No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story. Celebrating Diversity Since 2015
Gloria hesitated and simply stared at the enchanting woman; over seventy-years-old and dressed in white from the top of her head – wrapped with a veil-type material – to her ankles, where her long sheer dress ended. She wore a red sash around her hefty waist. Yellow beads hung from her neck, and various bracelets, also beaded, lined her wrists.
“Your first time.” the woman said as a matter of fact.
The town I’m from has a history an excommunication of diversity at the helm of self-serving Caucasian propriety.
Pointless. That was the word Zaire’s girlfriend had used to describe his life when she dumped him. At first he’d been upset at the sharpness of the insult, but now he was starting to see where she was coming from.
At first I only knew the more recent events, you had tried to kill my great grandfather, and when your murderous urges failed, my great grandfather dying of old age, you turned your attention to my mother. You have been able to injure my mother in unfathomable ways, eaten away at her psyche, ravishing her body and shattering my parents’ marriage, but you have not succeeded in pulling her completely under; so far she had kept her head above water, even on the days her mouth is submerged and her nose takes in water. Later you would tell me how it all started, long ago in Ireland with a tragedy involving our two families, but even you admitted maybe it went back even farther than this, before you were born or before you evolved to have the facility to think, to feel, to remember.
It is a misconception that there is a cure for addiction, our inner monsters are not slain. Rather we learn to live with our monsters and sometimes it’s torturous and sometimes it’s hilarity. Most of the time, for me, it’s an annoyance, an empathy, an echo of another life, a window into another’s pain. For those same reasons I am motivated to write: that another person may relate to the feelings I express and in turn feel inspired, seen, understood—and most of all—like I feel when I read and write—less alone.
Before that, before I’d walked off from her, she’d fastened my shirt by one more button. “It looks better this way,” she’d said. I liked to wear my shirts a little open, the way James Spader characters did in his early movies, when I was young. But when I asked her if she were sure and she said, “One thousand percent,” I believed her. Even though I didn’t know where she got her authority, I believed her.