How Elsie Became Tuyet

Elsie was a straight A student,
a dutiful daughter and a speaker
of three languages.
I was nothing of the sort
but still, we became friendly enough
that I was able to ask
why the French teacher called her
Tuyet.

Americans say its hard to pronounce.

I tested it on my one language tongue.
Tuyet.
Two syllables.
Elsie.
Two syllables.

I could see no difficulty
and so discarded Elsie.

When she told me that her family
decided that she is to marry
I remembered the teenage Haitian girl
who used to live across the hall.
Enamored with her boyfriend’s anatomy
she had names for various parts
and one of those named parts
led to a hurried wedding ceremony
at the local Seventh Day Adventist Hall
as well as her disappearance
from my life..

Back then, being called Haitian was worse
than being called nigger.
but I didn’t care.
She was cool and pretty
and made me not want to have sex.

Tuyet was cool and pretty
and also on the edge
of a disappearing act.

She left me
with a picture of herself
in a spring blue and white dress
and a pageboy haircut
that stands out
more than her face.

Frederick Douglass by Robert Hayden

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

Excerpted from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden

Then, Now

Back then, moans
manifested through walls
like copulating ghosts;
making morning after
sightings problematic.

Now, when I hear sounds
through the walls
I remember my own moans
and how they climaxed
into this life
where I am a mother
listening to my child
read himself to sleep.

The Day She Died

Ever since they moved
into the apartment with carpet
she liked to fly.
She would dive head first
off of any structure
that held her feet
“without giving a damn for rugburn”
her mother said.
Her father just laughed
and would swoop in “like an airplane”
catch her mid-flight
and give her the hugs she loved
until the day she died.

(8/30) pay attention to the signs

of a bed that’s unsleepable
until egyptian cotton sheets are removed
balled together in a bamboo hamper
to be fumigated
by the washing process

the time-worn couch
is untenable as well
until I remove the sheets
covering what was twice
his resting place
and replace them with
freshly washed ones.

then I can curl myself into it
until the knowledge
that a bicycle isn’t the only thing
a woman can never forget how to ride
is put into its proper place

like the sheets

(7/30)

Back then, moans
manifested through walls
like copulating ghosts

making morning after
sightings problematic.

I bound myself to my room
until the sounds and subjects
dissipated into the mist
of a Monday morning.

Now, when I hear sounds
through the walls
I remember my own moans
and how they climaxed
into this life
where I am a mother
listening to my child
read himself to sleep.

(6/30)

a generation of violets
spreads into english gardens
formerly manicured
with the precision
of the queen’s english.

exigent circumstances
leads to a silence
which tries but fails
to silence desperate
desires for cassava
and groundnut

in love (secretly) with sister killjoy’s
black-eyed squint
they spread not
their language to their seeds
who travel far
on diasporic planes

and who, when they return,
need the rosetta stone

to decipher their source

God’s Obituary Revisited

The title of Indytony’s poem drew me in. The writing kept me reading. One of my favorite responses to people who have tried to “save my soul” is “people created God, not the other way around”. What is created by people can also be killed by them. His poem does a good job of explaining how and the warm twist at the end, made me laugh. God (She-He-It) still exists, obituary notwithstanding…

indytony's avatarA Way With Words

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

God did many wondrous and mysterious things

Blessing a people to bless others

Delivering them from slavery to a Promised Land.

Rescuing them from self-destruction

Showing them mercy from everlasting to everlasting.

 

Then, some time ago, God died.

It might have been by the pen of Frederich Nietzsche,

Or in the ovens of Aushwitz.

Or on the tongue of Dr. Matthews, in the Spring of 1983

Who taught me that theology was no longer the study of God,

But the exploration of what it means to be human.

 

When I was young, God was very much alive.

Spewing fire and brimstone from the pulpit

Of the First Mount Pleasant Baptist church.

Kneeling beside me when I asked Jesus to come into my heart.

Holding me tight on nights I would hear my parents screaming at each other,

Softly whispering…

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Unburying the Lost Boys at the Dozier School (a real-life horror story)

tananarivedue's avatarTananarive Due Writes

UPDATE 8/30: On my way to Marianna, Florida, with my father, husband and son.  Exhumations will begin. The remains of the Lost Boys, including my mother’s uncle, will soon be brought into the light. 

ORIGINAL POST:

————————

Why do you write horror?  How can horror fiction be escapism? 

That familiar query from readers pops to mind as I’m riding with my father from Atlanta down to northern Florida to visit the site where the notorious Dozier School for Boys once stood as a real-life boogeyman to juvenile offenders from around the state of my birth.

Some former prisoners say boys were beaten, tortured, sexually assaulted. And as the cemetery behind the school still attests—called “Boot Hill” by locals—some of the boys sent to the Dozier School never came home.

One was a 15-year-old boy named Robert Stephens, my late mother’s uncle.  In 1937, Robert Stephens died after allegedly being stabbed…

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