My granddad always returned from the dacha—his summer kingdom—with bucketfuls of whatever was in season: pink fleshy tomatoes, cucumbers bitter at the bottom, scratchy hairy peaches, or green solid pears still dripping juice. He carried four aluminum buckets as if gravity didn’t apply to him. Before his feet even crossed the threshold, he’d announce these were the last ones and now he didn’t know what we would eat. He said it every time, so nobody believed him.
It was the late ’90s. Granddad still carried his childhood hunger from the war in his pockets; always afraid the table might come up short. After the Soviet collapse, my parents stood blinking at salary delays, at a life they didn’t know how to work.
Dacha wasn’t just the act of survival for him – more like the stage for his invisible performances. The precise color of a tomato knots, like tuning a stringed instrument. Two-hour trips just to water strawberries for ten minutes. One early bunch of potatoes planted to ripen by my birthday—like he could dance with time. He had a kind of intuition that made things grow not by the calendar, but by his own rhythm.
In June, the strawberries came first—small, misshapen, sweeter than anything I’ve tasted since. We ate them right there in the rows, hands stained, dirt under our nails. Peaches were rarer; granddad guarded the few we had, sealing them in syrup for the single jar of compote we opened on New Year’s Eve. Cucumbers, though—I dreaded them. They filled the bathtub before canning, stealing our showers. In winter, when the snow made the pump water ache in your fingers, he’d open tomato juice, and the kitchen would smell like August again.
Anyone else wasn’t allowed to intervene here—except my mom, tidy and precise. The rest of the family was hardly let to do harvesting. Mom’s elder sister, her complete opposite—fast and careless—once didn’t pick the berries right. It was a big fight—started between a granddad and his adopted daughter, then her husband involved, and just in two minutes I’ve heard all our family arguing and yelling at each other. And I was just shitting in cranberry bushes behind the house, afraid to go outside before they solve their problems and return to work.
We didn’t even have even a toilet there. No electricity, either. My sister once told me she remembers the time before an electrical cable was stolen from the whole village to be sold for scrap metal. Water was supplied at a certain time, so grandad was to stay the night on dacha once a week. Watering was supposed to be since 5 AM on Thursday. Once we were allowed to go with granddad, too—me and my sister.
We took the old metal bed with hard feather. It was so high I couldn’t make it myself—my sister got me there. We didn’t know even approximate time—the darkness outside seemed to last for ages. The only thing to do was press play on the cassette player and listen through our carefully chosen tracks. My sister asked me if I know how old is Cher. I guessed she should be five years older than Britney. My sister said Cher was fifty-two, leaving me confused. Believe was everywhere. Neither we nor our parents had known her iconic career before. Cher’s age didn’t matter anyway—she sounded like a future.
We woke up the next day long after the crop was watered. I sat on the bed and dangled my legs down, waiting for my sister to wake up, too. I’ve looked around—white walls, ugly soviet sofa with flowery upholstery, a cloth hanger. A dining table with drawers, a usual loaf of round bread. Two plates, glued at least once. There was a swing behind the wall—when my sister finally picked me down, I got there.
Out of the house, the cherry tree still extended higher than the attic. You couldn’t pick anything without using a ladder. Anyway, it was sawed down only after granddad fell from the stairs. His daughters persuaded him he is no longer in a condition to handle dacha. The bad times were over, and we could afford to buy any of stuff that grew here. Granddad finally gave in, sold dacha, bought leather pants for my sister. But still left home to see how new owners handle everything. They did nothing and it made him mad. He kept watching over them, insisted they should save his legacy. They didn’t care even less than we did. The only thing left for my granddad was solitaire. He dealt the cards quietly on the windowsill, as if he could still sort and control something. But the tomatoes were gone. It was just him and the cards now.
But before that, we were allowed to eat as many strawberries we could pick. To get lost in the raspberry bushes, to see a strange bug there and to run scared, getting scratched. We washed our hands in an old mining trolley repurposed to hold rainwater—common in our region, where whatever survived the mines leaked into everyday life. I gave it a hug before we left. It wasn’t really a hug. I just tried to unfold it—but it was too big for me.
The way to the tram was long. A rosehip bush at the corner—I always stopped to smell it. Then the hill: dusty, steep, with small stones along the edge and a path worn in by our own feet. I got better at it each year, but it never felt easy. At the bottom was a twisted road we had to dash across before the cars came.
After that, we had two ways—through the thicket or the wide wheat field. I always chose the field. My dad once told me they were caught in a thunderstorm there, back when my mom was pregnant with me. It felt like I remembered it too.
We finally got to the last stop, waiting for the tram moving in circle to make a circle back. We always talked with my sister—about the East Coast-West Coast hip-hop war, about our favorite Saturday morning TV show, how I dreamed of becoming a fashion designer and she of being a radio DJ. We dreamed of chips, a bottle of soda in a store too expensive for us even to walk into.
The tram was never just a ride. It was a spell cast between dirt and town, duty and dream. By the time we got to the final stop, we already were someone else.
Years later, in a museum, I saw the trolley again. The same kind that stood behind our dacha—chipped enamel, sun-heated metal, holding the same yellow-green water. I pressed my chest to it and let my tears fall.
I didn’t care who was watching.
Iryna Somkina is an author based in Kyiv, Ukraine. After a decade-long silence, she returned to writing to explore memory, displacement, and quiet acts of rebellion. Her recent work has appeared in Gone Lawn, Livina Press, and Star 82 Review.
the problem of trying to maintain the conversation the mood and tone of the moment when on the other side of her a hurting hungry middle-aged man with an unkempt beard and long scraggly hair talking to voices only he can hear who could have been my father if my father weren’t already three years dead an untimely found by Burlington police in a rundown studio apartment two weeks after his release from the state hospital ten months after his hell year homeless slowly starving and freezing on Church Street 800 miles from where we are now crossing 37th Street with me trying to not look back again at this moment to tamp down the anger and frustration at everyone including myself to tell myself the book which I have just started writing will be not enough nothing will be enough I know that but it will be something what I am capable of heading to my apartment with a very attractive no stunningly beautiful tall blonde with the best eyes and smile I’ve ever seen the problem has never left me not from that day to this one and neither has she for better and for worse even though I am now three years older than he ever was or will be him who I still see every time I visit the city I loved and gave up and left for these suburbs which I long to leave and will one day I have to I really have to one way or another
Nathaniel Lachenmeyer is a disabled author of books for children and adults. His first book, The Outsider, which takes as its subject his late father’s struggles with schizophrenia and homelessness, was published by Broadway Books. Nathaniel has forthcoming/recently published poems, stories and essays with Subtropics, The American Poetry Review, Poetry International Online, North Dakota Quarterly, Red Rock Review, Blue Unicorn, Potomac Review, Permafrost, and DIAGRAM. Nathaniel lives outside Atlanta with his family. nathaniellachenmeyer.com.
There is something about being arrested that makes me ravenously hungry. More accurately, there is something about being freed from jail after being arrested that makes me aware of an insatiable hunger inside me that cannot be filled by anything but sharing a meal with friends.
There have been times when, after an arrest, I feel vast and bottomless; only an equally enormous, steaming plate of pasta and a brownie sundae can create the necessary sense of grounding after the unmooring experience of being in jail. There is something in a plate of fries, still shining with hot oil, that is the perfect antidote to the cold bench of a police van and the stale chill of a jail’s holding cell. There is something unruly in how they taste better stolen from a friend’s plate as you trade stories, breathing deeply once everyone is accounted for and able to gather around a table.
Or perhaps it is simply that laughter and good food stand in such diametric contrast to the goal of the prison system. In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Davis explains that prison, “Functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited […] it relieves us of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.” Food — and reclaiming my body through it — is a path to embodiment in the fact of that abstraction. After several arrests for climate and environmental justice protests, I still relish this ritual each time.
