Rorschach Test          

by Kari Gunter-Seymour


Consider daffodil blades
in the crackling cold of February,
those green thumbs up
breaking through earth’s rind,
obliterating doubt—what’s left
of winter suddenly endurable.

What tethers us to the tentative,
to contingencies, to the life force 
we are designed to abandon from birth?

I am reluctant to call it destiny, knowing 
too well which neuroses rush forth
from that word, sifted through lobes
and sockets to lubricate our worry.

Listen—there are things to love
about failure too. Sometimes
we make mistakes, call them coincidence,
trapped like thirsty sponges
between memory and the moment,
our imagined selves the deal we make.

Aren’t most of us in fact still children
mishandling oversized bodies,
echoing songs seeded in our mind’s eye?                 

We pump our legs on a playground swing,
avoid the dare to jump, the grass
beneath our feet heeled to death,
the slaughtered ground a pit of sharps
and flats, scars the shape of shattered       
hearts stamped into our elbows and knees.


* * * * *

"Rorschach Test" is part of Kari Gunter-Seymour's poetry collection Alone in the House of My Heart.

Kari Gunter-Seymour is the Poet Laureate of Ohio and a 2021 Academy of American Poets laureate Fellow. Her poetry collections include Alone in the House of My Heart (2022), A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen (2020), and Dirt Songs (2024). Her work has been featured on Verse Daily, World Literature Today, the New York Times and Poem-a-Day.

Alterations

by Dorian Kotsiopoulos


One day your boy
brings home a girl
and you know
he is hers now.

It is something 
in the way she picks 
a stray thread 
from his shirt.

Follow that thread
to your mother-
in-law’s house, 
where this pattern was cut.                                                    

Look, she’s still stitching--
she’s been letting out 
seams for years.
She will show you.


* * * * *

"Alterations" was previously published in WomenArts Quarterly Journal and in Emerge Literary Journal.

Dorian Kotsiopoulos has featured at various poetry venues in Massachusetts, including the Brookline Public Library, the Loring-Greenough House in Jamaica Plain, and the Fuller Art Museum in Brockton. Her work has appeared in literary and medical journals, including Poet Lore, Salamander, Slipstream, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, On the Seawall, and Smartish Pace. She is a member of the Jamaica Pond Poets.

Where is She?

by Judith Michaels Safford

 

Where is she

The one who longs to be

Not the one who lingers Lost

in

 memory

Those Years

of

unyielding suffering

 

The soul longs for her

To persevere on the train

That never seems to have an end

Or a friend

To wipe her years of tears

That had to be

 

We spoke within her dreams of peace

We whispered in the flower beds

In rich black earth

Mother earth

That held her birth of softening

Row by row we helped her grow

Like a newborn

weeping willow bending to the ground so low

And stands upright again and again

stronger, longer,

 kinder, softer

with

compassion rising from the

deeper well

 

Where is she, now?

The one who longs to be

* * * * *

Judith Michaels Safford lives in Glenwood, NM. She migrated from Indiana to Denver in 1989 and landed in New Mexico in 1998, for keeps. She is a retired massage therapist. Just recently she was blessed with her twentieth Great Grandchild.

Don’t Sell Your Soul - Memoir of a Guru Junkie and a book of poems, Joyful Surrender – A Pilgrimage are her two self-published books. Many of her poems express learning how mistakes lead to growth. She writes about walking through the tough parts of life and finding joy and discovering what really matters.

After Ryokan

by Judy Katz-Levine


Life is impermanent, full of changes.
I swim in the lake, stroke past the kids.
Sitting on the bench, a dragonfly.
Then he lifts off. Women talk, standing
on the sand. Children run to the water
playing a game with buckets. I brush
the sand off my feet. My partner is gone.


* * * * *

Judy Katz-Levine is the author of three full-length collections of poetry: The Everything Saint, Ocarina, and When The Arms Of Our Dreams Embrace. She has published widely in journals such as Salamander, Writing In A Woman's Voice", Fence, The Sun, Blue Unicorn, Miriam's Well, and Peacock Journal. Her work has been anthologized in The Dreamlife of Johnny Baseball and Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend. She was the recipient of a Massachusetts Artist Foundation Fellowship in poetry and won the 34th Moon Prize from Writing In A Woman's Voice.

