped to afford furnishings then found yourself hastily throwing them away in a sudden move to a city with more livable wages; if you’ve been down to a dollar, swinging wildly at debt collectors to stave off an overdraft fee; if you’ve begged for payment arrangements; if you’ve been denied a bank account; if you’ve eaten Saltines as a meal: you are at war; you are being hunted. And an estimated 80 percent of the people in this country are crouching and flinching and looking over their shoulders right along with you.

Someone wealthy will tell you it is peacetime. You are no longer eating entrails, so we are in recovery. They are wrong. It is neither the opinion of wealthy nor the condition of the world that will determine when you are in recovery.

Only when you are no longer so reliant on walls that you waste whole years building them yourself, only when you are no longer afraid of what may await you underground, only when, upon seeing a hand emerge from a manhole, you can kneel and clasp it and pull with all your might — without fearing it will snatch you down before you can lift it up — will you know that you’ve reached recovery.

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Stacia in the Press: HuffPost Live, Salon, and a New Gig.

photo (6)
Why am I so happy? Read on.

Just a quick update before my next blog entry (which will probably be about calling a comeback a comeback, even if you’ve been here for years).

A few things have been poppin’:

On Thursday, I appeared on a HuffPost Live segment about black unmarried motherhood. Please watch when you get a chance.

  • I wrote a piece for Salon about The Melissa Harris-Perry Show’s recent segment on black single motherhood, which you can watch here. The piece was featured on the show’s Facebook page.
  • I’d also written another piece for Salon that I’m not sure I’d announced here.
  • And a recent one for The Atlantic that I know I didn’t mention here.
  • In other somewhat old news, I was one of five “Single Mom Breadwinners” featured at Disney’s Baby Zone site last month.
  • Just this morning, I tweeted about the importance of emotional restraint in personal writing (something I still struggle with, as I’m sure you can tell by my blog entries). If you’re a writer of nonfiction, you’ll want to check out the Storify slideshow there. Please note that one tweet should read, “Tell your emotions. But don’t sell your emotions.” The don’t is missing in the tweet.
  • I also Storify’d a tweeted tribute to Trayvon Martin this afternoon. May be always remember not just what we’re fighting for but for whom we’re fighting.
  • And finally, I’ve started a year-long fellowship with the illustrious Colorlines. I’m their 2013-14 Editorial Fellow for Community Engagement. This means, I’ll be helping them find ways to further connect with their readership through Google Hangouts, Twitter conversations, and article comment engagement on their website. It’s an exciting development as I’m a longtime fan of the pub and a stan for many of their writers/staff. Last week was my first week and we’re off to a swinging start. 🙂

In the next few days, I hope to have another blog entry for you. In the meantime, I hope you’ll check out the linked works above and let me know what you think. Thanks for reading, and thanks for being here.

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For Now, We Are Still Alive.

Beloved, the hope that I owe you — the hope to which you are entitled — is not something I can cloak in gossamer metaphor. I cannot paint you the Pangaea that all parents feel they should.

But neither will I speak to you as though the very sky is a fraud, as though our lives are a set breaking down, are a studio lot in foreclosure. There is no walking away from this, as we would from a dimly lit theatre at the close of a sobering film. 

We are real. And for now — just for now — we are still alive. 

When the time comes, we will not speak of expectation. I will tell you what happened to the lanky boy down South, taking the shortcut to a home after dark in what once was a sundown town. It will be more than a familiar narrative, even the first time you hear it. It will be an ancestral refrain; it will moan from within your own marrow.

I will tell you: at the moment when his murderer was acquitted, I did not hold you closer, as many black parents do in these seminal moments. I did not hold you at all. For a moment, my arms would not lift. For a moment, you were all but alone. You were smiling, your dark eyes dancing with gorgeous mischief, as you held out a box of Teddy Grahams you weren’t supposed to have.

Distracted, I poured you more than a handful. I poured you all that was left.

The murderer smiled when he heard he was free and his lawyers boasted of their own legal prowess. They preened and grandstanded like heroes. They clucked over how long it took for the murderer to be granted his freedom and surmised that he would never have been charged at all if he were black like the boy that he killed.

The State Attorney also smiled, as she had many months ago, when the murderer was in fact arrested — 45 days after he left the boy dying in the grass, of a gunshot wound to the heart. I remember her then and how she basked beneath a press conference halo, being alternately terse and coy, playing to the rafters with actress’s affectation. “Those of us in law enforcement are committed to justice for every race, every gender, every person, of any persuasion whatsoever. They are our victims,” she’d said.

