for grandma.

at my grandmother's funeral my grandfather is memorialized

“Lonnie stared the man in the face, took his gun, and broke the gun in half”

pastor tells us

“Lonnie left Margie to go fight the war in the Special Forces Army!”

Pasotr say

“He’s the reason why i’m alive.”

pastor say and the congregation sings praises to Lonnie

who looks up from his front row seat near margie’s casket to the pastor praising him.

and 3,0000 miles away margie’s spirit is collecting her things from youngstown ohio where she raised their five children while he fought a war he didn't veen know how to spell.

held his neck and back when he got home from that war and taught him how to spell it and other  wars like unemployment and alcoholic and racism because he did not know how to spell these, how to make these out when they were right in his face

but she wanted to be a school teacher and was taught how to spell and read by the white man whose daughter she raised and whose daughter she had at 16 after he raped her.

so she taught lonnie how to read things that were hard to make out 

and now 3,000 miles away she is going to be buried by him

but it wont be dirt she is under.

“i met margie after Lonnie wooed her one night with a handful of pebbles thrown at her window pane.”

congregation says “awwww’

while margie has left youngstown and now kisses the front step of every door where they lived 

rolls up her awards from The Washington Post and Ron brown vice president campaign and Channel 50 television station 

and the 15 surgeries she had on her knees

and the nights of pain she quieted everyone from

and the tears collected on her shoulder from him and the little hims she held for 56 of her 71 years

she collects all these things because she would like to bring them with her into the grave

but when she returns to the ceremony

she is being lowered in a casket filled with him: his stories, his medals, his friends, his favorite food, and the alone time he needed,

and the smoke from his tobacco pipe that made her asthmatic

and the times he called her fat and disgusting

and his rum and coke

and his rum and coke

and his rum and coke

until there is no room for the self she has gathered to take with her 

so she places her memoriablila down next to her grave and climbs in

but underneath the casket door, underneath all his things is space, is a black sky, is for her

a galaxy she has never known yet allows her to 

see the earth so clearly

to see his earth more clearly 

and i pray, not to the god the pastor serves, 

who believed margie’s best accomplishment in life was finding him

but i pray to the God within Margie who is Goddess

who knows her ability to gather and build for over seven decades 

makes her ready to be amongst the Gods of the Dark Sky

that are gathering and building another universe that memorializes people like her

before they become flesh, and then when breath enters them, and then when they become breath again.

To this God, i pray from her new galaxy my grandmother 

becomes a school teacher

and burns the white school teacher

and opens up her window in the middle of the night 

and tells the man throwing rocks at her that 

she has not been watching him from her room,

that she has only to come to the window because he distracted her from her work

that this is not a good sign if he wanted to be the love of her life

and that if he wanted to get her attention by first having her come to look down on him

then secretly that would be her purview of him their whole life until she, in death or life, could no longer keep it secret, that he met her having to look up.

Him/him

I knew Him before I knew him. I was raised Christian, namely methodist episcopal, and my mother wasn't. She did not "get introduced to God" as the term is put until she was well into her 20s. Her circumstances with her husband, my father, drew her to Him. She would be found bent over,eyes red shot and glazed, waiting for my father to come home at dawn. My great grandmother Ruth, my father's grandmother, who lived down the street from us in Decatur, Georgia would retrieve my mother in these states. Eventually she told her something to the effect of Debbie you can't live this way, you gave 3 little babies to raise. And GG Ruth promptly began to take my mother to church with her, us three little ones following them in tow. Every Sunday she was dressed in white Easy Spirit loafers, white stockings, a white one piece zip up dress, and a white tailored dome hat with a white laced veil that fell just below her silver and black curly hair greased down in aloe vera Estee Sheen. We'd get into her sky bue toyaota corolla and I remember every Sunday was sunny. Soon my mother was dressed like Ruth, both of them serving as ushers on the church usher board. Our church services met in the cafeteria of a public elementary school and y mother and ruth would stand at the end of the aisles holding tissues or communion trays, backs erect and smiles as they faced the cross at the other end of the congragation behind the pastpr's back. My mother became devout. God had saved her from my father. Thhough he continued drinking alcohol and using drugs and disappearing then returning home in need of resusciatation, my mother's joy found in the Lord caused her to beam a light I remember as one she found on some mountaiintop and stored in a jar next to her vaseline and appied it onto her face every morning right along with teh vaseline. her light stuck. And then, it carried her, and then enabled her to leave my father one night--as if the joy from the light of the Lord she had found had allowed her to escape a very unedning darkness with him.