Perhaps it is that there is a part of me that still views food as an extension of my rebellious acts, the ones that got me arrested in the first place. And the fries are simply a matter of “in for a penny, in for a pound.” Or perhaps the plate of fries is a more specific, more personal symbol. I want to tell you about my eating disorder—even though I can’t imagine anything more tedious than a white woman explaining her hangups about food. To be clear, it did not feel like an eating disorder at the time, but it was. I’m not sure any of us goes into a spiral with our relationship to our bodies and food intending to cultivate an eating disorder or knowing what one feels like.
I simply wanted, in the carceral way that the state demands compliance, control over a body that felt profoundly wild and dangerous. I believed the rules I created would provide me with the control that would ultimately lead to the pinnacle of wellness I’d been lusting after since my chronic pain began at 12. And rather than addressing the complex causes, it was easier in many ways to wage a years-long capitalism-fueled war of obedience and transactional compliance with my body. It was simpler to wrangle it into eating rules and punish it with overexercise than to touch my own pain with tenderness, to look into its face and surrender to the intimacy of being with myself.
The official name of my disorder was orthorexia, but I think of it like playing a slot machine that made me progressively sicker: a gambling addiction with my body as the lever. As long as I was willing to continue to pump money and attention and fixation and the “right” things into my body, I believed (foolishly) that it would eventually pay out a jackpot of indistinct “wellness” and I would know, at least for that moment, that I had been good and worthy and rightful enough. As with eating disorders, the opposite was true. Yet, as someone who had been experiencing chronic pain and disability from the age of twelve, the allure was undeniable. To offer up suffering in exchange for relief. To be willing to isolate myself in exchange for the ability to bask in the satisfaction in my temporary goodness.
As a recovering “pleasure to have in class” who has been chasing the high of goodness since childhood, unlearning obedience and becoming not just an anarchist, but an abolitionist, was a surprisingly easy transition for me—as long as the liberation at stake was someone else’s. My first official arrest was in March, 2006 at a Victoria’s Secret in Union Square in San Francisco. The company was sending out 1 million catalogs per day using paper sourced from endangered caribou habitat and traditional First Nations lands, and so I chained myself to a stone pillar in front of the store and was taken to a police station about a mile away, cited with interfering with a business and released. Since then, there have been a half a dozen or so additional arrests, give or take (at the time of publication).
Each of these left a traumatic residue. Despite my privilege, jail is ultimately a dehumanizing experience by design. It left the marks on my record, and the living memory of a dislocated shoulder, poorly healed. The unspoken understanding while in custody was that I was something less than fully human. Yet, given my beliefs, these comparatively small injustices I chose to endure have always felt worth the price I’ve paid to carry them with me. It is another form of withstanding small suffering for a greater sense of wellness.
Clearly, a diet is not prison. There is no orthorexia in any jail I have been to, with its bologna and mustard sandwiches on white bread. I have spent too much time peeling the slice of bologna off the bread, discarding it with my fingertips into the brown paper bag. I have spent way too much time spreading the same yellow mustard packet over the slices of Wonderbread and eaten that as a sandwich while I await arraignment. I cannot, and do not wish, to equate the two. And yet, they are born of the same spirit. They have the same practical origins in the US, which are anti-blackness, white supremacy, and capitalism. And they function in much the same way: through control, extraction, obedience, punishment, with the ever-present threat of ostracization, othering and unworthiness. The strategies of the prison industrial complex are devastating, even in their simplicity: to commit abandonment, isolation, violence, and demonization against prisoners — in the U.S., overwhelmingly Black — until sufficient atonement (as determined by a labyrinthine and nebulous system) and “appropriate” and “proportional” sacrifice is made.
Sometimes, I imagine how my life would be different if I hadn’t gotten my plea deal. I do not know who would have been made whole by my being convicted of a felony at 24 or by my spending five to eight years in prison. I would have missed my own wedding. And here is what my brain with its PTSD and survivor’s guilt wants to explain: I did nothing special to be spared. It was white privilege and telling my lawyer to reject my first plea deal and some arbitrary luck. I want to apologize for my freedom, to equivocate and explain how undeserving I am. But should any of us have to apologize or justify not being in a cage?
*
Neither diet culture nor prisons accomplish their stated goals.Diets do not lead to permanent weight loss any more than prisons and policing lead to lower crime rates. At the root of these carceral attitudes is a question of what we take for granted and what we are willing to question. The same way incarceration shrouds itself in safety, diet culture wields health and wellness. In both cases, they are designed to create reward in the form of status for the compliant. Sabrina Strings writes in Fearing the Black Body, “In this way, the phobia about fatness and the preference for thinness have not, principally or historically, been about health. Instead, they have been one way the body has been used to craft and legitimate race, sex, and class hierarchies.” Similarly, the prison industrial complex has done nothing to reduce crime rates or create safety in communities; rather, it functions primarily to create and reinforce those same hierarchies while extracting astronomical profits for the prison industry to create a smokescreen of safety and action.
Orthorexia, like any eating disorder, is not about food, but control. It is wrapped up in the purity culture of our evangelical nation—a lefty, hippie take on the puritanical attitudes that view certain foods as “sinful” and others as “good.” It takes a green juice-marinated view of sickness, health, pain, and healing that requires absolute obedience and offers the promise of well-being, longevity, beauty, and relief from suffering. Which is possible for a few, but (as with all experiences in a human body) temporary.
The term orthorexia was coined by Dr. Steven Bratman in 1996 and is marked by an obsessive preoccupation with healthy eating that ultimately constitutes self-harm. From the outside, orthorexia looks like what we are “supposed” to be doing with regards to food and eating, but has five warning signs when this behavior becomes an overwhelming fixation: a preoccupation with food and eating habits; extreme dietary rules; changes in mood and emotional distress; seeing food as “good” vs. “bad”; and food fixation that affects social interactions. While distinct from anorexia and bulimia, the primary function remains the same: restrict, isolate, exclude, and control.
As someone who has been arrested many times, I can draw a straight line between my eating disorder and the carceral attitudes of our society—especially toward the body. This is doubly-true for the bodies of marginalized genders and races.
On a collective scale, the antidote is abolition.
The corollary, on the individual level, is the socially-unacceptable unruliness of intuitive eating and the often messy process of restorative justice. A reliance on the innate knowledge of the body and self that not only does not require, but rejects outright, the expertise of those outside the self to create a relationship with food. This intuition threatens capitalism (and the diet and wellness industry), and ultimately the state itself. The untidiness of gathering for a meal with the express purpose of community, culture, and pleasure is at odds with the state’s coercive control of the body. Its purpose is not utilitarian: this food and this gathering are not aimed at productivity or efficiency, but enjoyment and camaraderie.
Which is maybe why that plate of fries after getting out of jail is so delicious. It is refusal to obey. It is the opposite of the scraps of food I’ve been offered in jail, when I’m offered food at all. It is hot and greasy and salty. It is imbued with the humanity of the person who prepared it, and energized by the company around the table. It is good enough to lick your fingers over. It is good enough to be worth stealing. It is resistance to how the state so often exacts compliance.
*
In the U.S., we have become a people not only overpoliced and over-incarcerated (the United States has more incarcerated citizens than any other country in the world), but overly preoccupied with policing one another, even on an interpersonal level. We deem others’ choices “irresponsible” (without additional context) even in situations where it seems that individual choice has little to do with the matter. When others are imprisoned or die in medical poverty or simply exist in a body we deem immoral (i.e. fat or disabled), it appears as an opportunity to ostracize, dehumanize, and other.