I recall the “our” clearest of all. (Few words, you’ll learn, are more disingenuous than “our” when a black child has died in the street and black folks begin to understand that the law will not hold his killer accountable.) 

Last night, before I could reanimate enough to embrace you, I watched the State Attorney grin again, just after she chastised all the parents and advocates and media — both social and mainstream — for raising our voices loudly enough to force an arrest in the first place. “For a case like this to come out in bits and pieces served no good to no one.” 

Here is all that you should know: we are the only our there is. There would be no case for her to concede had our bits and pieces not been lain at her feet and then cobbled together to give voice to the gun-silenced child. 

No, I will not speak to you of expectation. Expectation of any protection at all feels an increasingly empty enterprise for black mothers. But I will find the hope I owe you. It will be communicated with candor, not fear. I will stoke it with dreams of an imagined eternity, where every man gives answer for every of his actions. I will build it, floor up, in communities constructed with care and by choice. We — you and I — will get through this, together. We — us and our own — will invite the bewildered to join us. And when we have amassed enough hope to shore us up, we will run toward this behemoth, which cradles in its bottomless belly a legion of unavenged black bodies.

If we die, we won’t do it afraid. We will do it while standing our ground. 

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Wishes for Daughters in Darkness, at Dawn.

May affection be a simple enterprise for you. May you never know entanglements with men who disengage quickly while you thrash about like a swan in the rings of a six-pack. I wish you friendships with discreet women; relatives whose opinions of you are not forged by the opinions of others; gentlemen callers who do not condescend. I wish you emotional slip knots, the limber stealth of escape artists, the willingness to remain tethered at the right times.

(Indulge me; I am your mother. My wishes are potent.)

May your heart never become such that it is only contented by playing the Nightingale. Do not be too tender, neither too eager to heal. May you never learn to use your own ribs as splints; do not break any bit of yourself to reset the men who are broken. May you laugh at the idea of women like your mother, who seek only the feral and the numb, then romanticize bringing them home. Do not wait by the shore for anyone’s return but your own — better, may you never know this pining. May you never set yourself adrift to become more present for others. Know the sound of yourself, listen for the whisper of your God, hear the hiss behind the lips of the man who cannot love you.

If anyone is able to indict you, may it be for the bluntness of your honesty, not the dullness of your deprecation. May your chest never be a bat-filled belfry. Love is crazy-making; may its loss leave you mercifully sane.

And when you grow, child, when you grow: may you never apologize for it. When you feel yourself unfurling as a tree, may you never withhold your figs. No one is owed your origin story. Give it only to those whom you trust and only when there is something to be gained.

Do not long for those who’ve made themselves isles. There is water between you now, but someday the plates may shift. You must be able to breathe regardless; may you never deprive yourself air. Never dive into seas for those already wielding life preservers; when the time comes, they will not share. May you never believe yourself a rescuer where you are regarded as little more than a spectacle.

And when you go, child, when you go: carry all these many wishes with you. May they never feel as weighty as a burden. May they ever be airy as embers. May they aid you in bearing quite little resemblance to me.

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Hold Fast, All Ye Who Prolong Suffering.

The right day will come. You will trot to the water and, accepting — finally– the sand on your throat, you will drink. And the sand will dampen. It will clump and castles will congeal in the pit of you. Every man you have kissed until parched, your eyes open, your face a reflection, a vacuum of longing; every truth you have swallowed dry and its lonely aftertaste; every rightful and wondrous desire denied; all the people who named you Ungrateful when you did nothing but prostrate yourself, deplete yourself, and lie to make peace with the lies they have told you; every person with sight who insists she cannot see you; and that well-meaning man who loves you in ways that are not water: they will find their prison here. The castles will close around them. And your long and even pulls of water will be their moats. You have flaked enough of yourself away; there are layers to replenish. Let them live on all of the you you’ve already offered, the eagerer you, who denied herself as though she were part-Peter, part-Christ, who questioned her worth whenever they behaved as if she had none, who pretended and still pretends she is unharmed. They will not die. You have been kind enough to fashion them these fine accommodations. Sand can be gorgeous as glass. You will not throw stones, lest you grow ulcers, lest you lengthen the hours of worry and wring yourself to this arid point again. You are strengthening now; you are gulping, the skin on your arms has uncrinkled. Your tear ducts have regained their dew. But the castles are becoming uncomfortable. Water dislodged the sand from your throat; you have grown a voice, but you are still housing so many hindrances. You are letting the small, incurious world of you’ve left resettle itself in you, elsewhere. You are no oyster; this past will not yield you pearls. These clumps are no castles; they’re a gathering shit.