This month another Moon Prize, the 131^st, goes to Shaun R. Pankoski's tender poem "But My Heart Still Held A Sadness."

But My Heart Still Held A Sadness

by Shaun R. Pankoski


I felt like a little mountain goat
that day we hiked Maroon Bells.
Nothing could stop me
as I scampered here and there 
along the trail,
breathing alpine-flowered air.
It was crisp. It was perfect.
I felt invincible and young.
Great grey boulders, 
veined in white, rose up 
from churning water, 
and I danced upon them,
my face a tiny flower,
seeking your sun.  


* * * * *   

Shaun R. Pankoski (she/her) is a poet most recently from Volcano, Hawaii. A retired county worker and two time breast cancer survivor, she has lived on both coasts as well as the Midwest as an artist’s model, modern dancer, massage therapist and honorably discharged Air Force veteran. Her poems have appeared in several literary journals and blogs including Verse Virtual, ONE ART, Poetry Breakfast and Sheila-na-Gig. 

 

This month the 130th Moon Prize goes to Melanie Choukas-Bradley's challenging poem "Muddled Grief."

 

 

Muddled Grief

by Melanie Choukas-Bradley

 
How do you grieve an untimely spring
The precocious daffodil, the frog tuning up too soon
 
Of all the climate griefs
This the most muddled
 
The heart swells to the magnolia
Gambling on a spell of winter warmth
 
All the resilient lives reaching
Into the breach of a changing world
 
And our hearts wondering
Whether to break or bend
 

* * * * *

Melanie Choukas-Bradley is a naturalist and award-winning author of seven nature books, including City of Trees, A Year in Rock Creek Park, Finding Solace at Theodore Roosevelt Island and The Joy of Forest Bathing. She began writing poetry during the pandemic and had the good fortune to discover Beate Sigriddaughter’s Writing in a Woman’s Voice. The site has featured many of her poems, including “How to Silence a Woman,” “If I have loved you,” and “The Water Cooler,” which won Moon Prizes. Her poetry has also appeared in New Verse News.    

 

Regret Is A Dress To Be Buried In

by Alexis Rhone Fancher

All the dreams she had for her daughter, my grandmother crocheted into the dress, counted stitches. Filigree (happiness), embroidery (success), tatted lace (two solitudes, melded). The honey blond yarn a perfect match for my mother’s hair, down to the shimmery gold strands woven through it.

Regret is cap sleeves, showing off her arms. Toned. All those years of ballet. The corseted waist, full skirt for dancing, the taffeta petticoat that gave her dress rustle and swish. The night of their 20th anniversary, how my mother twirled, dancing to Johnny Mercer’s band, flaunting the dress, safe, she thought, in my daddy's arms.

So this is bliss? my mother sighed, sipped another vodka martini. Who knew cancer loomed in the lounge, lolled with the bartenders and servers on break, hid in the powder room, waiting to stitch itself into her colon, her stomach, her heart, an irregular mass - throwing off the count, crocheting caskets into everything.

* * * * *

"Regret Is A Dress To Be Buried In" was first published in Spillway (2020).

Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle, Verse Daily, The American Journal of Poetry, Plume, Diode, and elsewhere. She’s authored ten poetry collections, most recently Triggered (MacQueen’s), Erotic: New & Selected (NYQ Books), and Duets, with Cynthia Atkins (Small Harbor Press). Brazen, an erotic, full-length collection, the follow up to Erotic, published in 2023, again from NYQ. A coffee table book of Alexis’ photographs of Southern California poets will be published by Moon Tide Press in 2024. She lives in the Mojave Desert with her husband, Fancher. They have an incredible view.