This so-called irresponsibility is considered a crime against not just society, but the state itself. And this is also how the left exacts its own purity culture: by creating the illusion that personal choice and lifestyle activism will free us from, well, everything: from climate change to cancer. Whether it’s raw veganism or yoga or going plastic-free (none of which is necessarily bad on its own), the crunchy left has its own fixation on piety and fitness and “wellness” habits that confuse lifestyle politics for systemic change and are little more than personal choice, at best.
My orthorexia told me that all of this was an investment in myself—a mark of care for myself. Instead, it left me busy (making all that green juice is time consuming!), broke, and isolated. When my friends were all going out for pizza and beer, I was going to my ninth yoga class of the week or prepping my cleanse meal of brown rice and lentils for the next day. Sometimes, I’d sneak a cup of coffee in the middle of one of my cleanses, and utter the phrase that now makes me shudder: “I’m being so bad.” In fact, each cleanse was just another punitive way of keeping myself in line. Out of a desperate desire to be well—to be free of chronic pain and disability—I had poisoned myself with the belief that who and what I was needed fixing.
Though the exact cause is unknown, risk factors that increase an individual’s chance of developing orthorexia include: low self-esteem; a chemical imbalance in the brain; perfectionism; a strong need for structure in one’s life; and difficulty controlling emotions. As a perfectionistic trauma-survivor who has clinical depression and generalized anxiety disorder, I was a prime target for orthorexia. Or perhaps this is how I was conditioned by society as a young woman: coached to aspire to an unnatural standard created by advertisers and influencers.
As a child of the 80’s, I grew up marinating in diet culture. The first time I remember adults around me dieting, I was in preschool—younger than my son is now. I didn’t understand what it meant other than these adults wanted the number on their bathroom scale to be a smaller number than the one they saw. But I did know we couldn’t eat out at our favorite Italian restaurant as often, which I remember thinking seemed like a bad trade-off. Everyone seemed to want a different body than the one they had, which made no sense to me, since I loved every pillowy inch of these people. I, on the other hand, was often the subject of praise for being tiny (partly due to a genetic condition that made me smaller than everyone else my age). The first time I remember wanting my body to be different than what it was, it was the summer after fourth grade. I was at a pool party with some family members and my uncle (by marriage) told me that I had great thighs. I longed to disappear, and whether that meant starving myself to evaporate completely or becoming large enough that my thighs would no longer count as “nice,” I wasn’t sure. But I never wore a bathing suit around him again. I punished myself internally for years, blaming myself for how he had made me feel in my body. As though I were something even at ten, available for the taking.
This is what the carceral mindset does. Even though I knew in my heart that he was being creepy, I punished myself for transgressing the unspoken boundary of having a body that created attention for itself in this way.
I grew up believing that police were safe; that they kept us safe; that if I were in trouble, I should find a police officer to help me. I know better now. I try to teach my son the truth without frightening him more than I need to. But he lives in the world. There is no shielding him completely. In the car on the way to a doctor’s appointment the other day, he told me about a friend at school who told him that cops were good because they stop people from stealing and doing bad things. I took a deep breath. Instead of reacting, I asked, “What do you think?” He didn’t think so, but wasn’t sure. “What do you think, mama?” “Well, Papa and I believe that we should make sure that people have enough so that they don’t need to steal, instead of spending that money punishing people.” He was quiet for a moment. From the front seat, I could hear the gears in his kindergarten mind cranking away. “So, the police do more harm than good.” I do not tell you this for clout or for you to witness my child’s uncanniness at five. But because it is proof that understanding that police do not keep us safe is not such a stretch. It is proof that our minds can imagine another way. We could dream an entirely different way into being within a generation.
With food, my son is free to take thirds or fourths, or to leave the table after three bites. I would rather teach him to trust his own hunger. I keep my mouth shut even if I spent more time than I’d like to admit making the dinner he did not eat.
The language that we use around bodies connotes something moral and carceral, which are two sides of the same coin in the US. The way we are asked to pay for our crimes and the way our punishment is exacted for transgressing against the mores of our society into criminality (of the law or of the body) presumes malice on the part of the transgressor. Or perhaps, whether in crime or in food, our bodies represent a moral failing: gluttony, sloth, greed. In our diets, we “work off” what we’ve eaten by exercising. In prison, we pay a “debt to society.” Each, a form of penance, that separates us from society. And none of this makes us—as a society—whole, because it isn’t designed to; but it does leave us starving, distracted, fragmented, and dismantled. If anything, the consequences reduce us to the most transactional elements of ourselves and our relationships. We become nothing more than the time we serve or the calories we don’t consume. The solutions we take for granted do nothing to restore us, individually or collectively, but exact more and more.
One thing I’ve come to believe is that no one can know someone who has been to prison and not be moved to abolition. I know this isn’t strictly true. I know that these stories, this humanity, does not always move people to this political conviction. I suppose it’s more accurate to say that I don’t understand how knowing someone who has been to prison cannot move a person’s heart to abolition. Abolition is, after all, a matter of creating the conditions for a world without prisons. It is a matter of creating a world for all to thrive.
The arguments against the abolition of both prisons and diet culture often cloak themselves in hand-wringing concern over things like safety and health. The what-aboutism neglects the fact that neither diets nor prisons actually accomplish their stated goals of safety, well-being, and lasting rehabilitation. In diet culture, people believe they are able to ascertain health from body size and shape—and from there, establish a condescending “concern” for the assumptions about health, which may or may not be accurate. When I was at my smallest and (from the outside) maintaining a strict regime of “healthy” habits, I was deeply sick. I was taking up to three 90-minute yoga classes per day, consuming endless amounts of green juice and other markers of “clean” eating, and then binging alcohol whenever I wasn’t on a cleanse. My cleanses felt like penitence for all of my “unhealthy” choices and the foods that, left to my own devices, made me feel most satisfied. The only reward was the light (and light-headed) feeling of over-doing it with exercise and restrictive eating that I could not identify as hunger. For all of my talk of liberation and my activism, I had devised an Instagram-worthy prison for myself, so perfectly curated that from the outside, it looked like success and perfect control. From the inside, it only felt lonely and obsessive, and never perfect enough. For everyone’s concern over health, I was not any healthier. I did not have less pain from scoliosis. I did not avoid getting colds or having allergies. My mental health issues were not, it should be obvious, resolved in any way. But that did not keep me from thinking that I could “win” at having a body.
In a carceral society, that concern-trolling takes the shape of asking what we do about the mass murderers and rapists. Should we simply let them roam free, after all?
Abolition is a matter of imagination. It asks what would need to be different in order to deconstruct this system. My imagination wanders from there. Who would I be without the police and prisons? Who would my friends be? How might our communities be different without the specter of the prison industrial complex?
*
Anyone who sets out to create abolition is doing so without a map, against the express wishes of the state. It is an act of faith, the definition of karma. It is a means of travel before it is a destination. Sometimes, we believe in it before we even wholly agree with it. Before we have alternatives in place or the scaffolding necessary to support it, it can feel like a cognitive leap to believe that abolition can succeed, without a current working model on a large scale. But this is no excuse not to begin to tear down this system. It begins with a belief that we can be safe without what the police have asserted as their value proposition: safety and peace, executed with the deterrent protection and punitive correction of carceral punishment. Where can we begin? With questioning whether that value proposition is what they have ever truly offered anyone but an elite and select few. It begins with the belief that we can, collectively, be whole, accomplished, loved, seen, care-for, and worthy without the adherence to an evangelical and fanatical devotion—whether to the police or to thinness—that many of us have been suffocating in for our entire lives. It is the belief that we can extend care and mercy and grace to one another without transactionality. That we can keep each other safe. That, in fact, we are the only ones who have ever kept one another safe. All of this may test our imaginations, and it should. It is an individual and collective longing not to be disposable, not to be so easily ostracized or cast-out for the small crimes for which so many have been rendered disposable. What would this require from us, collectively?
