Recent Work
“Name The People, Places, And Things You Love Non-Romantically. Can You Make A List Of 12? How Can Feeding Non-Romantic Love Support Romance In Your Life?”- My Beautiful Alien, 2024
Name the people, places, and things you love non-romantically! Can you make a list of 12? How can feeding into non-romantic love support romance in your life?
“I’m a big fan of Black women. ‘Cause in our blood is space travel.” Nikki Giovanni
Dear Alien,
You should know that I dove into your question wholeheartedly, fully intending to write a list of twelve things I love non-romantically. My lifelong adoration of sunflowers came to mind first, how the youngest of the species move their blooms to track the sun during the day, only to reorient themselves at night in anticipation of the dawn’s arrival. I have always been comforted by their behavior, a reminder that plants and animals need both dark and light to function, and things move in their own time. I considered how each song and interview on Nina Simone’s Protest Anthology album is a sacred prayer; meditations I’ve revisited frequently over the last nine years to help me find words to express my anguish, fear, and hysteria over the lack of justice and equity in the world. Then a memory came, of renting an Airbnb in Long Beach for a writer’s getaway, and in-between writing and procrastination, I took a blanket and walked to the water each night, to sit in silence as the sun was setting. It was there I learned to love listening more than speaking, realizing the fullness of quiet, tuning into the crashing waves and paying reverence to Mother Earth with my breath.
But something else kept nagging at me, friend. My heart demanded that I write something else. Because it feels incredibly urgent to do so. And because I cannot answer your question without acknowledging what I know to be true. And as the very wise bell hooks once wrote, “To know love, we have to tell the truth to ourselves and others.”
"A Melancholy Old Woman Dying A Miserable Death Alone”- Dreamers Writing, First Place Flash Contest Winner 2023
“We quit!” my ovaries pronounce with gusto on a random Thursday afternoon, and if I’d been paying attention I would have seen it coming since they’d left me plenty of clues we were headed for a dramatic breakup: the simultaneous puking and period poop every month, cramps like I’d been mauled repeatedly by a world class fighter in a Taekwondo match, deep inner belly aches necessitating the use of a hot water bottle passed down to me by my grandmother when I was 16, one with a little red knitted sweater and a white heart that she’d had since the 1970s, trips to the emergency room where doctors consistently gaslit me by insisting that everything was normal, I’d been detaching from my body for years, busying myself with life and work, secretly relieved that I wasn’t ever going to use my burdensome ladyparts to birth children of my own, not wanting any more responsibility since having been forced into raising so many of the adults around me from childhood because they were too damaged to take care of themselves, figuring that the centuries of Black women who’d come before had already paid my debt by being nannies, domestics and othermothers, I’d long since grown accustomed to invasive questions about my reproductive choices,
“That Word” - Prose Online, 2022
The first time, you are in elementary school.
Too young to know exactly what it means, but old enough to know it is something awful from the way it’s hurled angrily at you from Dave Sommer’s lips. This is when you refuse to give him the ball on the playground after school. You aren’t trying to be difficult, not really. You’ve just gotten the ball and only want your turn like everyone else. It feels disorienting to suddenly incur Dave’s wrath, as he is the most popular kid in class.
Mrs. Brooks has been teaching you about context clues in Language Arts this year— “When you don’t know the definition of a word, use the words and phrases around it as hints to learn its meaning,” she says.
You are a fast learner and so you quickly catch on.
Maybe he’s right, you have been told you talk too much and cause trouble. Why can’t you just act right? You should walk away before anyone else can get mad at you.
So that’s what you do, the sound of bouncing rubber trailing behind you, the words “stupid nigger” pounding loudly in your ears, reverberating off the asphalt.
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