When you are well enough — when you are whet enough — release it.

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Excavating Emotion with Stacia L. Brown.

One of the most consistent bits of positive feedback I receive about my blog is that it has the ability to make people feel. Not all writing connects with the reader’s emotions. Not all writing is meant to. But there is perhaps no greater frustration for the aspiring writer than to intend for readers to feel her work and to get the sense that she has not quite succeeded.

If that’s you — whether you’re writing creative nonfiction, fiction, an op-ed or even an academic essay (yes, academic papers can convey intense emotion) — I’d like to help you.

To convey the emotions of others, be they fictional or real, you must be in touch with your own. You must become a projector. Think of your feelings as light. You cannot build a lively world of moving images if you are unwilling to let a flash of wild rage; a burst of ecstatic joy, a confession of secret jealousy, a surrender to impregnable sorrow, a yielding to devastating, life-altering love and an equal acquiescence to devastating life-altering heartbreak flow through you.

If the words you need feel trapped under the rubble of denial or self-protection, and somehow, in spite of yourself, you want them on the page to be read by friends and strangers anyway, I can take through a series of exercises, readings and discussions that may help you unearth them.

This summer, I’d like to work one-on-one with writers from all levels of experience who are interested in exploring emotion on the written page. Each writer will work with me individually  to design four hour-long sessions over a four-week period. The dates and times will be scheduled according to each writer’s availability. Sessions will be conducted online via Skype, Facetime, or Google Hangout+, and the content of each client’s sessions will be tailored to his/her writerly needs.

If this is of interest to you, contact me here to initiate the process. Sessions will be booked on a first come, first serve basis.

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Oil and Water (or What Happens in Church Does Not Stay In Church).

The oil clings to everything. It is an intrusion; it follows me home, persists, demands decisions. To be rid of it, scrub the skin. But I do not want to be rid of it; it recalls too many things hallowed. I am not ready to reach up to my forehead and, with one simple swab, remove it.

It has already begun its migration. I’ve touched my face, hugged myself tightly, brushed my fingertips along my daughter’s hair. The oil is omnipresent.

I’ve inhaled this before, as it wafted up from a street vendor’s table, usurping the stalks of Black Love incense and the low-end imitations high-end fragrances. I have seen it in a twist-top vial, its name hastily scrawled and Scotch-taped to the front. Frankincense, it reads, or maybe myrrh.

* * *

In the car, we are three women leaving a service of confirmation: grandmother and mother and child. The windows are rolled against the cool night air, and the fragrance rushes ’round floor and ceiling. It occurs to me then that, like so many things at churches, the oil is decidedly masculine.

I am thinking over what was said, deciding whether I feel betrayed, wondering if everyone’s looks of concern afterward meant that, now, they see me as a danger to myself.

They would not be entirely wrong.

Scent is an association. We are our associations.

The last man I dated smelled of deodorant and fabric softener, which means, for better or worse, I pine for him as often as I pass any clean man in freshly laundered clothes. Before him: a man whose scent recalled potting soil; for eight years, I tried to plant sustainable things. I do not remember the smell of the preceding man — perhaps line kitchen and bar soap; I was rarely with him and, at the six-month-mark, eager to leave. And my first boyfriend, the 24-year-old I dated at 18, always smelled of an oil, something airy, almost unisex, rarely overpowering.

My father smells of aftershave and cologne with aggressive top notes. What he wears is not oil- but alcohol-based. It absorbs, burns off, rarely lingers.

* * *

The five of us who had taken adult bible class for three weeks stand gathered ’round the altar when called. Our regional bishop, having traveled from the Midwest for this purpose, is seated, a pillow at his feet. This is where we are to kneel when it is time. He takes the three on the left first; they are being received, not confirmed. They are already of this denomination and now they are joining this parish. They, like 98 percent of our small congregation, are white.

My mother and I are aloft, on the other side of the aisle. In our 30 years of churchgoing, we have never been part of a denomination. I am here because I like the liturgy. I am here for the parts of this I can comprehend — and also for the marvels we are happy to leave unexplained.