Such a shift rarely occurs by shouting down or overthrowing the entrenched power system by force. Success and progress within social movements occur by eroding the support from those responsible systems. This happens in waves, often; little by little, then in great leaps and bounds. I first learned the term “spectrum of allies” in my training as a nonviolent direct action trainer in 2007 with The Ruckus Society. This analysis places those affected by an issue along a spectrum, from active support to active opposition, with passive support, neutral parties, and passive opposition in between. By identifying those who will be affected, we can understand where and how to shift power toward our position; we do not attempt to move active opposition to active allyship, but rather to move stakeholders one position at a time toward active support of the issue.
This approach is one reason why “body positivity” feels hollow and often ineffective. We cannot shift from diet culture and body hatred to body positivity overnight; the expectation of positivity is too much. Instead, there has been a movement toward body neutrality, an acceptance of what is, rather than an insistence on celebration. When it comes to the body, neutrality can be a more useful place to start. And with that in mind, we can see that perhaps body positivity is the wrong goal entirely. Body positivity is yet another commodification by capitalism of our relationship to our bodies that sets us up to succeed or to fail. The real goal is not insisting that we find our individual bodies attractive, but instead a collective recognition of fat liberation, disability justice, and decarceration.
In order to exert control, first we must sever empathy. We must intentionally forget interdependence and interrelationship in order to create the duality necessary for cops and diet culture to exist. There needs to be good and bad, a villain and a hero, in order to support the logic of these systems. We must create an other. The only way both can remain profitable economies is to not only meet their demand for, but to make scalable, suffering and sacrifice. In order to exist, they must constantly reinforce the belief in control and punishment as solutions. This turns us into warring factions within our own bodies and erodes class solidarity with white nationalism so we can be more easily fractured and therefore controlled. Kept poor, distracted, exhausted, isolated, broken, and hungry.
*
Direct action aims to do four essential things. Foremost, to disrupt business as usual. The disruption is the point, whether we are blocking a freeway or shutting down a bank. Also: to build power, to raise the stakes, and to communicate our message. Sometimes, in order to clarify the emergency nature of the issue at hand — the climate crisis; labor rights abuses; police murder of Black people — direct action is necessary. It is not merely a tactic to exact a particular outcome, but a strategy of escalation and disruption that serves as a warning shot to others. Risk is a part of this. In exchange for this strategy, those of us who engage in direct action continually make ourselves—collectively and individually—a target.
Which is not to say I never feel doubt or hopelessness in my work. The belief that interrupts the doubt or resistance is this: Incarceration does not keep us safe; it keeps us separate. Diet culture does not keep us healthy; it keeps us lonely. When I want to apologize for surviving and escaping the system again and again, I remember that none of us deserve to live under a police state or under the thumb of diet culture. Recovery is cyclical. I am caught between impeccable self-care as an act of rebellion and self-respect of myself just as I am. I feel the panic of a metaphorical prison any time I make any kind of rules for myself. It is a process.
As someone with multiple disabilities that cause me real, physical pain, my relationship with my body remains fraught. But I have reached a certain peace that is built on listening and on refusing to punish the body when it asks for help and care. For years, my internalized ableism told me that I simply wasn’t trying hard enough. Too many people promised me that with appropriate effort and restriction that I could heal myself. That, through obedience, I could make my pain go away. That one day, I could wake up cured. But it only gave me new ways to fail and evidence, in my ongoing pain, that I had not only failed, but maliciously sabotaged myself. I could either betray the false hope of “wellness” or betray my intuition which tried desperately to convince me that maybe I wasn’t totally fucked if I ate that donut. I wanted what was promised to me, so I chose to betray my intuition, over and over again.
After I gave birth to my son, my hunger was insatiable. There was no diet or “pre-baby body” or “bouncing back”. There was an all-out, no-calorie-left-behind endless buffet of food which began when I first opened my eyes and lasted, without exaggeration, all day. I was either feeding my child or myself at all hours of the day, often both simultaneously. After feeding him at 3am, I would slink down to the kitchen to fortify myself with lactation cookies made with barley malt, flax meal, and double the chocolate chips. It felt like a race to feed myself enough to feel satisfied. Enormous bowls of fried rice, thick lentil stews, triple cheese baked ziti, and smoothies were my calorie-dense go-tos. The recipe for my smoothies was: a whole can of full-fat coconut milk; an entire avocado; chocolate protein powder; and whatever frozen fruit I had on hand. This made two smoothies, both of which I would consume in a day (one in the morning, one in the afternoon), in addition to three or four full meals each day. I had never known hunger like this, and it would not be ignored. Breastfeeding, for me, was a war of attrition. I could barely keep up. I tried (and often failed) not to need a snack in the middle of a shower. There was no intuition or plan to follow besides feeding my body whatever it asked for.
It seemed nothing was enough to rebuild my body after a difficult pregnancy, a birth that nearly ended my life, and a child who could not get enough. This time required me to set down any notions of good or bad, right or wrong, even healthy and unhealthy. It required me to make up for years of care that I’d denied myself. It offered me a true understanding that I had made a miracle with my body, and that anyone who wanted to gripe at me about cellulite or saggy anything or a number on a scale was not only terminally missing the point, but could eat shit. In retrospect, it should not have taken making a human and his placenta; enduring 20 hours of birth and 40 stitches; and providing 18 months of breastfeeding to arrive at this simple understanding. My body is allowed to evolve. My hunger is real. I am worthy of being satisfied without justification.
Food I have consumed while writing this essay: a bowl of pineapple chunks, 2 mint Milano cookies, half a papaya, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a bag of Maui onion chips, several veggie hot dogs, half a cinnamon roll with cream cheese icing, cases worth of Pamplemousse La Croix, several pieces of spinach-mushroom quiche, and approximately 8,000 cups of coffee. And here, I notice my mind’s desire to hedge or explain or contextualize all of that; to apologize or minimize. I am neither good nor bad, I want to say. I am neither restricting myself, nor am I completely out of control. I want to explain to you that I am the exact perfect balance of indulgent and intuitive, while including food that makes it appear as though I value my body. This is the insidious nature of eating disorder recovery. It is a forever thing. It is a metaphorical cage that still makes me feel as though I am facing judgment and punishment. It does something radical to my brain to include this list. And now, I am thinking about eating deep fried pickles. And now, I am wondering about my metabolism. The avalanche of thoughts doesn’t ever truly end. But I have, at least for this season, managed to set down the misery of intentional weight loss and anything that smacks of a wellness fad. I choose recovery and to forgive myself for the self-abandonment I committed against this home of skin and bone. Anyone who has ever uttered the words, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” has clearly never eaten an entire plate of fries at the Irish Bank Pub after getting cited and released for occupying a bank with her best friends. Perhaps it is a psychosomatic response, but I am always ravenous. Pancakes. Veggie burgers. A plate of pasta the size of my rib cage. I welcome anything starchy and greasy. Something soft. Something warm.
I choose, every day, to fortify my body. I choose not to call that a crime. The crimes I choose are ones of necessity: the ones that bring me face to face with a justice system that is anything but just.
Christy Tending (she/they) is the author of High Priestess of the Apocalypse. Their work has been published in Longreads, The Rumpus, and Electric Literature, and has received a notable mention in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023. They are the recipient of a residency at Yaddo and the Birdcoat Editors’ Prize in the Essay 2024. They live in Oakland, California with their family. You can learn more about their work at christytending.com. Photo by Molly Kate Photography.