 

Roots

by Alexis Rhone Fancher


Hair on the head of the dead girl kept growing. Dark roots sprouted, clutched at her delicate scalp, muddied the bleached tips, embarrassed her, one last time. No, Google says. The hair doesn’t grow; the body, deprived of moisture, begins imperceptibly, to shrink. Like people do when they’ve lived too long. Like a man’s cock does once he’s come. Loses interest. Seeks a nap. A sandwich. Wants to do it again. The cops showed up before dawn. Lights and sirens everywhere. The whole neighborhood wide awake. When they knocked on my door I was ready, my bathrobe half-belted, a mug of French Roast steaming in my hand. Coffee, Officer? (My mother always said, you never know when you’ll meet your one true love, so always look your best; make coffee!) Yes, Officer, yes, I heard the screams. The cop was all ears. Screams? Plural? he asked. Yes. And loud enough to wake the dead, I said. Male? Female? I considered. High-pitched. Female, if I had to guess, although, you know. I gave him a look. When he asked me if I saw anyone else, I lied. When he asked me why I hadn’t called it in, I shrugged. Lately, things around here are going to the dogs, I admitted. But what’s that got to do with me? No one made me the head of neighborhood watch. I have things to do. I have a busy life. (“Good fences make good neighbors,” my mom used to say.) So when they came home, I ignored my neighbor’s screams. Closed my windows. Pulled down the blinds. I’d seen her come home before, two or three in the morning, bedraggled, spent. Seen her tumble out of her Mercedes and drag ass up the stairs, followed by her latest loser. Tonight, illumined by the porch light, I saw him crush her against the front door, his mouth hungry. I imagined his tongue down her throat, the moan she made when he fingered her. I confess, I wanted to be that girl, wasted, wanton, that man’s hands on my breasts, his cock between my thighs. I watched as she extracted herself from his grip, maneuvered inside. Watched her date slip in after her. Saw the lights go on. Then off. Then on again, around 4 am. About when I heard the screams. I sped to the window in time to see my neighbor, half-naked, press her face against the kitchen windows, then slip down out of sight, saw her lover slink out the door, fade into the night. I wondered if the man was still lurking, or if he’d left for good. If he did come back, maybe I’d have a chance with him. I watched from my doorway as the medics rolled my neighbor out on a gurney, a white sheet pulled up over her face but not her head. Her hair, spiked and defiant, those black roots a dead giveaway. 


* * * * *

"Roots" was first published in Live Encounters, 2022.

Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle, Verse Daily, The American Journal of Poetry, Plume, Diode, and elsewhere. She’s authored ten poetry collections, most recently Triggered (MacQueen’s), Erotic: New & Selected (NYQ Books), and Duets, with Cynthia Atkins (Small Harbor Press). Brazen, an erotic, full-length collection, the follow up to Erotic, published in 2023, again from NYQ. A coffee table book of Alexis’ photographs of Southern California poets will be published by Moon Tide Press in 2024. She lives in the Mojave Desert with her husband, Fancher. They have an incredible view.

 

Abiquiu

© Mary Saracino


Red clay runs through thick yellow rock
red lips a parting  mouth revealing uneven yellowed teeth
I breathe in deeply
trying to absorb the colors, the smell, the textures
trying to inhale the scent of pinon
The cliffs’ soft ridges stretch the raw blue sky
like bone under skin
a body opened and wide; aching, taut
revealing the red coral heart beating, beating
beneath the layers of dust and the relentless wind,
I long to dive deeper into the rock
enter the place where the soul of the land lies, hidden
safely beneath the green tufts of sagebrush
that guard the hillside
only then can these sandstone gates open to heaven on earth
only then will the red clay ribbons mingle with my blood,
only then will the blue sky become my own flesh
yielding to the wide window of the horizon, flying


* * * * *

Mary Saracino is a novelist, memoir writer, and poet. Her most recent novel, Heretics: A Love Story (2014) was published by Pearlsong Press. Her novel, The Singing of Swans (Pearlsong Press 2006) was named a 2007 Lambda Literary Awards finalist in the Spirituality category. She co-edited (with Mary Beth Moser) She Is Everywhere! Volume 3: An anthology of writings in womanist/feminist spirituality (iUniverse 2012), which earned the 2013 Enheduanna Award for Excellence in Women-Centered Literature from Sofia University. For more information about Mary, visit www.marysaracino.com and http://www.pearlsong.com/mary_saracino.htm

 

A Woman Walks

© Mary Saracino


A woman walks in the rain
on a dirt and gravel road
wild daisies among the tasseled
grasses greet her
pods on past-their-prime lupine nod hello
soggy pine and broad-leafed trees
sing a song of greening
as she passes by
Queen Anne gathers dew
on her lacy lap, saturated
blue and purple monk’s hood,
speak to her of dampness
and the humid places deep
inside that cradle the parched sun
arid hours of restless longing
skin brittle with thirst.