So we relocated to Maryland where my mother's parents lived and stayed in the basement of their house. And in the afternoons, my mother took hot baths and wept for Him and him. She would ask for the Lord to take her away from this earth since she felt nobody loved her except Him. "You are my Light. My God. My Everything. My one and only true love!" She would wail. I would enter with a glass of cold water and place it on the floor near the tub, and she would turn to me and say, "Baby, don't you let any man get in between you and Him" her finger points to the corner of the bathroom ceiling. "He is your Light. Your everything. Your one true love." And then my motehr would turn back to the corner in the celienig and tell it, "I give my life to you Lord! You are my Love. My HUsband. My soul's desire!" It's then I learned God could be your man, your boo, your hubby if you wanted him to. What I did not realize I was learning in the moment too was God as a way out from the pains that come from loving him, a man. The pains that come from falling for mortals and giving them your heart then vying with whatever is necessary to have or keep theirs, even at the cost of your joy, your sleep, your family, your own light. But mainly, I did not know that in beleiving in Him as a mate, I was by default dancing very closely with the opposite, with the idea that mate is Him. I came to attribute God with husband-like qualities and therefore deemed husband, mate, man as God. i came to worship Him as him, and subsequently found myself worshipping hims and not knowing it. My tone of voice eased into the most delicate utterances when on the phone with hims, from the huskier, heavy place it stood most of the time; my clothing--shape colors size--was arranged around what i think would inspire him to see me in a higher light, as thee one. What i read parralleled with the things he spoke of to me, that i heard he spoke to others, what fed his mind i began to shop for the same types of foodsl what foods i put into my body became the same places where he would go for the same type of food. my friends altered to sound and look like his. I became devout to hims. A true disciple of man. And without knwoing it, i have changed gods over and over and over--with as many lifestlyles, wardrobes, tones of voices, hair color, body size and all to go with it. because the change of a lover came to mean the change of a god until i woke up and saw me. me at the other end of the aisle, facing myself looking at me in uniform for her man to the me dressed in nothing but myself, enough, and filling the space looking for no other to cause her sense of a completion.

This book is about how we as women can be obsessed with men, in both romantic and familial relationships, what they think and do can shift and shape our sense of Self, can even re-route our Self path to his or to suit his. We will specifically look at how this impact and transformation for the woman in love or the woman influenced by familial ties to a man parallels very closely to the transformations that take place for the new religious convert. How a new follower, specifically a devout and zealous one, to the Christian faith's God comes to give their life to this God, in my observation and experience, mirrors very closely to the way in which change happens for the woman in a romantic or familial-close relationship. I am looking at the ways this transformation happens on three levels: physical appearance, social circles, and worldview.

The woman's obsession with him in my belief has come in large part from the common association of God as male. Father. Lord vs. Lady, mother. Goddess.In oreder to understand God as a Woman, as Mother Essence as Divine Creator of Life through which birth easily takes place in and thruogh a woman, one has to shed a multitude of stages of unlearning to discover or re-discover their divine source as mother Goddess. I now experience an expansion of what i have known as God, an authoritarian presence sheperding me yet one that has always been distant and external, to a presence that is within Guiding me as close as a vessel in my blood stream, as if the veins of my bloodstream is where I can feel this energy has as a home. but this shift took many years of not so much turning from the notion of a male God, but Mother god cam as a knowing I now have throough me believeing in the goodness, truth, and beauty ofo my own voice.  There are many books and spaces that uplift the Divine Goddess and encourage us to own her and know Her, and I think thoose spaces do that exceptionally well and I owe them gratiude for shapin gmy course through this difficult terrain. I will not focus on God as Goddess so much in this space as I will the stages before one gets to that understanding. Where we operate out of him as Him.

The writings are based on experiences from my life, the lives of those around me, and stories in the public sphere.

Physical Appearance: pregnancy (hasidic jew women)
Social circles( my people vs. his people): me, ihotu and didier
Wolrdview: lauryn Hill, Rhianna, Me

-the losses of fathers/hims (tami and kamonee)

-For him
-Separating yokes
-Buried alive
-he will come
-how we read

1st piece

for him.

he needs harvest so he comes to her. she, a farmland, lying untouched since the last time she curled back her seeds into the soil. its softness the only thing on earth she trusted. she opened her earth to him, gave him food straight from her root. and he hovered over every sign of life in her and devoured it. her land is now barren from his hunger.

but she has re-soiled. and he, in another name, in another skin, same him, has come back hungry. she knows the hollow sound of his boots over her face. and she is tempted to spread open for him again. to show him how he can bear earth on earth. how to re-source. how to give him back to himself. find land within him. but she lets him pass by slowly, losing weight till he passes for another piece of earth. she wont break through layers for him anymore. not until he sits down on her earth, prepares a place for them to meet, asks her would she bring food she has made because he will bring food of his own. and their first meal will be one they've made together.

2nd piece

I asked him to bury me alive, thinking we were playing in the sand, as if a relationship were a beach in front of an ocean, we laid there unassuming for fun, letting our surroundings collect on top of us, being in his home, at his favorite restaurant, with his friends, listening to his worries, holding his dreams, celebrating their arrival--while my shoulders, my lungs, my sight caved underneath him.  

3rd piece

AM: i think of separating yokes with him sometimes. just until it thins. till it appears we're about to break. except we stay runny and loose till we are so clear and weightless we seem invisible.

PM: sometimes i just want us to thin out. me seated in the center of a green field covered in 6 feet high grass in Iowa.  sun at my back. in prayer with a passing breeze. Him at his desk in Brooklyn in front of the computer seated in his grind, concrete, and very little grass.

Late: sometimes i want to be alone. in baldwin's another country. i want this without the empty breeze in the corners of me that are cold instead of cool when he does not fill them like he does now. i want alone without lonely. without the silence i want to speak back, hear his keys in the door, place his hands in my nook, spoon me to sleep. i want alone with him. around.