Of the Burning; Or, James Weldon Johnson Investigates the Lynching of Ell Persons
If you would want to know something about the life of a human being, this one named Ell Persons, it would be because you first knew something about his death. And something about the mob who murdered him. I could say that the mob that day was angry but that would be cliché, as in angry mob. And untrue. The crowd was actually quite calm as it played both participant and spectator—judge without jury—in the spectacle it made of burning a man’s flesh.
Or was it a jury without a judge?
If you want to know something about the death of a human being, this one named Ell Persons, here are the facts as we presently know them:
On May 2, 1917, a white, sixteen-year old named Antoinette Rappel was found dead in the woods near Macon Road just outside the city limits of Memphis, Tennessee. She had disappeared three days earlier. Her body exhibited signs of sexual assault, and her decapitated head sat beside her right foot. Investigators claimed that the neck showed signs of being hacked by an axe.
A Black man named Ell Persons lived in a cabin about a half-mile from the crime scene. About 50-years old, he made his living as a woodcutter.
Early assessments by investigators noted that evidence seemed to indicate that the crime began as a friendly encounter. Since it was assumed a white female would never walk alone with a Black male, it followed that the crime only could have been committed by a white male. Nevertheless, police apprehended, interrogated, and released Ell Persons not once, but twice. Abandoning other leads, the police brought him in a third time. Over the course of 24 hours, they gave him the treatment known as the “third degree,” severely beating him until he was left, despite the evidence, with only way out.
He confessed.
The only thing to corroborate Ell Persons’ confession was conjured when police exhumed Antoinette Rappel’s body and took a photograph of her eyes. Basing his findings on a dubious theory promoted by French biometrician Alphonse Bertillon, a police officer reported that, when examining the photograph under a microscope, he saw the last living image Antoinette Rappel saw. Displaying a “frozen expression of horror” (the phrase news reports used to describe her eyes), the officer said he could detect an inverted image of the face of Ell Persons imprinted as if it were photocopied on Antoinette Rappel’s retinas.
Fearing a lynch mob, police escorted Ell Persons to Nashville to await arraignment. On May 21, a group of white men intercepted the train carrying him back to Memphis. The police officers conveniently stood down without resistance. The headline in the Memphis Commercial Appeal the next morning announced Ell Persons’ imminent lynching, almost as if it were an invitation. A crowd estimated to be at least 3,000, including children, showed up near the crime scene. Stands were set up to sell sandwiches and snacks, and a self-appointed master of ceremonies stage-managed the event, as if it were a carnival.
Once Ell Persons was secured to the post erected at the site, some within the mob allegedly complained that too much gasoline had been poured on his body. Their objection was that it would make the fire less painful and his death too quick.
Shortly after Ell Persons died, his body was decapitated and dismembered, hacked with an axe. A number of people swarmed the pyre to grab the parts, as if they were souvenirs or relics.
Newspaper accounts at the time asserted that this was the first lynching in American history carried out in broad daylight and without masks.
Members of the mob drove Ell Persons’ decapitated head to Beale Street in the heart of Memphis—at that time the center of the African American community—and threw it out of the open passenger-side window at a group of Black pedestrians.
As it lay on the sidewalk, photographs were taken of Ell Persons’ head and one of the shots was eventually printed on postcards. The reason we know these photographs existed is because one of them was obtained and reprinted with a scathing editorial in the Chicago Defender, the most popular African American newspaper of the time.
Shortly thereafter, James Weldon Johnson, field secretary of the still relatively new National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), arrived in Memphis and spent ten days independently investigating the crime and its aftermath.
After ten days, James Weldon Johnson could find no material evidence that Ell Persons had committed the crime.
So it was that the mob was quite calm—matter of fact even—as they tied a man to a beam of wood and lit him on fire. Some said Ell Persons didn’t say a word as he burned. Others said they heard something but could not make out the words.
As he walked the smoldering ground, James Weldon Johnson might have heard the echoing of the voice. The voice would have been Ell Persons’ voice whispering out of the burning cords of his own flesh, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
*
Shortly before the lynching of Ell Persons, James Weldon Johnson had written “Brothers—American Drama,” one of his most haunting poems. Written in a Shakespearean iambic pentameter, it is a dramatic reenactment of a scene where a mob interrogates a man before burning him alive. The mob’s monologues are an ominous allusion to the choruses of ancient Greek tragedy, except that in this case their voice unknowingly betrays their own guilt, their own words pronouncing judgment upon themselves. In the midst of the judicial miscarriage, the victim speaks these words, embedded within one of his monologues:
The line echoes the Tetragrammaton, the ancient Hebrew name of God — I A M W H O I A M — Moses before the burning bush, numinous breath animating fire. The line animates its speaker’s imago dei—his face in the reflection of the face of God—in defiance of the mob’s inhumanity. But even to call it “inhumanity” does not seem adequate. Hatred, brutality, violence, atrocity: each word falls silent at the sight of flayed limbs hanging from a tree drenched with gasoline, slow death meant to inflict utmost pain upon a body and a soul.
Fifteen years later, on page 317 of his autobiography, James Weldon Johnson would write a paragraph describing the lynching of Ell Persons with an elegiac and terrifying mix of past and present tense.
When I first read the words lying in bed at the verge of sleep, I had to stop reading, wide awake along the edge of midnight. I would not pick up the book again for days. You could say I was brought to the end of reading—its terminus, its telos—the point at which I could only resume my interaction with words by writing some of my own.
In other words, the words you read now.
*
Of writing, the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin once wrote:
For James Weldon Johnson, the moment was reading the news reports of the lynching of Ell Persons, reading the remains of newsprint smoldering with human ash on the cleared ground beyond Macon Road. For me, the moment was reading what Johnson wrote of what he read 83 years after he wrote it, the image still burned in my eye of a teenager’s body facedown for four hours under an unrelenting sun on a street eight miles from where I lived, the next big city up the muddy river from Memphis, the ribbon of blood running downhill, veining the asphalt.
All these years later, Black body and white soul are still so painfully intertwined.
It is not lost on me now how the man’s name—Ell Persons—contains within it the magic convergence of language. In the biblical Hebrew, el is one of the names ascribed to God, the divine mystery. And in modern English, person is the name we ascribe to our individual human being, the mystery of ourselves, body woven with soul. Unbeknownst to them, what the mob saw in the fire is a reflection of the burning face of God in human flesh. It sees it by not seeing it.
Alluding to the Hebrew prophet Isaiah, the Gospel according to Matthew will write of the birth of the Christ child:
Emmanuel. Ell Persons. (Which being interpreted is, God with us.) A mirror of the burning face of God in human flesh.
Or perhaps what the mob saw in the shimmers of heat radiating the air from the blaze were their self-made idols mirrored back at them, refracted in their own contorted faces, all the idols, each one manufactured by its bigotry feeding upon itself.
In the next chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew, the bloated, bronze-crowned king Herod, for the sake of his own narcissism mixed with paranoia, will massacre every child under two in the town of Bethlehem. But by then, the child will have escaped to Egypt, to return after Herod dies to a town called Nazareth.
Thirty years later, Herod’s son, now king, will unknowingly help finish his father’s business, one more flayed body strung up on a beam of wood, another mother weeping for her lost son.
*
One summer when I was in high school, the 1990s, I accompanied my father on an overnight business trip to Memphis. It was around the same time that I, a naïve suburban white kid, had discovered the Blues, the concealed splendor of the roots of the music that was beginning to define my youth. While my classmates were headbanging to Guns N’ Roses, I was reading the liner notes to the cassette box set of The Complete Recordings of Robert Johnson. I had been drawn irresistibly to the guitar-driven riffs that inspired rock n roll, but I was also smitten with the folk mythology of it. Everything happened at the crossroads, where it was alleged that Robert Johnson made a deal with the devil to play the guitar like nobody before or since.
