Once Upon A Time

by Alice

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SELF-PORTRAIT IN POTENTIA

After the death of memoir, I will write fairy tales.

I desire a purity of language outside the stink of events and memories. Stories I cannot be accused of having invented because of course I have invented them.

Neither full fiction, nor freighted fact.

I would show other bones behind my telling.

*

Fable gifts us fanciful creatures, fanciful bodies, fanciful selves. In the tales, I shall become winged, ogrish, bulky as a mountain, a face all crooked nose and sharpened teeth—by turns witch, killer, a dragon in shadows. I rend flesh. I eat princesses whole. I am wolf and hunter both, my head too full to contain in just one mind, in just one set of teeth.

I am Little Red Riding Hood’s lover.

I pull my feet off the ground and still know where I am standing.

*

I grew up in a gingerbread house, led by a gingerbread man, all of us happy and perfect and filled with gumdrops to our eyelids until at last we bled gumdrops out our mouths, and still we filled with them. I was a princess who gave away her voice for love, who danced in magical shoes until her feet were stumps and slept atop 85 feathered mattresses yet still could find no rest.

All the while being told (small child in a small child’s nightgown) that monsters were never real. The very monsters I could see, could smell.

Monsters whose fur caught on railings, leaving behind tufts that I collected each morning in a pillowcase.

One grows weary of not knowing when to believe the words pouring off one’s own tongue. Over time, one starts to prick one’s finger on every spinning wheel spindle out of spite and desperation.
Continue reading “Once Upon A Time” →

Unbearable Weight

by Alice

Yesterday, another Black American was executed on the streets by police.

9/20/16, Charlotte, NC: Keith Lamont Scott, age 43

I have not looked closely at the details of this latest shooting in North Carolina yet. How a father sat waiting in a car. How a gun book in a poor black man’s hand became life-threatening in other men’s eyes.

How frail my nation, quaking from its birth in fear of the literacy of black voices. When has a book in a black man’s hand not been seen as provocation for violence?

Witness North Carolina’s own penal code, passed in 1830-1:

Therefore,  Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of North Carolina, and it is hereby enacted by the authority of the same,

…That if any slave shall hereafter teach, or attempt to teach, any other slave to read or write, the use of figures excepted, he or she may be carried before any justice of the peace, and on conviction thereof, shall be sentenced to receive thirty nine lashes on his or her bare back.

But that is knowledge for another time. Today all I can picture is Scott’s young child, skipping home from school towards a beloved parent and finding death instead.

I cannot yet endure knowing more.

9/16/16, Tulsa, OK: Terence Crutcher, age 40

I have not read yet all the details out of Tulsa, where a police department with a documented history of planting drug evidence has just planted released drug evidence against their latest victim.

Since I learned that even from the air above, a policeman in a chopper had concluded that the black man having car trouble looked like “a bad dude,” these words from the slain man’s twin sister have played on repeat in a corner of my mind: Continue reading “Unbearable Weight” →

Manifesting

by Alice

Anybody know a writer’s equivalent to the old saw about conquering stage fright by picturing your audience in their underwear? Hmm…

◊

I am deeply grateful to The Manifest-Station for publishing my essay “Body Lessons,” about girlhood, shame, sexual violence, and recovery (revised from a earlier blog post). Also deeply grateful to any and all who read and support my work.

Please know I am picturing all of you in your underwear at this very moment.

◊

After my divorce, I began a long and agonizing journey to reclaim my own sexuality. (continued…)

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The Suspect Has Been Identified. The Suspect Has Been Killed.

by Alice

“It turns out to not be a firearm in the sense that [a firearm] fires real bullets,” Columbus Police Chief Kim Jacobs to reporters, at a press conference following Wednesday night’s fatal police shooting of Tyre King

According to police witnesses, 13yo Tyre King had a bb gun in his waistband.

According to early reporting, Tyre was a man who had just started 8th grade at Linden STEM Academy.

Children today grow up so much faster.
Black children today grow old so much faster.

*

At 13, I started 8th grade too. Shooting spitwads from the back of Mr. Taylor’s 6th period, were those men? Was Lance Trumble a man the day he drooled into the English teacher’s water glass when she stepped out of the room?

Was I a woman when I laughed?

Adulthood comes unlikely early to those whose fruition is feared.

*

A spitwad is not a bb is not a Glock 9mm.

*

Columbus, Ohio, is the same department that served and protected 12yo Tamir.

Tyre is the second Ohio citizen Bryan Mason has served with a bullet and protected out of life in four years.

According to policy: Office Mason has been placed on paid administrative leave and will be receiving psychological support counseling. According to policy: Officer Mason will be offered leave time to assist in recovery from a traumatic experience.

What support counseling available for the King family.
What trauma recovery offered to Tyre.

Nothing ages a child faster than death.

Water Is Life

by Alice

Here is a sentence I never expected to type: I am transfixed by North Dakota.

Specifically, I am transfixed by the events unfolding in North Dakota right now.

For those of you not yet in the know, North Dakota is where the Standing Rock Sioux, other Native American tribes, and their supporters are gathered in protest of a multi-million-dollar oil pipeline project being built across reservation lands, destroying cultural heritage sites and endangering local water supplies. [Here’s a primer, current up to five days ago.]

Honestly, I’d be hard-pressed to locate North Dakota on a map. Both Dakotas fall into my schema of the US states as “one of those square ones in the middle,” and on days like this, I wish my early teachers had felt a little more oomph to teach us the states, instead of the European map I had to draw year after year. (Pointing out Yugoslavia on a topo has proven to be not quite the necessary life skill my Sedgewick Junior High social studies department apparently expected.)

But these past few weeks? I cannot look away.  Continue reading “Water Is Life” →