* * * * *

Mary Saracino is a novelist, memoir writer, and poet. Her most recent novel, Heretics: A Love Story (2014) was published by Pearlsong Press. Her novel, The Singing of Swans (Pearlsong Press 2006) was named a 2007 Lambda Literary Awards finalist in the Spirituality category. She co-edited (with Mary Beth Moser) She Is Everywhere! Volume 3: An anthology of writings in womanist/feminist spirituality (iUniverse 2012), which earned the 2013 Enheduanna Award for Excellence in Women-Centered Literature from Sofia University. For more information about Mary, visit www.marysaracino.com and http://www.pearlsong.com/mary_saracino.htm

Home

by Connie Johnson


why muddy the waters
you with your spells me with my prayers
& all this unfinished business between us

nothing you foretold changed much
doors still closed along with chapters
still i know you wanted to conjure this

sprawling; legs entwined
fingers touch & remember:

this is where my soul
resides


* * * * *

Connie Johnson is a Los Angeles-based writer who has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. "In a Place of Dreams," her digital chapbook, can be found at www.jerryjazzmusician.com
 

The Boiling Point for Jam

by Lynda Tavakoli

 
She is making jam in the tiny kitchen,
aproned up, thumb-worn spoon in hand,
fingertips browned like nicotine
from plums she’d stoned an hour before.
 
Through the window she watches him work,
his naked back a tease of muscle-bulk
as axe splits wood, big hands tender on the shaft
with every shlurp of the blade’s release.
 
She adds sugar to the softened fruit,
stirs until its coarseness fuses the pulp.
Then she waits. Outside the sky is bruised with cloud,
the day punished for its obdurate cheerfulness.
 
He stiffens then, minding something beyond her reach,
and in his stillness she finds the man she knew
who measured time with shrugs and rinsed his days
with promises she could not keep.
 
Now there is only her raw womb,
the haemorrhage of empty-bellied days
stretching behind her like a vacant sky
and the sweet spit of fruit pricking at her skin.
 
Yet there is peace in the ordinary:
the boiling point for jam, the quiet release of a latch,
the skirting of his arms about her waist,
the hope that love would always be enough.   


* * * * *

"The Boiling Point for Jam" is the title poem of Lynda Tavakoli's debut poetry collection The Boiling Point for Jam.

Lynda Tavakoli lives in County Down, Northern Ireland, where over the years she has facilitated both adult creative writing classes and been a tutor for the Seamus Heaney Award for schools. She is a professional member of The Irish Writers Centre and has been nominated for Best of the Net Awards and the Pushcart Prize (2024). Lynda’s debut poetry collection, The Boiling Point for Jam (Arlen House), has received wide acclaim for its raw honesty and authenticity. She is presently working on her second collection. 

 

Your Gift To Me When I Got Sick

by Shaun R. Pankoski


My key chain has a quartz crystal
wired to a little crab, some beads
the color of bruised grapes.
I believe you when you said
that you'd taken the crystal,
washed it in the sea,
let it sleep under a full moon.
I turn the key in this old truck,
drive it for another day.


* * * * *
   
Shaun R. Pankoski (she/her) is a poet most recently from Volcano, Hawaii. A retired county worker and two time breast cancer survivor, she has lived on both coasts as well as the Midwest as an artist’s model, modern dancer, massage therapist and honorably discharged Air Force veteran. Her poems have appeared in several literary journals and blogs including Verse Virtual, ONE ART, Poetry Breakfast and Sheila-na-Gig. 

But My Heart Still Held A Sadness

by Shaun R. Pankoski


I felt like a little mountain goat
that day we hiked Maroon Bells.
Nothing could stop me
as I scampered here and there 
along the trail,
breathing alpine-flowered air.
It was crisp. It was perfect.
I felt invincible and young.
Great grey boulders, 
veined in white, rose up 
from churning water, 
and I danced upon them,
my face a tiny flower,
seeking your sun.  


* * * * *   

Shaun R. Pankoski (she/her) is a poet most recently from Volcano, Hawaii. A retired county worker and two time breast cancer survivor, she has lived on both coasts as well as the Midwest as an artist’s model, modern dancer, massage therapist and honorably discharged Air Force veteran. Her poems have appeared in several literary journals and blogs including Verse Virtual, ONE ART, Poetry Breakfast and Sheila-na-Gig. 