When I was a little girl I talked to God the way my mommy did. "You are my God. My Love. My One and Only." I saw God floating over me in thet skies, over the pews at church, on my walks home from school. God was everywhere.


I believe I knew Him before I knew him. I was raised Christian, namely methodist episcopal, and my mother wasn't. She did not "get introduced to God" as the term is put until she was well into her 20s. Her circumstances with her husband, my father, drew her to Him. She would be found bent over,eyes red shot and glazed, waiting for my father to come home at dawn. My great grandmother Ruth, my father's grandmother, who lived down the street from us in Decatur, Georgia would retrieve my mother in these states. Eventually she told her something to the effect of Debbie you can't live this way, you gave 3 little babies to raise. And GG Ruth promptly began to take my mother to church with her, us three little ones following them in tow. Every Sunday she was dressed in white Easy Spirit loafers, white stockings, a white one piece zip up dress, and a white tailored dome hat with a white laced veil that fell just below her silver and black curly hair greased down in aloe vera Estee Sheen. We'd get into her sky bue toyaota corolla and I remember every Sunday was sunny. Soon my mother was dressed like Ruth, both of them serving as ushers on the church usher board. Our church services met in the cafeteria of a public elementary school and y mother and ruth would stand at the end of the aisles holding tissues or communion trays, backs erect and smiles as they faced the cross at the other end of the congragation behind the pastpr's back. My mother became devout. God had saved her from my father. Thhough he continued drinking alcohol and using drugs and disappearing then returning home in need of resusciatation, my mother's joy found in the Lord caused her to beam a light I remember as one she found on some mountaiintop and stored in a jar next to her vaseline and appied it onto her face every morning right along with teh vaseline. her light stuck. And then, it carried her, and then enabled her to leave my father one night--as if the joy from the light of the Lord she had found had allowed her to escape a very unedning darkness with him.
So we relocated to Maryland where my mother's parents lived and stayed in the basement of their house. And in the afternoons, my mother took hot baths and wept for Him and him. She would ask for the Lord to take her away from this earth since she felt nobody loved her except Him. "You are my Light. My God. My Everything. My one and only true love!" She would wail. I would enter with a glass of cold water and place it on the floor near the tub, and she would turn to me and say, "Baby, don't you let any man get in between you and Him" her finger points to the corner of the bathroom ceiling. "He is your Light. Your everything. Your one true love." And then my motehr would turn back to the corner in the celienig and tell it, "I give my life to you Lord! You are my Love. My HUsband. My soul's desire!" It's then I learned God could be your man, your boo, your hubby if you wanted him to. What I did not realize I was learning in the moment too was God as a way out from the pains that come from loving him, a man. The pains that come from falling for mortals and giving them your heart then vying with whatever is necessary to have or keep theirs, even at the cost of your joy, your sleep, your family, your own light. But mainly, I did not know that in beleiving in Him as a mate, I was by default dancing very closely with the opposite, with the idea that mate is Him. I came to attribute God with husband-like qualities and therefore deemed husband, mate, man as God. i came to worship Him as him, and subsequently found myself worshipping hims and not knowing it. My tone of voice eased into the most delicate utterances when on the phone with hims, from the huskier, heavy place it stood most of the time; my clothing--shape colors size--was arranged around what i think would inspire him to see me in a higher light, as thee one. What i read parralleled with the things he spoke of to me, that i heard he spoke to others, what fed his mind i began to shop for the same types of foodsl what foods i put into my body became the same places where he would go for the same type of food. my friends altered to sound and look like his. I became devout to hims. A true disciple of man. And without knwoing it, i have changed gods over and over and over--with as many lifestlyles, wardrobes, tones of voices, hair color, body size and all to go with it. because the change of a lover came to mean the change of a god until i woke up and saw me. me at the other end of the aisle, facing myself looking at me in uniform for her man to the me dressed in nothing but myself, enough, and filling the space looking for no other to cause her sense of a completion.

This book is a collectio of pieces illustrating moments created around him and Him. It shares the outcomes, the process, and transformation of how myself and others in my life have committed many of our days to the mentality of him as Him. I am no longer a Chritian nor do i call myself anything relating to a particular religion to name my spiriutal practices or relationship with God. But I also no longer attribute God as Him. A few years ago i had a moment--i understood, felt, and saw God as woman, as mother, as Her--and it made complete sense to me that She was-not because of my many Goddess affirming friends and female menros and elders who relate to Spirit as inherently Maternal mother Source and this understanding is a no brainer--but because i felt it. saw it. Knew it was and had only to be true. it made sense. This was a huge shift spirtiallly, intellectually, physically for me and my relatinoship with God. I felt my source in God expand and hold me cradle my life in a way that I had not realized i had been missing and even more tyring to provide myself all these years.

altered my life story, my day to day, my clothing, voice, I have changed my prayers to certain other prayeres to meditations to no prayers at all back to praying, to sleep patterns to the type of socks I wear and cell phone carrier I use all for him--shaping my life to be aligned with my love. And I have done this with lover after lover, changing gods, an would alter, remove, rearrange for him.