Everything happens on U.S. Highway 61, the river road from New Orleans through Memphis to St. Louis to end in St. Paul, Minnesota. The mythology runs so deep that the Minnesota-born Robert Allen Zimmerman, after renaming himself Bob Dylan, would hear the burning voice of God bidding Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac on its sacred pavement.
Where do you want this killin’ done? Out on Highway 61.
I had begun to admire my mother’s cousin Steve, who had been playing harmonica in Blues bands for years. When I told him I wanted to learn to play, he made me a mixtape of Little Walter sides.
Initially playing for the Chicago Blues legend Muddy Waters, Little Walter revolutionized Blues harp playing by cupping his hands around a microphone pressed up against his harmonica, then plugging it into an amplifier like you would a guitar. Long before Jimi Hendrix, Little Walter discovered distortion, playing riffs and solos the way John Coltrane played jazz on the saxophone.
First lesson: Muddy Waters’ classic stop-time, five-note riff: ba–de–da–DEE–duh.
After a couple months, I had the riff down cold. The trick to playing the Blues on harmonica is to learn to bend the notes. It is easier on the inhale than the exhale. You pucker your lips a little tighter and draw the air down with your tongue into your lower jaw. When you get the flow right, the reed bends to a sound between the notes on the scale, allowing you to slide the riff to make it swing: ba–de–da–DEEahh–duh.
But now I’m a man I’m way past twenty-one
Muddy Waters sung his standard “Mannish Boy” in answer to Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man,” which was itself an answer to Waters’ “Hootchie Cootchie Man.” Each song was built upon the same five-note riff. Each song pronounced a statement of potent personhood (I am—just what I am…) in the face of an idolatry that would otherwise annihilate their humanity with gasoline and fire.
I’m a man I’m a rollin’ stone
I went to Memphis with my dad in search of what became of the Blues. I had little interest in Graceland, which we didn’t have time for anyway. I wanted to go to Beale Street. By the 1990s, Beale Street had been capitalized. It was a tourist attraction. That night we ate dinner at B.B. King’s Blues Club with the giant neon sign, and I hoped to see the man himself, B.B. King, the last living legend of the Blues. I hoped in vain.
We walked the whole strip, my dad and me, a strip that would be made more famous a year later when Tom Cruise did backflips down the sidewalk in the movie adaptation of John Grisham’s novel The Firm. I bought a black t-shirt with a full-length silkscreen of Little Walter playing his amped-up harp. I still have it, the image faded, buried somewhere in my closet.
Had I known then what I know now, I might have searched the sidewalk for a trace of Ell Persons’ blood, any thin ribbon faded to maroon. But it was night, and all I remember were the street musicians playing their instruments, their upturned fedoras on the dusky concrete filled with dollar bills.
I guess this is how mythology intertwines with the facts, burns the edges of our own personal histories. My parents grew up in two little towns in southeastern Missouri, five miles off Highway 61. They drove its blacktop a thousand times after they migrated to Saint Louis, before President Jimmy Carter finished Interstate 55. Fifty years earlier, thousands of daughters and sons of former slaves drove the same highway north to find better work and escape Jim Crow. A few of them played the Delta Blues in juke joints along the way until Muddy Waters got to Chicago and plugged in his guitar. Elvis Presley would spin the record on his turntable and everything would change.
When I graduated high school, my mother’s cousin gave me an amplifier like Little Walter’s, but I gradually gave up the harmonica during college. My sophomore year, when my grandfather—his uncle—died, we tried to play “Amazing Grace” together at the graveside. But I lost the melody a few bars in, and he had to carry the tune the rest of the way. A few months after New York City’s Twin Towers collapsed, at the reception after Jenny and I were married, my mother’s cousin plugged in his harmonica and played Al Green’s “Love and Happiness” with so much Memphis soul we danced the delirious night away.
It would take another thirteen years to know now what we didn’t know then, the ribbon of a teenager’s blood veining an asphalt street in a suburb called Ferguson, not far from Highway 61.
Travis Scholl’s essays and poems have recently appeared in Fourth Genre, Essay Daily, After the Art, and Saint Katherine Review. He holds a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri, Columbia, an MDiv from Yale Divinity School, and lives, works, and teaches in St. Louis. This is the title essay from his current work-in-progress. For more, visit travisscholl.com.
I got indicted by the feds, you write to me in an Instagram message. You tell me you’re hoping for house arrest, but you’ll probably have to do some time.
It’s been a long time since I’ve talked to you, even longer since I’ve seen you. I think back to the December night two years ago when you sent me an Uber to your apartment by the river and we sat together on your living room floor, our faces illuminated by the glowing red light of your snake’s cage. Your wall was one big window, and outside the downtown skyline lights gleamed across the water. My eyes followed you as you got up and walked to your kitchen, plucked a stiff, white mouse from where it was thawing on the counter, and dangled it by its tail over the glass edge while Ghost, your snake, pretended not to see it. You told me he hadn’t been eating much lately and you weren’t sure why.
Time passed in silence while we waited to see if Ghost would make a move. When he finally did, it was in one fell swoop, shooting upward and unhinging his jaw, snatching and swallowing the dead thing whole. We watched the mouse’s body pass through his body. Afterwards, we made out on your couch, your long hair smelling of tea tree oil, the TV droning on in the background. You led me to your bedroom, peeled off my shirt, my leggings, my underwear, our bodies pressing into each other. You tossed and turned all night and in the morning, you called me an Uber. A few months later, I got sick and didn’t get better.
We’d met each other a couple years before, when the world had just shut down and I wanted drugs. You handed me a pack of edibles in a parking lot and told me we should hang out sometime, flashing a smile that could turn anyone’s day around. Those weeks were filled with listlessness and uncertainty, in the world, of course, but in my own life too. I’d just ended a tumultuous, years-long relationship with a man I’d been living with and moved back in with my parents. You, too, had just gone through a breakup. We started texting often, talking on the phone late at night. At the time you were working as a counselor in a group home for men; on the side you modeled, on the side-side you sold drugs. You told me about all of it. You were charming, handsome, a little aloof in the way that a person who has something that everyone wants could afford to be.
Social distancing was the phrase in everyone’s mind that spring, the CDC told us that close contact was a risk, the news reports showed us bodies piling up in trucks outside of hospitals. We met up anyway, at the eerily empty campus of the women’s college down the street from me, on one of the first perfect-weather days of the year. Sitting on a bench outside the chapel, you told me about the trip you took to Dubai the summer before to be an extra in a film, the insufficient safety protocols at your job, the story behind the face you have tattooed on your arm. You had this light, this warmth. During a time when nothing felt good, basking in the glow of it felt good.
A week later I invited you to the house where I was housesitting, it belonged to a friend of my parents, and we sat on her backyard deck until the early hours of the morning. Eventually you said you should probably get going and lingered in the kitchen until I pulled you into me and kissed you, pressed up against Nancy’s granite island. It felt dangerous, when anyone could be harboring this virus, a plague with so many unknowns—why did some people die on ventilators while others just got the sniffles?—to abandon caution for the thrill of intimacy, the forbidden fruit. It felt inevitable.
We drifted in and out of each other’s orbit over the next couple of years, seeing each other sporadically, always after midnight, once you’d finished your runs. I’d buzz you up to my apartment on Selby Avenue, above the florist shop, the first place I lived alone, the one with the French doors. I’d pour you a glass of red wine while you told me about your life in the fast lane: the dealings on the dark web, the trips to Mexico for Xanax, the run-ins with the cops. You did a stint in rehab and a night or two in county. Once, you didn’t text me back for a week and I thought maybe you were dead but it turned out you’d done peyote outside Zion and gotten lost in the desert. Or so you said.