Muddled Grief

by Melanie Choukas-Bradley

 
How do you grieve an untimely spring
The precocious daffodil, the frog tuning up too soon
 
Of all the climate griefs
This the most muddled
 
The heart swells to the magnolia
Gambling on a spell of winter warmth
 
All the resilient lives reaching
Into the breach of a changing world
 
And our hearts wondering
Whether to break or bend
 

* * * * *

Melanie Choukas-Bradley is a naturalist and award-winning author of seven nature books, including City of Trees, A Year in Rock Creek Park, Finding Solace at Theodore Roosevelt Island and The Joy of Forest Bathing. She began writing poetry during the pandemic and had the good fortune to discover Beate Sigriddaughter’s Writing in a Woman’s Voice. The site has featured many of her poems, including “How to Silence a Woman,” “If I have loved you,” and “The Water Cooler,” which won Moon Prizes. Her poetry has also appeared in New Verse News.    

Anticipating the Love Poem

by Anita S. Pulier


This unmarked page
That significant silence

These sleepless nights
Those sincere sorries

That snaggle toothed smile
These strings of sentiment

Those soothing sounds
This ocean of onomatopoeia

This splash slam
That burst bubble

That lording over
These loopy hearts

This terrible knowing
Those many moments

That kiss


* * * * *

Anita’s chapbooks Perfect Diet, The Lovely Mundane and Sounds of Morning and her books The Butchers Diamond and Toast were published by Finishing Line Press. Kelsay Books published Anita’s new book Paradise Reexamined. Anita’s poems have appeared in many journals and her work is included in nine print anthologies. Anita has been a featured poet on The Writer's Almanac and Cultural Daily. Her website is; Home

 

A MATTER OF TOUCH

by Martina Reisz Newberry


How skillfully and perceptively Vermeer captured women in their private moments! He saw their faces—really saw them—even as they existed in the company of men—as canvases in their own right, their eyes, intelligent and masking all the mysteries of the feminine, divine or not. 
 
See the servant’s knowing look as she hands her mistress “The Love Letter,” the anticipation of its contents on the lady’s face, hoping that what is in it is what she wants to hear. See the look of faint annoyance on the face of the “Girl Interrupted at Her Music.” It is the face of the world’s women whose personal pursuits are always considered interruptible. 
 
There is the dreaming face of the “Woman Holding a Balance”—a face that suggests her thoughts are elsewhere, maybe on balancing the universe, certainly not on the balance in front of her, one that weighs gold or flour or lint from her husband’s waistcoat. 
 
There is a very different kind of face, something wise and wonderful in the scornful smile of “The Procuress,” the face of a sly madonna. Her disdain for the weakness of men and the rude nonchalance of a customer’s hand on her breast appear to be—shall we say—non-issues.

It’s all right, say her bright eyes, I’ll have his money in my purse and he will go home in the morning, reeking of gin and fornication. His touch doesn’t matter.


* * * * *

Martina Reisz Newberry’s most recent book is Glyphs, available now from Deerbrook Editions. She is the author of Blues For French Roast With Chicory, Never Completely Awake (from Deerbrook Editions), Where It Goes (Deerbrook Editions), Learning By Rote (Deerbrook Editions)  and Running Like A Woman With Her Hair On Fire: Collected Poems (Red Hen Press).

 

One Day at a Time

by Tzivia Gover 

 
The first time I saw her
10 days after her son
who was secretly no longer
 
(let that fractured sentence stand for itself)
 
and before I could choose words
to say and not to say
whether to hug
 
her body collapsed
into me and my arms
surrounded her dead weight
 
and held on “been a long time”
“meaning to call but”
“if there’s anything --”
 
my daughter’s ringtone pulsing 
interruption I fought to ignore
the betrayal bouncing at my hip
 
in the presence of grief
some lives
some children
 
Back in my car driving
stopped at a light 
tap call back

while cooing at a grinning
dog in a bruised Toyota one lane over 
when my daughter picked up
 
I heard her over the speaker
trying to make sense of my giddy
goofiness “but you don’t even like dogs”