 the very think line that creates between   A young mother of three children under the age of 7 and living in Atlanta, Georgia 16 hours away from her parents residing in Maryland, my mother would keep herself up all hours of the night waiting for my father to return from drinking and who-knows-what and then try to rest during the day with three kids under 7 to account for while her husband, my father

he will come.

it's because she looks like him that my mother beat her more and harder than me. my fraternal twin, whose face turned out just like our father's and mine completely opposite. she inherited an oblong shape with a slight protrude at the chin that rounds out with a smooth shiny spot on its edge. this shine goes with the one off the tip of her nose. the nose that tells exactly who her father is--narrow at the bridge yet widened at the nostrils, a defined steeple on her face that sits nicely under a set of complimentary angular eyes. she came through the vaginal canal and i was pulled down from underneath my mother's ribs and out her sliced open stomach. we even arrived in different ways to here, now, 31 years old, with Tami sitting on my couch telling me how her 4 year old walked out of my house on her own while i stand at the door holding boxes of pizza.

"She was curled up on the mat outside of your front door, on that gray mat Pam! lying on the floor saying to me mommy i want to go home.'

'wait, where was Kevin?" my sister's husband Kevin and my husband Jullien are building a shed in our backyard. The girls have been prancing around the men with Abigail wearing my hot pink 4 inch high heels with the open toe and Isabelle the satin champagne ones with a flower on the top. I return from the pizza run to Isabelle bare foot and nestled under her mother's arm pit bowing her head and Tami staring out the window. She watches me park the car and then greets me with "I'm upset." The pizza boxes still in my hand, I blurt, "What happened? Jullien messed up?" Both my sister and he have been known to go to war out of refusal to say 'I was wrong'. I assume another war happened while I was gone. "No, both of them" i hear her say. I want to ask where was she but I say "everyone" instead.

"Kevin was in the back. I asked him, ‘were you looking for her?!’"

"Wait..."

"I come from out back looking for her and I dont find her so I assume she's playing hide and go seek. But I still don't see her. Then something told me to look outside your front door. And there she was Pam, curled up in a ball on that gray mat, in front of the building door, saying to me Mommy I want to go home."

Tami snugs Isabelle closer and i place the pizzas down on the desk in the living room.

"oh wow." I sink and look down at Isabelle.

"Yeah!"

"I see, so you're mad at Kevin because he did not know where she was?"

"I told you guys to fix that door, Pam."

"Huh?"

"Now with this no-shoes-in-the-house policy the kids place their shoes outside the door so they think outside is a part of your home."

I live in on the ground floor of a building in New York city, where at least 6-8 other adults have keys, and one floor of the building is dedicated as a hotel for guests to drop in and out, each person having their own set of keys. My apartment door here on the ground level has a lock that turns but as soon as the handle is pulled down the lock, without being touched, releases.

"Oh man, I see."

"Yes Pam. Now I feel like her, I want to go home too."

I try to keep my face from scrunching up. It is my embarrassment for Tami over referencing a child as an exact mirror of how she feels. I look down at Isabelle who looks up at me with a round vanilla face that always appears dampened, a turn of grayish-black, just around and underneath her eyelids. She looks up as if being cued in a save the children commercial to stare right into the camera's lens at this moment.

"So you're mad at..."

"Why do you keep questioning this to death?! If this was your child you..."

"You told me you were upset when I walked in! You said 'they both messed up.' I'm trying to..."

"No," she glares. "I said you both messed up."

“Oh...what? Wait!"

"I already told you about that door.” She says with a firm calm.

"Wait. You're mad at me and jullien because we didn't fix the door yet?"

"Children can just leave when they want to Pam! the lock basically doesn't lock! If this was your child you wouldn't be asking me all these questions!"

"If this was my child I wouldn't come at you like this!"

"This would not happen with me!"

"You're not perfect Tami! You're going to do things with my child I do not like but I'm not going to attack you. You can't be mad because we did not fix the door in your timeline. You're just looking for someone to blame!"

I'm six months pregnant and in six more months my sister will be the daytime caretaker of my first child as i go back to teaching English at a community college here in the city. my daughter will be tucked under her as Isabelle is now along with Abigail and Parker, all under the age of 8. she is mother hen, the stay at home parent in her relationship for the last 7 years with a portfolio of her work to show in her children's dinner table manners, "how was your day today Pam?", their pleases and thank yous, their smiles instead of tears when mommy leaves them with someone because of the confidence they have that she has left them with someone to trust and that she will return.