There are four priests in front of us, standing at the seated bishop’s right. On his left is our pastor. He has instructed the four to impart “a word” to each of us, if they feel led.

I know what is coming.

The three people being received kneel when called, and the bishop presses a cross of oil onto their heads. He tells them about their lives: you are hurting; you have a gentle spirit; you’ve overcome something insurmountable; you are going to serve faithfully here. He has lifted a veil on their futures, glimpsed in, and backed away. They are discreetly weeping, but mostly composed.

Prophecy makes me uncomfortable. It has since I was nine and a young visiting minister stopped mid-sermon to ask what I wanted to be when I grew up. I told him: an author, and he told he several things: that I would not be like other children, that I would write many books, that I would never have a day of lack. It was recorded and I kept the cassette till college.

I do not like predictions; they apply an uncomfortable pressure.

I am 33, unpublished, and I often feel invisible, the very definition of ordinary, even as I know I am not.

Also, I have not been behaving. If obedience is better than sacrifice, my life is often a landscape of lack. I have tried out autonomy, doing as I wish, loving who I want, in whichever ways seem right. I have not followed the letter of the law.

So I know what’s coming.

* * *

In the churches of my youth, prophecy began with “I hear the Lord saying,” and ended with any number of messages, though the most memorable were “rebukes.” No one wanted to be rebuked; it meant someone would have to “pray a spirit off” of you — and there were spirits for everything. Spirit of poverty, spirit of promiscuity, spirit of depression or rebellion.

I had few greater fears while sitting in service than when a minister paced the aisles, pointing out congregants and calling them to stand or walk toward the pulpit for prophecy.

This is, in many measurable, relief-filled ways, a different kind of church.

But I know how I live. The blank after, “I hear the Lord saying…” could fill with flotsam fairly quickly.

I kneel when it is time. The bishop rests his hands on mine, says that what he sees is compassion. This is not what I thought was coming: he says that I have a good heart.

There are other things about hardship, how I’ve seen some, how I’m likely to see more. And then, it becomes about men. Perhaps I’ve been abused; abuse comes in many forms. He says that I do not trust men, that it is hardest to find love in men who have not been fathered. “So many men haven’t been fathered….”

There is more, but I am crying and thinking and wondering where You are. I am wondering if even this can be trusted, when another priest jumps in to say I’ve been searching here and there for comfort — any kind of comfort. The comfort God gives will not leave you, he says.

This is what I expected: to be told, in front of onlookers, that I have unresolved father issues, that I’ve become the classic looking-for-love-in-all-the-wrong-places cliché, that I need, in some fundamental way, to change.

The priests are not wrong.

Yet another chimes in and says that a wall I’ve built is breaking tonight. This, I have also heard in churches before. I have heard about my walls, everywhere, for all my life.

I am no skeptic. But I do not like feeling so exposed. And I do not understand why anyone would want to be told by relative strangers, before a cloud of witnesses, what lies in the reddest, sorest recesses of her heart.

The bishop says he feels led to embrace me and when he does, as all look on, I cry a bit harder into the folds of his crimson and ivory vestments. I am not sure why; I am exactly sure why.

This has been my experience of faith: to remain ever uncertain and to be certainly present.

In this way, I, myself, am the oil, meant to stain and to blur and to stay.

* * *

Lord, You’ve been a long haul, and I’ve been resistant. Your burden has not felt light. To feel as weightless and unyoked as I should, I would need to more of what happens in church demystified. Prophecy has always made that difficult, itself an act that mystifies.

You know better than most that I do not mean to be resistant. Were I a simpler woman, I would float along the water, or better, I would walk upon its surface. I’d let you bear me up. Were I uncomplicated, all the wounds that were reopened would be healed in the rushing current. Instead I am a slick, amorphous; I am moving in ways I can’t control.

And yet again, I’m left asking You: can living water ever commingle with oil?

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I Am No Sybrina Fulton: On Single Mothers, Loss and Hope.

(Cross-posted from BeyondBabyMamas.com)

Sybrina Fulton, center, in happier times. Credit: Twitter
Sybrina Fulton, center, in happier times, with sons Jahvaris Fulton (left), and Trayvon Martin (right). Credit: Twitter

Here is the difference: I can check out. There are days when my heart holds vigil, when I can consume commentary from useful and inspiring angles and I can be useful and inspiring myself. Then, there are days like today, when I am so overcome with empathy and when what’s happened to Sybrina Fulton feels so close to home that I cannot look fully into her face on television. And that’s the difference between single mothers who still have their children and those who’ve lost them in unexpected, arbitrary ways.