I couldn't tell her
here in half-moon darkness
and all the bad news in the world

red light turning green
and the glad-panting dog
not knowing the weight of my fear

and traffic was still then
moving that because she's alive
and as far as I know


* * * * *

Tzivia Gover is a dreamwork professional, poet, and author. Her most recent book, Dreaming on the Page: Tap into Your Midnight Mind to Supercharge Your Writing, combines writing and dreamwork. She has been published in dozens of journals and anthologies including The Mom Egg Review, The Naugatuck River Review, and Lilith Magazine. She teaches, writes, and dreams in western Massachusetts. Learn more at www.thirdhousemoon.com

Patience

by Tzivia Gover


Let’s get this over with. It’s a joke between us.
Even when reading a book we love so much
we refer to characters as if they’re our oldest friends,
and we’ll miss when it ends, and repeat their lines in bed—

Still, we calculate, flipping pages by twos or tens
how much more there is to go until the end.
Or a TV series, 22 episodes, 7 seasons.
Love it so much we binge watch when we should be sleeping

Even copy favorite lines on sheets of looseleaf and stow
them with the pencil in the drawer with the remotes.
We count our laps and log our times. We mount the scale, rue what’s accruing.
Gather up our gains. Inventory what we need to shed. What we’re losing.

Let’s just get this over with. It’s our wink
to our impatience: with commercial breaks
and intermissions. We revere the VCR’s glowing time stamp,
tap the phone to check the clock, and ask

When will this be done? When will we be home? How much longer?
Couldn’t it be shorter? Faster? Let’s get it over with. Our joke’s the answer.
Our wave to the sweeping secondhand as eternity keeps lasting.
It’s ticking while we’re waiting, dreading the inevitable—and craving.


* * * * *

Tzivia Gover is a dreamwork professional, poet, and author. Her most recent book, Dreaming on the Page: Tap into Your Midnight Mind to Supercharge Your Writing, combines writing and dreamwork. She has been published in dozens of journals and anthologies including The Mom Egg Review, The Naugatuck River Review, and Lilith Magazine. She teaches, writes, and dreams in western Massachusetts. Learn more at www.thirdhousemoon.com

Coal Town, 1982      

by Margaret Coombs
                                                                                   

I lived in the basement of a house on a ridge, a newcomer from another landscape. From my open door I saw rows of gray and green asphalt rooftops descend to a narrow valley where a transmission line shadowed a swing set. I had come from a dry, flat place of red clay roofs and Cyprus trees. Although I feared my new home might be lonely, the new geography stirred me. The showy displays of wealth that I encountered in Texas were gone; this city resembled the factory town where I grew up.     

Soon after my arrival, I saw four men return home from the mines, two in the back of a decrepit car, one riding shot gun, their faces covered in coal dust except around the eyes. I thought they wore black masks. Laid off, sent home, one said to me. They didn’t even let us shower off.

My second week there, the younger of his two boys greeted me on the street. The older one punched his arm. Are you going to talk to the señorita? The foreign word floated over the sidewalk, retrieved a memory of my fourth-grade Spanish class, offered me a tenuous connection to the neighborhood.   

Their mom disappeared, so we moved here from the coal fields, their dad told me later. I was fresh out of grad school, confused. I just stood there repeating, “What? What do you mean?” until he walked away.

That fall the boys visited me a few times on Saturday mornings. They tiptoed into my cinder block living room, peered at my pile of New Yorkers, politely refused the healthy snacks I offered. They bore no visible mark of tragedy. The younger one asked me, Why did you move here?  I thought—to escape—but answered Because I found a job here.  

One night I drank vodka shots with a man I trusted: the landlord. I had been feeling hopeful, befriended, remembered too late not to assume the best in others without an accumulation of evidence. He told me that my drunkenness was consent. I felt degraded, prayed that the boys wouldn’t find out. Unmarried, I was an unguarded mine, an unclaimed resource. That was why I wedged a kitchen chair under the outside doorknob at night. Delma from my previous life taught me that. I was grateful to have met someone with such grit. Some nights all three doors in that shotgun place had chairs tipped under their handles and I still couldn’t sleep, wondering how long the structure would hold if pressed.