We’d talk, too, about the woman who’d broken your heart and the man who’d broken mine, about your sister’s psychotic break and how she kept dropping out of treatment. “I don’t think I’ll ever get her back man,” you told me. A few times I asked you if you ever thought about walking away from it all, doing something else instead. By then you’d lost your group home job and were feeling a little unmoored. You’d never finished college. You said it was the money that kept you in it, that there was just no way to touch that kind of money legally, unless you became a surgeon or something. I think you liked the danger too. You had a tarantula tattooed on your hand and eventually you’d run it across my thigh, whisper into my ear that you’d missed me, our bodies taking over. And in the morning, you’d slip me something you’d saved out for me, a few benzos or a baggy of weed, kissing me quickly on your way out the door.
In the weeks after I receive your message, I think about calling you. I’m not sure what I’ll say. You know about my illness, vaguely, but you don’t know the extent of it.
I think about calling you and in the meantime I text my closest friends. Do you want to hear something crazy? Remember that one guy? The drug dealer?
I call you on a Wednesday night, after my support group meeting. You’re waiting on a DoorDash order from the pet store; I’m lying on my back in my childhood bedroom–the same room where I’d first fallen for you years ago–eyes fixated on the ceiling fan. We ease back into the smooth rapport that we once had, but we don’t have to say what we both know: we’ll never be those people again.
“So what happened?” I finally ask.
You give me the rundown. It was raining, the DEA agent approached you in the lobby of your downtown apartment building. You were heading to work. You were wearing these ridiculous rain boots—you’re laughing as you tell me this part—and he told you to change out of them because they were going to have to cuff you at the ankles. You asked if you could have a smoke. He told you to hurry up. Someone had snitched, a kid you’d met on some shady forum, years ago. You hadn’t seen it coming.
You tell me that you spent two months in a federal holding facility, how the filth in that place nearly killed you. “You know how I am about cleanliness,” you laugh. You tell me that you got out on a recognizance bond, you’re sober now, that your lawyer is also your sponsor. You tell me that your sister just had a baby; she’s clean now too. You’re living court date to court date, the long judicial process dragging out, but you tell me the judge could give you life if he wanted to. “I don’t think he will, I’m a first time offender, I have a good lawyer,” you say. “But he could.”
And then you ask me how I’ve been and I tell you what I hadn’t seen coming either, that while you were being detained last summer, up in Sandstone, I was being wheeled through the bowels of a hospital on a gurney, stickers dotting my chest, wires jutting out from them. I was listening to a doctor tell me that what I had was incredibly rare. I was searching the name of the disease, seeing the survival statistics, hyperventilating. I could die from this. Pulmonary hypertension was a lot of people’s biggest fear, their nightmare WebMD search, their frantic Reddit spiral. But it hadn’t even been on my radar.
I tell you how just recently I’d had another procedure to track the progression of the disease, to see if the medications were working. The only way to do this is through an invasive catheterization: on the operating table, the doctor inserts a flexible tube through a vein in my neck, then pushes it through into my heart where it measures pulmonary pressures. I tell you that I had to be awake for it, no sedation, and how the pre-op nurse told me it would feel like a butterfly but it felt more like a snake. The meds were working, but not well enough. I’d need to add yet another one and repeat the procedure in six months.
Damn, you keep repeating as I tell you all this. Damn Rachel.
Neither of us says anything for a while. I change the subject. I ask you if you’ve been reading anything lately.
“Okay don’t laugh at me but,” you say, “I’ve been reading the Bible.”
Instead of laughing I admit that I too have been “kinda getting into God.”
I’d grown up Catholic, a childhood steeped in tradition. First Communion, first confession, admitting my sins to a priest behind a screen, that little voice shaking in a plaid pleated jumper. Rosary beads, stained glass gleaming, stations of the cross every Friday of Lent. I memorized the books of the Bible and recited them out loud in Mrs. Sullivan’s 5th grade religion class, standing on a ladder in the corner of the room: Matthew Mark Luke John Acts Romans Corinthians Corinthians. Our Fathers, Hail Marys, Memorares, I can still recite them all. The guilt stayed with me too, the fear of eternal damnation. But I never felt close to God.
As an adult I wasn’t sure what I believed. Mostly I didn’t think about it because I didn’t need to think about it. The remnants of my strict education had left a bad taste in my mouth and I hadn’t set foot in a church in years. If pressed, I would say I was agnostic, that I wasn’t really sure if God was real. There’s something though, about a turn-your-world-upside-down life event, the unrelenting helplessness, that makes you start asking the big questions again. You know this, I know this. For all my critiques of organized religion, I’ve always admired the way believers have something figured out about how to weather a storm, that innate sense of trust that it’s part of a plan, that everything could be endured as long as you believed that something greater was waiting on the other side.
During my sickest months, and for a long time after, I prayed every night, even though I still had my doubts. I prayed that I would wake up the next morning and when I did I would say a prayer of gratitude. I had a renewed understanding of the impulse, the need, steeped in desperation, but all the while I wasn’t sure if I was getting closer to God or just further from the life I used to have, with all of its illusory comforts and predictability.
A progressive illness is like a prison sentence in that it marks a loss of freedom, the death of a future. Any illusion we had of being in control of our fate was gone now. Here we are, you and I, at the edge of an abyss, reaching for a hand to hold us, a reassurance that everything is going to somehow work out, that it’s all a part of a grander scheme. Because if we don’t, then what is there? Is wanting desperately to believe as good as believing?
I want to ask you if you think we’re being punished, if we need to repent, but I don’t. The topic has changed again and soon we’re saying goodbye, hanging up and returning to the private universes of our own overwhelming problems.
A month goes by and you text me from outside a federal courthouse somewhere in the middle of Illinois. Going in in 30 minutes. Little nervous!
Praying for you, I reply. I don’t hear from you again for a long time.
When I talk to God, he doesn’t answer back.
Rachel Dorn is a writer living in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her work has appeared in various publications and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is currently working on a memoir and a novel.
Here are my memories. Please mirror me back. Give me images. I can only see the black. Give me images. Anything. Tell me what I look like. Tell me who I am. Images. Characters. People. Anyone with a face.
I am faceless. I want to know my face. Help me see my face.
Let me show you my image of happiness:
Verse
I am free to just desire because I now know The One. I will no longer listen to measly mortals… I am praying that my God hears my prayers because I just want him to desire me as badly… I want him to see how desperately […] / All my love for him […] love letters […] English […] French… I hope he answers… my prayers.
I want a new motherland.
Refrain
I want him to pay […] d’être [sa femme]… I want to be his most […] dangerous […] / I want us […] like animals… I want him to […] with precarious […] / I want to be the one he […] Jesus Christ! Protégée […] Who / I want / Tell me […] dreams […] so I can sleep, finally… He won’t understand […] my desperate […] […] […] to be the point—
Chorus
I want to burn the world […] filthy mortals […] / Because not understanding […] pleasure / Please, dream […] filthy animal… Release […] cage… / Want […] / Pick […] / Choose […] Pray […] Pay for me…
Verse
Tell me his most desperate […] bedtime story… I […] no longer […] venue… I’m just […] / mon Dieu, protégé-moi… de Toi / […] My most desperate bedtime story… Forgive me for I have sinned… Je brûle pour […] mon Dieu qui est aussi […] / Protége-moi, mon Dieu… animale / Dis-moi comment tu me brûle […] comme […] Dis-moi… j’ai besoin… mon enfin…
Chorus
Dis-moi je suis […] Arrêtez pas… Dis-moi […] les fantasmes du prolétariat […] Leurs rêves […] Les rêves sur […] des reines et rois d’insurrection qui veulent venir qui est vient […] Dis-moi […] Dormir en sucre…
Bridge
I am free to just desire because I now know The One
Refrain
I only pray to one God / Please, let me get what I want:
Bridge
Hello, these are my memories. Mirror me back to me. I want to see myself. But please, don’t […] Just give me images of happiness. Just […] Me […] me.