We can check out.

From this not-so-comfortable distance, I can admire Ms. Fulton’s unwavering fortitude, her composure, her faith, her love, her ability to lean on her son’s father and admit how much she needs and is grateful for his presence and support. She never appears catatonic or sedated. She is letting as much of reality in as she can, only removing herself from a space when her son’s recorded final moments are being replayed as evidence, and somehow, remarkably, listening to obvious lies about her son, without violent outburst.

I am nothing like Sybrina Fulton. I do not have her grace, and I do not have her courage. I can’t look at George Zimmerman’s impassive expressions or recall his crowdfunding efforts online or read his account of that fateful night’s events without feeling a very rational, concentrated anger and a very real need to remove myself from the sight of him.

I can check out.

(Or can I?)

In Jackson, MI where my mother was born and spent most of her childhood, crime is spiking and, as is often the case in small, economically depressed towns, that crime is hitting black families hardest.

Rakeish Brown's senior photo, Credit: WLNS.com
Rakeish Brown’s senior photo, Credit: WLNS.com

On Saturday morning, June 22, single mother Latonia Hemphill heard what sounded like firecrackers outside her mother’s home. Moments later, according to reporter Justin Dacey, she heard her 20-year-old son Rakeish Brown asking, “Why’d you shoot me, dog?” Those were his last words. His alleged shooter was a neighborhood “friend” he’d apparently run into at a nearby store and offered a ride.

17-year-old Aquilla Flood, Credit: Twitter
17-year-old Aquilla Flood, Credit: Twitter

We are losing our children in the most unexpected ways, whether in suburban neighborhoods during All-Star Games or on Saturday mornings outside their grandmothers’ homes. We are losing them ten days before high school graduation, as in the case of Aquilla Flood, who was reportedly shot while sleeping, allegedly by an ex-boyfriend whose prom invite she’d refused.

In each case, their black mothers — often single, sometimes with the support of a co-parent and usually with extended family and friends lending bewildered, helpless comfort — are left to talk to the press and to appeal to the community. If we live in any major city in the U.S. or any economically depressed community where crime is on a steady uptick, we’ve seen one of these mothers on local news. Maybe she’s teary, maybe in shock, but she’s there. Present. Showing up day after day. Answering press conference questions, walking the street bearing a candle, holding up photos of her child.

We’ve almost come to expect that level of composure. And it can feel, at times, that viewers outside our own communities, whose ability to check out far exceeds our own, believe that we were somehow prepared for this possibility.

By virtue of poverty or city-dwelling or the number of blocks from our children’s school the nearest gang territory is or the thuggishness of our daughters’ ex-boyfriends or the prevalence of racial profiling or simply because we were two black people giving birth to a black child anywhere in America, there are people somewhere who expect us to remain calm and patient and to have faith in the justice system. There are those who actually believe that whatever confidence in our justice system we’ve managed to hold onto will comfort us after someone’s murdered yet another one of our children.

Dominika Stanley and Charles Jones hold a photograph of their slain daughter, Aiyana

They can check out. And they can do it because they aren’t Aiyana Jones’ parents. They’ve never had to hear a judge declare a mistrial in a case that should’ve held accountable the SWAT officer who murdered their sleeping seven-year-old.

In a growing number of black communities, a living child is beginning to feel like a luxury. No. “Beginning to” is wrong. Historically, being able to parent a living black child has long felt like a luxury. And it shouldn’t. Of course it shouldn’t. Being able to see your children survive gun violence should not feel like a conferral of mercy or good luck.

But it absolutely does. When we talk about holding our children closer, whenever we hear about yet another mother who can’t, we are feeling blessed and fortunate in ways that say so much more about our nation that they do about us.

The fact is: there is no checking out. We have very little control over the ways our children are living and dying and very little choice in how we’re publicly handling our losses. Watching so many other black mothers lose their children carries a kind of psychic damage for us all. No amount of changing the channel or pushing the newspaper away or locking our doors insulates us.

We can’t all handle what’s happening to minority mothers and their children with the grace of the Fultons’ or the patience of Aiyana Jones’ parents. We can be grateful, but we cannot prepare. All we can do is pay attention, remain engaged, lobby for change, look out for our neighbors’, and — yes — hug all the children who remain. In so many daily ways, we are checking in. And we must keep doing so, if we’re to have any hope left at all.