For groceries, I slogged through wet tongues of snow, a mile there, a mile back, straining my arms with a brown paper sack loaded with a week’s worth of food. There was a house I liked on that route. Someone adorned its picture window with paper cut-outs and finger paintings. My mother had taped up my sister’s art like that in our childhood home a thousand miles away and two decades earlier. I felt love flow from the drawings like a lighthouse beam. I sent back my love and thanks to that unknown family, prayed for their wellbeing.  

One spring day the boys and their dad offered to weed whack my steep back yard. They quoted me such a small fee I had to agree, though it was not my responsibility. My landlord called now and then; he wanted to marry me. He decided we’d have two kids who would be all excitement and wide eyes at Christmas. I declined his proposal three times. The next time he called me a bitch. Why you little bitch, in a thick, clumsy voice. Reluctantly, I realized it was time for me to marry. I was tired of fortifying my defenses, the ongoing battle to protect my privacy, the struggle for dignity.   

One summer day I rented a small car and drove due south on the turnpike to a wood-paneled library on a sunny ridge. White pines grew next to the interstate, reminded me of my quiet mother. Her cool, soft hands. I swear they were like a tenderness that came smelling of rain. I asked the trees for luck, and they swayed toward me in a quick burst of wind.

One of the librarians offered to show me around campus. He was awkward, funny, red-headed, midwestern. His hometown neighbored the city where my favorite brother lived. When I considered this stranger’s face I thought—I could marry you. We’d get along fine. In a week or two, I received a job offer.

I didn’t seek out the boys to say I was leaving. It never occurred to me that anyone in the city of my unhappiness might have wanted to tell me goodbye. But word got around. While I was packing, the older one stopped by. I knew you wouldn’t stay.


* * * * *

Margaret Coombs spends her days seeking the consolations of literature and finding herself richly rewarded. She lives in a waterfront city on an inland sea. Last year she changed her writing name to her birth name to re-connect with her former self, a young woman who dreamed in poetry. The Joy of Their Holiness by Peggy Turnbull was her first chapbook. 

 

Switch

by Ebony Haywood

I did my homework. I selected several artists whose songs I intended to learn to play on the guitar. I was fresh out of high school and excited to take my first private lesson. Sitting in the tiny studio with my guitar across my lap, I watched the teacher as he perused my song selections.

"Hmm," he said, "The Beatles."  

I giggled. He looked intrigued.

"How, if you don't mind me asking, is it that a young black girl is into the Beatles?"

I wasn't offended—I was amused.  I cocked my head to the side, raised an eyebrow and grinned. Mr.Guitar Teacher, I thought to myself, There're a lot of things about this black girl that would surprise you.

By most people’s standards, I was never your typical black girl. I detested soul food; I read voraciously, and I had a lot of white friends. My black friends would ask, “Why do you talk like that?”  

“Like what?”

“Proper. Like a white person.”

I didn’t let it bother me it too much. I liked my “proper” mannerisms and refused to subscribe to “ghetto fabulous” behavior: improper grammar, excessive neck rolling, exorbitant amounts of kool-aid smeared all over my fingers. My parents didn’t display such traits. They were babies of southern migrants, children of the Civil Rights Movement, teenagers of the black is beautiful ethos. They were products of working-class and middle-class families who aspired for their posterity to live the American Dream.

As a means of propelling my brother and me into that dream, my parents escorted us onto yellow school buses that nosed through the streets of our South Central neighborhood—once a sprawling middle-class enclave, now a victim of white flight, fear, and hopelessness—past the liquor stores and storefront churches on Western, past the wigs shops, fried fish stands, and YMCA on Vermont, down the 110 freeway, and into the Mayberry-like city of Lomita.

Every day as I stepped off the yellow school bus and onto the black concrete of Lomita Fundamental Magnet Elementary School, I found myself surrounded by a sea of ethnicities. Nevertheless, one thing was obvious: most of the black and Latino kids were arriving from far away on the bus. The white children were Lomita natives; the black and Latino children were immigrants, the kids from the other side of tracks who were coming to Lomita because it was better than where they were from.

I was too young to articulate my feeling socio-economically inferior. That seemed to be the only difference (besides the obvious differences in skin color and hair texture) that I noticed. I didn’t feel that my white friends were any smarter than me; they didn’t appear to be any more or less talented than me, nor did they seem, on average, happier than me. Yet I always felt the need to blend in, to feel like I belonged completely. I never felt like I belonged anywhere completely.