Verse
My fatherland is Northern Mindanao.
Chorus
I will […] continue… searching […] motherland I do not need [a history] I already am […] myself.
Outro
Ni toit. Ni toi. Ni loi. Ni loin.
i Et puis, une voix de l’avenir : I’m leaving you […] melancholy […] but in the depths of my heart / I’m happy.
Jessa C. Suganob is a translingual practitioner working with diagrams, languages, and ephemera. She transliterates English, French, Filipino, Binisaya, and Hiligaynon-Kinaray-a in her works. Her current preoccupation with critical folklores is a part of her project “Kanto Philosophy,” which insists on the crucial and ethical value of bearing witness to trauma through syncretic and xenosynthetic frameworks for the marginalized and the ghosts of the dead. Her works are accessible at Kritika Kultura, OF ZOOS, TLDTD, LUMIN Journal, and elsewhere. She is currently based in Northern Mindanao, Philippines.
On a headline beginning “RFK Jr. bombarded Bill Nye with autism texts”
One, I’ve also tried and failed to express something deeply internal. Two, I’ve heard what Bill said about you, but about myself: “And he started again, so I cut him off.” And three, I am also overtaken by flights of fantasy when I hear the word mercury. Planetary alignments, strange coincidences. I do love a multi-meaning word, a mercurial word. In conspiracy, for example, it represents death, impurity, the little silver theodicy of evil in the vaccine. And in astrology, it is an immutable personality. I don’t care for that, but perhaps you appreciate it more than I do.
But in alchemy, the study of everything being the same and the futile quest to show it to the world? I am transfixed by the word mercury just like you. How the tender slivers slink up my nervous system like bugs: This substance contains mercury. It has life-altering transformative power.
and that is three similarities between us, as kindly as I can put them. I am not looking for feedback regarding empathy at this time.
Hy Libre is a poetess, game designer, and trans gal born in Tucson. She’s currently working on a thesis on the poetics of distortion, and she’s interested in rhetoric, logic, sound, play, time, and the failure of empathy. Find her at lightsforcats.com.
i. pre-diagnosis, or, before and ii. post-diagnosis, or, (after)
i. pre-diagnosis, or, before
the panic attacks and overflowing just-in-case bag the driving home on the way to dinner dates because i’m curling up inside every meal you made that i couldn’t eat they all told me: you’re a burden you’re too much you leave exhaustion in your wake even your tears fall in selfish punches. so i did the things. i went to the sessions. billed our insurance. kept a journal. i told myself it was a matter of rewiring and replacing, tinkering bits of machinery into the correct gear, and you know what? i did it, mostly. i poured my cloudbursts into charts and endured a seat at the dinner party and bought flowers from the grocery store like i could invent my own omens. i put sunflower stems in a vase and thought: i can turn towards the sun again. i can make use of its warmth. but then (and didn’t i always tell myself there would be a but, a however, a contradiction) here is the proof i didn’t fix myself fast enough. here is the exhaustion, the sunken spots, the brokenness that bears my signature. here is how hard i tried and here is how it wasn’t enough. a waste. all this time. every therapy session and breathing exercise and slow release capsule only got me closer to the real lie, set free from beneath the paperweight: i am a burden and you are not free of me. an unrequited impasse. i tried building a home and ended up with tombs of empty cocoons. i cannot tell you how many times i’ve hatched.
ii. post-diagnosis, or, (after)
so: it turns out sunflowers don’t move to follow the sun. not all caterpillars turn into butterflies. classic case of correlation and causation– if x and y increase simultaneously, sometimes it’s just because your brain has more red wires to defuse and apparently that’s okay. there’s a name for it, even, six entire letters and a real, honest-to-god dsm-5 entry printed in permanent ink. i never thought i’d be able to study myself in a manual. point to a diagram and say look, this part was never really broken. there’s no cure, and the news saves me because it means i wasn’t greedy with blood or sweat or tears. i was trying to buy out my burden with a false currency, thought i could trade trying for a smaller footprint. here, finally (after a childhood of waiting rooms, a thirty year trail of bitten thumbs and clipboards and prescription slips) is a truth that fits. i say no to loud restaurants and don’t swallow xanax to fall asleep. i ask if we can leave the party early and it’s a reasonable request. i eat the same meal five days a week and i’m a fucking nutrition champion, picking at plain pancakes and one spoonful of peanut butter because i’m allowed to name my own nectar. now, bending the rules isn’t cheating. joy doesn’t depend on change. did you know you can have an exoskeleton and wings at the same time? did you know there are even more things you are allowed to be?
Alexis Deese-Smith (she/her) is an emerging writer interested in navigating neurodivergence by building and bending spaces in which her autistic self might feel at home. Originally from sunny South Carolina, she now lives in Canterbury, England, where she enjoys a gluttonous amount of cream teas. She was a runner-up for The Classical Association’s inaugural poetry competition and has been listed as an Honorable Mention by Plentitude’s Prizes in Nonfiction, shortlisted for The Poetry Society Free Verse competition, and named a finalist in Frontier’s Misfits Poetry Prize. Find her on Instagram at @alexisdspoetry.
This is What I Know of Filth is a response to Oklahoma Senator Tom Woods’ response to a constituent asking what would be done about the bullying that led to Nex Benedict’s death: “I represent a constituency that doesn’t want that filth in Oklahoma.” The poem is to be printed double-sided and flipped vertically, or held up to a mirror, to read the endnote.
Merrick Sloane is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma who’s a fan of expletives and second languages. They hold an MFA in poetry from University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Merrick’s work has appeared in The Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, BLEACH!, citizen trans* {project}, and is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol and Arcana Poetry Press’s Roots & Ruin anthology. In 2025, Merrick’s poetry was selected as a winner of the Garden Party Collective’s Neurodivergent / Intersectional contest and the AWP Intro Journal Awards. Merrick writes so that others may feel radically loved.
there’s little ease in a life of library lunches, wall-sitting, everything full volume ear-lancing cacophony, but there is infinite literary possibility in experiencing this vividly, dedicating ourselves so thoroughly, silently people-watching, microscopic magnified, personified everything. I don’t know how to pen Hallmark poems, I don’t gaze into eyes enough to describe them, but I notice the places skin pulls taut, slacks wrinkle; I see someone playing with a tag hanging at their waist or a smile on their face, trying to place the emotion behind it; I commit bitten stout nails and clavicle constellations to memory. we are not just writing poetry, but living it embodied for any who care to hear echolalia humming like a fridge, echolalia collaborations flickering lens echolalia the truest communication echolalia of motion, of routine, of ideas, of being seen. even overload, the fire blanket, the airbag, is like my poems: saying what I cannot, what I may not even understand, pure adrenaline tearing then settling into rare silence, pleasant emptiness. do not let their limited creativity paint ours as anything, but inextricable, boundless.
Maxwell O’Toole compulsively creates. An emerging disabled and trans writer, he is particularly inspired by his activist work, using art to connect with himself, others, and our world. He has pieces published/forthcoming with UNESCO Chair, Chartium, The Muse Zine, Freefall Magazine, Vellichor Literary, and Poets.ca. Maxwell lives with his partner and their cats in St. Catharines, Ontario, traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples. For more information, visit @maxwellwriteswell on Instagram or sites.google.com/view/maxwellwriteswell.
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