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How to Love a Man Who’s Lost Everything.

Don’t. But if you must, dive in. This will be fleeting; it is not a sustainable love. Seize it, like a hand does a flame. Understand that you are not a restoration. You are not a gutted frame on which his hopes can be re-hinged. Neither offer yourself as a cipher to be filled. You are already full; you have never been so emptied, and perhaps this is what’s drawn him in the first place. Know that, at times, you resemble everything that was stripped. Know, at all times, you can compensate for nothing.

There is no pity in your attraction; you needn’t worry there. You cannot save him; you know it. This has never been your aim. It is simply that anguished men are often wisest. It is their wisdom that draws you, that stalwart, measured carriage only known to those who, having conquered, have been conquered, and are certain to conquer again. Their world, unlike the rest of ours, is flat. Only things that are able to float above that bare horizon are considered worthy of notice. You are worth his notice, and it deepens your sense of purpose. Were you made to love him? Are you here to, among other things, arc the edges of his earth? No. You may hover, but you will sink soon enough. You will blend into some faraway butte.

Get used to being called foolish. Get used to feeling foolish. Be foolish. This is not a regenerative affection. There is only one chance; you mustn’t squander it. You are not those women of grandiose lore who can love a man back from the ledge. You are the ledge; you are merely where he stands to keep from falling. You will not bear him up for very long.

For the man who has lost everything, the best you can be is a friend. When he believes he is falling in love with you, you become something more to lose. When you believe you are falling in love with him, you are already lost.

Close your eyes. Keep them shut. The best of it all is beneath your lids. This is the bit that your reflex can control, the bit that can be contained. Look at him there; he is smiling. Look at him there; he has not been brought low. And no one feels guilty and no one is broken and it seems, while you pretend to be asleep, that he is your favorite dream.

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Juneteenth.

1.

We turned to each other when we heard the decree. You are free. And freedom felt like lead ’round my ankles and I asked you if this was what you wanted and you shrugged and said it was what needed to be. We did not know that we were late, that we could have ceased work on this borrowed land long ago. We could have earned something for each other. All this time. All this time, we should have been holding each other without punishing ourselves, for wanting what we could not have, for promising what we could not give; life need not have looked this way. And the sky was full of those rolling clouds you love but you said, Freedom don’t make me feel no closer to ’em, and I knew what you meant and I know who you are and I hated what was happening.

How long and how low pain lingers when they take away the tethers; you can see where they were forever. The gashes ooze and they fester and it is no real comfort for fresh air to hit them. There is no true salve for what lies beneath.

2.

I tell you that I need a drink, and you walk with me to get one. We pass two blocks of rowhomes — at least one where the lawn is overrun with weeds and you point to the dandelions and tell me you always believed they were flowers. This is how it feels to be free: miles between us with shoulders almost touching, wanting to reach for your hand, to run my thumbs over your bitten-down nail beds, to feel your skin again and to claim it, to realize that makes me no better than a slaver, restraining myself. You can do what you want now, say what comforts you to whomever you want, and I get to pretend that I don’t wish that person were me. I am so bad at pretending — and so weak, for not wanting to be free. At the corner, you cross against the traffic; I don’t follow you. A car darts between our adjacent curbs. Nothing was coming, you call across to me. We are facing each other, effacing each other, and I already know I will miss feeling tethered to you. There is something ancestral in this distance, something the crow knows, as he circles overhead. Something we will soon forget.

3.

It is Juneteenth, and everyone is reveling o’er belated liberation.The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes. We all know what it means to overstay, to read into a broken bond an invitation of nearness. Freedom may be our noble and God-given right but first it will feel like the radical, paralyzingly jolt of too much choice. What I wanted most when we were first free was that small and muddied hut I shared with you, that borrowed time and that bottle of wine you uncorked when it was over. What I wanted was the attention we could give when we had nowhere else to go.

Liberation is lonely for the once-loved. I have longed for your letters, now that we are free to write them. But we are not where or who we were. Everything I send you returns to me unopened. I have heard you’ve gone off to another war, but you did not need to leave to be a warrior.

I am drinking Shiraz from the bottle. You have been gone for years, for generations. This is what freedom has become: laughing and turning my face to the rain, finding that you are in these clouds. You have reached them after all, and you are giving me a taste of what they hold.