I remember the reverse bus ride coming home from school. The neatly trimmed streets of Lomita slowly declined into the graffitied curbsides of LA. It’s hard to pinpoint the line of demarcation—the point where my world shifted from white to black, from opportunity to disadvantage. Perhaps it was at the threshold of our house, for whenever I stepped inside, I felt bitter. There wasn’t anything horrible about it. It was small yet tidy, surrounded by noisy car horns and sirens yet full of laughter and music. There was, however, something unsettling about not being able to call Lomita home. Why did I have to traverse two worlds? Why couldn’t we afford to move to Lomita?

At home, we did the same things my classmates did. We read books and played Candy Land and watched Double Dare. We ate dinner—tossed green salads, dinner rolls, baked chicken, potatoes—around a table with the napkins and silverware set properly. We brushed our teeth, said our prayers and hugged each other before we went to bed. We had pet dogs and cats that we cleaned after and loved. Fruit trees blossomed in our backyard. And on warm days, we’d pick our lemons and make lemonade with ice, sit on our front porch and sip till sundown.

Although most black people expected me to know the lyrics to the latest hip-hop music, my parents were musicians who hated rap. Instead, we listened to the rhythms of Motown, the rich vibrato of Barbra Streisand, the uplifting melodies of Andrae Crouch, the sweet harmonies of the Beach Boys and the soulful musings of Stevie Wonder. Sometimes after dinner, the lush orchestrations of John Williams would fill our living room, followed by the R&B swell of Michael Jackson. We were an American family with American tastes, not simply a black family with black tastes. We were more than a stereotype.

But even in my neighborhood, I still felt that I didn’t completely belong. The kids on the block were quick to point out our differences.

“The Beatles? Why you listen to them? That’s white people music. You weird.”

I could never eat dinner at my neighbor’s house.

“What? You don’t like collard greens? What kind of black person are you? Definitely not the real kind.”

I couldn’t discuss movies with them.

“Why you always watchin them boring-ass white movies? If you haven’t seen Poetic Justice, you stupid.”

At home, I didn’t have the proper cultural awareness. At school, I didn’t have the proper social standing. I was in constant limbo between these two existences, wanting desperately to belong to one, not being able to escape the other.

As an adult, I’m still figuring it out. I have, however, learned the art of code switching, which helps me slip seamlessly between cultures. I developed this skill when I began teaching high school in Compton where the students frequently referred to me as “Oreo.” I was, according to them, “black on the outside and white on the inside.”

            “Ms. Haywood, you white.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “You act white.”

            “What does that mean?”

            “You talk white. All proper.”

            “Well, I am a teacher.”

            I encountered students who were a bit more insidious.

            “Where’d you go to school? Sweet Valley High?”

            I found myself immersed in a culture that didn’t value my credentials as much as they valued my authenticity. Was I authentic, or was my “properness” a facade, an accouterment I displayed to elevate my ego? If I let my guard down just a little, if I began to embrace the culture, what might I discover about myself?

            “Ms. Haywood, can I have a pass to get something from my friend in Mr. Connor's room?”

            “Uh, uh. You trippin. I’m not givin you a pass to disrupt another teacher’s class.”

            The words flowed out of my mouth so smoothly that I almost smiled.

            “For real, Ms. Haywood?”

            “Yeah, for real.”

            Maybe I’m not supposed to belong to just one world. Having dual citizenship can open many opportunities for me. There’s a lot of value in cultural fluency. When I learned to code-switch, my students respected and trusted me. I discovered that I could be me in both worlds—I can feel comfortable and confident in both worlds. I don’t have to love collard greens or Poetic Justice. Black culture, any culture, is so vast and rich. Who can subsume every single aspect of it? I have adopted the expressions and mannerisms that feel true to me. I can exist in both worlds and be true to myself.

I’d like to be able to relive that moment with my guitar teacher. I’d look him boldly in the eye and say, “My name is Ebony Haywood, and I like the Beatles.”


* * * * *

Ebony Haywood is a writer, teacher, and energy healer who helps people unblock their creative flow and generate solutions for their personal and professional lives. She lives in Southern California, where she enjoys cheese pizza, anything with avocado, and classic films.