But now Tami appears to be tucked under something, and by the look in her eyes it seems she is trapped and clawing to get out of it. and she is losing breath as if she were drowning in a tumultuous sea but there is no water. it is a very dark and heavy air that is her only source for breath yet every intake of this air presses her down underneath it, suffocates her, loses more of a breath that rejuvenates deeper breaths in her. i see her hand reaching out high, five fingers spread in hopes to clasp a hand that reaches back. and now, it is clear to me, she is clinging to Isabelle more than Isabelle is clinging to her on the couch, in the air sea.

my mother told Tami shortly after our father died that she was his favorite. Tami told me this many years later. i did not mind. i was glad she was given this. she has mourned for him since she was 16 when one morning we learned his pancreas had burst. i began only at 26. i did not understand what was happening then mainly because we had not lived with him in over 10 years and had not seen him in 5. but she instantly understood what was occurring. another way, an option, a possibility for a different life later, after this one, a life instead of this one was ending. 

he was the gift of imagination we gave ourselves after we were disciplined by our mother. or simply after we witnessed her being someone who we preferred not to be a part of-- cussing out the cashier or the woman behind her in a grocery store line, telling the Spanish men in our neighborhood they were nasty pedophile freaks for looking at her 11 year old girls, aggressions we wished to be invisible to, even if they protected us somehow. but Tami received more than aggression. it appeared the discipline given to her was not mere protection from herself or the ills she could slip into in this world but instead my mother's own protection from the face of my father, her abuser, her first love, her biggest embarrassment. one day, on a very sunny clear sky afternoon, while we were walking home down the hill from the grocery store at the crossroads of Ivahar Street and Judson Road my mother began to hit Tami for something she had done. as she spoke she struck her with each word. "you stupid ass! how many times do i have to tell you?!! I'm so sick of this shit. I'm so sick of you, you hard head ass child!" by the mailbox, with the sun beaming, she beat her until a woman across the street stopped and watched. i believe the woman waited until she felt this moment was now beyond a boundary that seems difficult to name around a mother reprimanding her child. she told my mother she would call the police if she did not stop. my mother yelled back and proceeded to take us up the next hill to grandma's house. i remember thinking, this stranger saved Tami from our mom and that a child should never need saving from their parent. that a stranger should not be saving us if indeed we needed to be saved from a parent. and that this maybe is what the other parent is for.

my father had given us 2 solid years of pouncing on daddy's knee. of birthdays from ages 5-7 with a montage of images from our strawberry shortcake and big bird themed party, with two cakes in the shape of these characters; cinnamon the dog crouched in the back seat of our white pinto being pulled out by our dad to give to us as a bday present; the Christmas tree falling because i caused it to tip and my father wiping my tears telling me i had not ruined Christmas; him flying out onto the highway after Tami toyed with the lock on the back seat car door where she sat as he drove, and then suddenly tumbled out the car into 6 lane traffic--my father retrieving her from lane 3 and bringing her into the arms of her mother who i would never see hold her so closely again in this way.  he was daddy then, and once my mother left him, once he was out of reach, he was the savior. his intermittent presence sprinkled into our lives, phone calls from the rehab centers in Atlanta Georgia where we left him came to us in Maryland with soft weeping as he uttered 'you know daddy loves you?" just enough of these moments to compel us to believe there was something better we possessed out there that was just a matter of getting a hold of, to keep reaching for it. there was someone out there with a softer voice, a gentler way, with whom days were sunny and cleared skied without any beatings. he had appeared in our lives shortly enough and then disappeared long enough to be a dream, the solace we could imagine somewhere our family had (had).

i walk away from Tami in my living room because she has turned her head to the window and i know she has said all she is going to say about it. and over the years i have learned to give her the silence she seems to prefer after a fight. i go into my bedroom but leave the door wide open. i hope my thoughts reach her with what i wasn't finished saying: who do you think you are?! you're crazy! psycho! my twin sister is CRAZY!! what 31 year old woman jumps to the conclusion that because we haven't fixed the lock this happened, instead of asking herself where was she when the child was walking out the door, why isn't the child obeying the rule that she already knows which is to not touch the door handle?!! STUPID! THAT IS SO DUMB. OUT OF HER MIND! CRAAAAZZZYY! MY sister is PSYCHOOO! She's PSYCHOO. 

I begin to do a sing songy tune to My Sister is CRAZY in my head until i hear the sounds of a tranquil waterfall flowing off from a mountaintop. I walk into the living room acting as if I'm getting something and i see Tami at the dining table hovered over her phone where the waterfall sounds come. i return to the bedroom answering my own questions: who does this? who thinks like this? i know who.

Later that night when they have left, i tell jullien we have to fix the lock sooner than later. he says it costs 500 dollars to do it. i tell him,

"you know what happens right? the lock opens up as soon as the kid pulls down the handle. and they walk out. and you know what happens, right? if they want to get back in they can't because the door locks behind them. so she could have been out there wanting to get back in but couldn't for who knows how long? those are traumatic seconds for a child Jullien." i stop talking and visualize Isabelle choosing to lie on the floor and possibly being picked up by a random adult who opened the door. then i see Tami, a little girl, staring at the front door to my home, to her home, to my mother's home and trying to find a way back in. she is surrounded in dark gray because there is no light in the halls. because my mother has told her she is STUPID. DUMB. JUST LIKE YOUR FATHER. Has told her GET OUT OF MY FACE I CAN'T STAND LOOKING AT YOU, and made her believe there was another home where she was meant to be, where since we were little she has gone in search for and in part has found it in her children and the home she makes for them, and in part in her belief that i will hear her for what she is really asking when she is asking for the locks to be changed, and maybe in part from the quiet ways she has found to mother the little girl inside of her who is still looking for the other parent, for her real twin, for him whom she was told in so many ways is where she belongs. 

reading him.

i tried to hide it in the speck of my eye. a theory that pop pop had molested me. i stored it behind me like a note someone had passed me in grade school that i must keep secret. don't let anyone know i received it or what it says. so i crumpled it up into a very tiny ball just before we left for Maryland to go see him in the rehab center. and i made it so small until it resembled trash. and i kept it in the back of my eye. i could feel it there. small and pinching yet nestling into me. it did not rub up against the other trash in my memory. it did not unravel somehow every time i moved like other theories and memories i had tossed but did not want to throw away forever. except when i sat down on pop-pop's hospital bed, next to him, it was the first time i scooted over an inch or two to the edge of the bed. more towards my husband. more towards the door. i felt the hardness of the edge of the bed digging into my back thigh because i began to lean so far over it. half of my body tipped until i picked myself up and moved across the room and sat on my husband's lap. pop-pop looked at me and then at the spot right next to him, where i had sat for many years trying to close the little gap between us--what was it like to be in thee war? how many people did you kill in Vietnam? did you ever cheat on grandma? do you have another family over there? so she raised the kids while you were at war? why did your mother give you to her sister for her to raise you? where is your father? did you ever know him? did you want to? were you really going to shoot my father if you found him? was my father a bad man? do you miss grandma? you should get back out there and date--do you want to? are there social events at this new living center? you seen any hot ladies you would like to holler at?

and then one day, two years before i scoot away from him in the hospital, we are at breakfast, and he slips me a note.

first i say, "you seen any hot ladies you want to holler at?"

"nah nah nah nah. i'm an old man pam. nobody's going to want me." and in his eye i wait looking inside of it because a glimmer has started to form. we are sitting at Ihop on university blvd east in Wheaton Maryland. it is where we come every time i visit for our breakfast time together, alone. "i should be there" my eldest aunt says. "i want to go but i know that's ya'lls time" my brother says. i have vowed to grandma on her bed in the ICU that, yes, i would take care of pop-pop and clean the apartment. and now we are at our fifth or so meal together since she died and he is slipping me a note through his eye.  it's written kind of blurry and in pencil and the gray has already smeared across the page. so it is hard to read. i am trying to make out the words. i think it says, "i like you. do you like me?" i do not read for a box to check yes or no. i simply start talking louder and scoot my eyes back away from where i found the glare in his, where i found the note. i try to go gray myself. blurry. dumb. lost.

i yell "yeah! you should! you're what? 71?"

"72"

"ok! ok, 72!" i nod looking down at my plate and finding a pancake piece to jam into my fork. i could look at this plate of cold eggs and thickening syrup with half a stack of pancakes on it for the next 20 minutes and then i could look at it the whole day if i felt i could without anyone asking questions. but i look back up at him into his eyes within a decent amount of time from the moment i shoved a pancake in my mouth.

"so you think i should get back out there huh?" he asks. his eyes have softened--he is warm, a school boy hunch has come over his shoulders. i feel something reaching out to me from his glare. i talk even louder. "yeah!" and then i am heavier, staring down at my plate again, and planting a huskiness in my voice, a matter-of-fact tone, a yes-stop-fucking-asking-me. "yeah i do." i close my legs under the table to stop the warm feeling in between them that feels so wrong and angering, and i scoot a couple inches to the left near the wall divider next to me. i scoot again 2 years later in the hospital, and then again when i get back to new york, away from the sweet smell of his Captain Black tobacco, from cleaning out his pipes for him with the tiny wires that looked like the ties that hold together bread bags and garbage cans, from our respective copies of Louise Hays' You Can Heal Your Life and discussions on how far the belief in one's potential can get them, how far it got him, Green Beret and all. i look up to the ceiling in my apartment and apologize to grandma. i do not tell her that its because i am trusting in a speck in me because it has fallen to my gut now. that i know the note has slipped out of me on this last visit to see him, and I passed it back to him, with a new message on it to read.

90% of our communication is passive aggressive. It's because we're afraid of discovery. The hidden gems that fall out when we sit still fear.

When we don't yield or bow to it, treat it like its a caged lion we are required to feed and keep calm, but instead approach it like in its belly is the diamond in the roth we find the gem that will allow for magic in our lives we have never known possible to be set free.

the worst thing about lovebreak is waiting for all the smells to leave. his nicotine in the back of your throat. his must in your linens. the Myers Clean Day candle he gave you that you cant seem to stop burning when you're sweeping and mopping his smells out of your home.

The Good Boy

He keeps his head bowed
not low enough that you can step on his neck and not high enough so that you can see the specks of sun that get caught in his brow.
That you can see in the center of his eyes is a pool of ghosts swirling colors into a murky brown-blue,
but just so,
so he can carry his gait along with his briefcase to fit inside the door, so he doesn't hit his head on the upper ledge of the frame from standing too tall, back too straight, his gaze too narrowed ahead to fit inside this room where everything on him will shrink once he sits into his chair, surrounded by the box almost the size of the one he carries, and the one he sits in coming to work, and the one he crams into on his way home, and the one he eats and sleeps in. The boxes that are rooms that come with doors he chooses to fit in to, lowering himself just enough and sustaining himself just enough to fit in.

I asked him to bury me alive, thinking we were playing in the sand, as if a relationship were a beach in front of an ocean, we laid there unassuming for fun, letting our surroundings collect on top of us, being in his home, at his favorite restaurant, with his friends, listening to his worries, holding his dreams, celebrating their arrival--while my shoulders, my lungs, my sight caved underneath him.  

Yesterday:
i was given the love i have been waiting for
and then told I will probably have to wait for it a little bit longer.
i told a Guide she was not able to truly see me and we let each other go.
i woke up this morning before dawn thinking that the burn she gave me was a fire i am meant to allow to burn all the way through to see the me that is on the other side. And while burning i am meant to hold on to these words, "Trust you are loved and respected. Do not let anyone violate you."i am meant to hold on to one without letting go of the other while a fire works to get through me.
i am willing this morning to allow her to be a Guide in my relationship with the love i have been waiting for, the one who i will need to continue to wait for while he gives me the love in time. even though i believe she does not See me for my whole self--i will have to trust i am loved and respected, and not let anyone violate me, while i wait for love, and let love reign no matter what--to know it is reigning. no matter what.

Love sits still inside of right now yet doesn't demand everything be right now.

Love knows that your Shining Light is its Own.

Love lets its fortune be known only to share it with you. 

Love makes room for you in the sandbox and asks if you can play together.

Love enjoys thee way not 'my way'.

Love treats obstacle as opportunity.

Love knows how many times it has been forgiven vs. the times it has done the forgiving.

Love attracts the answer.

Love sees the road that hasn't even been paved.

Love believes in Itself.

for him.

he needs harvest so he comes to her. she, a farmland, lying untouched since the last time she curled back her seeds into the soil. its softness the only thing on earth she trusted. she opened her earth to him, gave him food straight from her root. and he hovered over every sign of life in her and devoured it. her land now barren from his hunger.

but she has re-soiled. and he, in another name, in another skin, same him, has come back hungry. she knows the hollow sound of his boots over her face. she is tempted to spread open for him again. to show him how he can bear earth on earth. how to re-source. how to give him back to himself. find land within him. but she lets him pass by slow, losing weight till he passes for another piece of earth. she wont break through layers for him anymore. not until he sits down on her earth, prepares a place for them to meet, asks her would she bring food she has made because he will bring food of his own. and their first meal will be one they've made together.

-how daddy and i met. he was something new.

this morning i felt a pain in my stomach. on the right side. i placed my fingers there to ease it out. it moved. i followed it towards the bottom of my belly where i am as firm as a unripened mango. my uterus widening since we met that rainy night in the city of brother love. we had no place else to go in that tiny bedroom. we did not want to go anywhere else but inside each other. and walls collapsed, doors to other rooms opened. now my fingers follow a pain i am trying to ease for her or him and me and you. it does. it leaves as soon as i detect a heart beat, as tiny as the room we made it in.

i want to be alone right now. i'm so clear about this. and i am pregnant.

i think of separating yokes with him sometimes. just until it thins. till it appears we're about to break. except we stay runny and loose till we are so clear and weightless we seem invisible.

sometimes i just want us to thin out. me seated in the center of a green field covered in 6 feet high grass in Iowa.  sun at my back. in prayer with a passing breeze. Him at his desk in Brooklyn in front of the computer seated in his grind, concrete, and very little grass.

sometimes i want to be alone. in baldwin's another country. i want this without the empty breeze in the corners of me that are cold instead of cool when he does not fill them like he does now. i want alone without lonely. without the silence i want to speak back, hear his keys in the door, place his hands in my nook, spoon me to sleep. i want alone with him. around.

i saw a curved, naked branch today. it helped me forgive. it looked as if just before its back was broken it found a way to yield.

think for (with) your heart and body. because the mind can be a very terrible thing to haste, a very necessary thing to replace.

what happened is always more important than what you think happened.

trust.

The countries within him become himself. How he behaves when he's in one country is different from another. He knows the spirit of the land and talks to it in its language. He stays until he knows how this country is different from the others, until he understands why others live here instead of only visiting. And right then he leaves. He does not give the country a formal goodbye. He does not tell it why he needs to go. He uses the night the country has given him and slips into it and out to leave. He does not know how to tell it he is afraid to belong. That in all a man's searching for home he is afraid to find one because it means he will have a place where he meets himself, where all of him collects and settles, where all of him stares back and tells him where he has been. 

yesterday i danced a jig that swung my hips low and then the thought of you slipped under me. it swayed inside where i'm softest. the thought of you, allowing you, makes places in me bend that do not want to, that have not bent in years. thank you.

you do not even have to go around the world at least once to know it. close your eyes.  the spirit of tanzania will visit you, will whiff across the breath in your air and carry the currents of china and nepal in it to you. stay close to yourself and the center of the world will come to you. every spirit will find you.

there is a spirit for each of the 7 continents.

there are locations where the spirits of this world dwell. you have access to them. one of them is yours. find your home.

be a disciple of your own voice.

sometimes your business is what keeps you from doing your work.

the first step of 'doing your work' is to know when you're not. is to know when all of your busi-ness has kept you from working.

you can't know whether the baby will be okay until it is born.

you cannot know whether the child will be okay until it has matured.

you do not know whether the mature will live long until they die.

you do not know if death is a beginning until you die.

you cannot know if knowing is certainty until you let it go.

I stand next to her cutting the potatoes into a pile of little sandy brown moons with the skin still on. She, my mother, washes the collard greens as we prepare dinner. Just a few minutes before I am hit and screamed at: "You disgust me at how to stupid you can be sometimes. Stupid ass!!" And now, a low rumble, a hum vibrates on my lips, "Oooh/oooh/oooh." I slice the potatoes slower, having the knife settle into the rhythm of the beginning of my song. "I found out what I been missing/ Always on the runn/uuunn." My mother, two feet next to me, begins turning her eyes from the window sill in our kitchen, from facing the aloe vera plant she takes thick leaves from to place on our scars and burns, to looking at my lips. "I've been looking for someone/uhhhh/Now you give good love to me baaaaaby!" I get into the first chorus of Whitney Houston's song and the tremble I began singing with leaves me. It is like "Good Love" is running up my leg and into my belly, through my fingers and into these little brown moon potatoes. Whitney Houston and Good Love has found me. "Be quiet!" My mother barks. But it is too late, "Good Love" is running through me. I go quiet on the outside but inside the song is still playing and I learn when you sing inside no one can stop the song from playing. No matter whether they are asking you to slice up potatoes or saying that you are "A stupid ass," if you keep the song inside of you it will play over and over. Thickening you with your own self. So when the only place or person you've known "good" or "love" from is you or Whitney Houston, you can keep the good love you've found a secret. Sometimes you need to keep the good love you give yourself a secret so you can feel good love at anytime.

what if it's hard for black americans to work hard because we started out working hard for others?

protect the corner of your universe wherever you find it. in a hot bath. in the hole in the wall restaurant on 5th and forester ave. in the 10 minute walk from the subway station to your door. in the bike ride down that steep hill on bedford ave for 1/2 a mile before traffic bottle necks. in that conversation with her-im over chamomile tea with two shots of rum. in that which you know that you know. protect that which you know that you know in your deepest knowing, in the place that does not know that it knows because this is the anti-thesis of knowing, this is what blocks the universe than letting it become the size of a corner you can sit inside of. find it whenever you need to. sometimes you protect what you know by not knowing that you know It.

i will be a mother in 6 months. for 31 years i have not been a child. i have not been a woman either. i have not been a good daughter. i have not forgiven. i have not made it easy. i have not cried on my mother's shoulder. i have not said i need you, but once, and it felt good, and i did not say it again and again even though it felt good. it felt hole-filling. i hope my child does what feels good.


make it feel good again and again.

mom your whisper hurts. it is not something i want to even put a period to, to stop it is to pierce my own self again

only you know when It is speaking within you. when you are no longer other gods, but your own. you, the spine with all feeling carried in it without martyrdom or unattainable graciousness but with simply I Am Here. without holy waters or candles burning or conjure women gathered in circles in the middle of the forest--with simply the hum from all those places, the whisper inside all of them collected in the breath coming from my spine. when your whisper is the only thing you hear, fuming through every layer of skin on your skin, through every layer of skin on your thought, grazing hairs on those skins that will stand, every part of you will stand and it will be the only standing you do that is not forced. that does not break the feeling in the arch of your spine because it is aligned. because it is god.

i'm not nice. i'm good. good is better than nice any. day. in the park, good would kick nice's ass because nice would steal another little girl's dollie, call this little girl friendly, out of her book bag when she was not looking. complement her on her purple velvet shoes. and smile in her face when the dollie is finally in its pocket. good would give nice some good lickings and send its ass home with its double-handed self to tell it's mother what it had done before good arrives with the truer version of the story. no. i'm not nice.

maybe when we all breathe each of us is able to breathe a little better where it's hard to in our lives. maybe your breath is my own.

the purple lilac me can slow down and fold herself into angles, showing corners and creases of herself when wind blows.

when i'm in need i curl up like things that hide from the sun.

trying to find my new born's skin that needed touch, that asked for it, that gravitated to your skin, that only spoke with laughter or tears, that could not hold itself until it was held long enough by you. when she says 'i'm ok' it is not a lie. 

once i was in phase two, a dream, with visions of tomorrow blurring my today. i had distractions that came by the dozens. like schools of fishes, i saw i creative writing students, the hairs on my vagina, pieces of tomorrow, again, a distant now, heart palpitations, second guessing and you in today. i saw the gums of candles that appeared like tiny glue caves above a fire burning on the leg of my tub, i saw you and you again. you never have a face—you come with a ball of warm wind built slowly into a jack and the beanstalk size fist and in it are auras—nice ones like blue jasmine and hibiscus they are spirits with smells that breathe on me then through me and when they enter they inhale the navy blue me. the me who i say i am that’s saturated in 'someone else can do it better' and 'i will not forgive.' and it exhales a purple lilac me who slows down and can see in the mirror when there isn't one around. who forgives herself first. a warm wind that cleanses, approaching to ask can it sit inside of me. but it only speaks by humming. and it comes as close as across the street. its voice reverberating over to my corner of the sidewalk as i wait to be told i can go.  

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