The word afraid was nothing to me. I was afraid of plenty of things. Clowns, birds, riding in cars sometimes, the shadowy figures of people on the periphery of my vision. I was afraid most of the time. It sat with me and on me, it was a constant companion for a lonely only child. I liked afraid, afraid felt familiar.
I didn’t know fear, real fear until it reached out…
My twelve-year-old self danced in the woods behind my creepy neighbors house, in long pastel dresses that I would find in cardboard boxes at garage sales. I would gather my supplies of love notes written on white college ruled paper, stolen coffee grounds from my mother’s morning fuel and a lighter… you always need a lighter. I also always brought my mom’s old paper prayer books. They reminded me of the Riot Grrrl zines, the way they had stories of archangels and women who were burned at the stake for their ideas, their beliefs, their dreams. I would trace my finger over the pencil drawings of saintly women and wonder what they had wished for, because my spells were just fancy wishes. They always had the same two themes–boys and wishing for my mom’s happiness.
One spell would be a love potion for the boy next door, sticky red and full of sweet smelling perfume, bubbles popping on the surface like kisses. The other one was a feeling, an almost desperate plea to end the curse of sadness that landed on my mother and buried itself into her hair. I used fortune cookies for my happy spells. They seemed to hold such drama in the black words scrolled across small, white tabs of paper, with lucky numbers and symbols. Sometimes I would eat them and swallow my magic like a pill, letting it soak in and travel through me hoping that the next time I touched my mother I would infect her with my fortune.
•
My seventeen-year-old self still did the witch dances, just more secretly. The woods were darker, the spells filled with more lust and insecurity than before were still being said. My witch wishes for my mom felt more hopeless. I started to think she was a witch too. How else could she repel my spell for so many years? Her darkness was deep, and isolating. Her brewing storm was a war against what was real and what was only in her head. I burned sage on altars of dead tree logs and held hands with other girls in pastel hues whose parents had lost their powers. When no one notices that you carry prayer books full of scrap paper and harvest people’s hearts for blind love you can hide in plain sight. No one knew I had secret powers that were tucked inside my pockets, filled with dead flowers and garlic.
My hiding places were hang outs–the simplicity of having friends that believed in the same craft. We braided each other’s snarly hair and whispered of romances we had not felt yet. They made me feel alive. Alive with a twirling of my stomach when I tried to do a handstand without one of them holding my legs, alive with the promise of lips actually feeling love, not just speaking of it. We practiced the art of never feeling alone. Loneliness was my enemy, I had seen it wreck havoc on my mom. I could not and would not allow loneliness to steal my soul. I only felt powerful when I was around the other girls–I fed off them; I loved them; they were my icons, my sisters, my true coven. My own cure for breaking the cycle that I was now fighting against. My physical saints, with real hearts and good grips.
•
My twenty-three-year-old self lost track of my childhood spells, misplaced my paperback books, and was trapped in the real world. My relationship with the most important woman in my life was so fragile that if I breathed too hard, too close to it, it could unravel in a million, trillion, tiny specks spread across our past lives. Mental illness is a spell itself. It’s sneaky and smart; it gathers your pieces and mixes them with dust; it confuses you and misplaces everyone around it. I forgot my mission to wish away her sadness and moved away from what scared me. She scared me. I wanted to understand her, I wanted to help her, I wanted my love to save her, but it didn’t and it wouldn’t no matter how many goddesses held my hand and recited words that were born from cookies. She was my connector to the feminine, the rope holding my spirit; she was casting secrets to the same woods, with the same creepy neighbors. I had to learn that she and I had different struggles: as I was trying to fit in, she was trying to tune out. Our genes had split…she went one way and I went another.
•
My thirty-one-year-old self found my old pastel pink dress. Everything was still there, smeared on top of tulle. Old dirt, grass stains, ash–it smelled like coffee and when I closed my eyes, I saw my mother. I saw my saint-girls, and my circles of rituals. Magical powers swirled around my eyes. I missed her, I missed them all. My curse to entice happiness had exploded in my hands. I watched her grow older, not happier. Depression seduced her like a child lured into a car with promises of candy. I was tempted to forget my witch that lived inside, but it was my animal guide, it was a part of me, it’s the only part that danced. My paranormal double life made me question if I was doing enough to help her; what else could I do, when I had tried it all. I had outgrown the dresses–I would need new ones if I was going to wake up the witch. I was going to need supplies and the woods and a lighter…can’t forget the lighter. I was going to have to startle her awake so she would pop up quickly and not have time to reflect or second guess. I was worried she might never wake up…what if she never woke up? I had to try, I had to try one last time to see if it might work with older and blacker magic. But the most important thing I needed to do was find what each girl had given me in the past and track those traits down in myself. I had been away for so long, would they remember me? I would track them down one by one, asking each trait to help me. They came, like true blood, never missing a beat, pumping life into the trees like rain. I was back to being superhuman, back to drawing circles in the dark and lighting candles for the living to talk to the dead.
I needed my mother, but she wasn’t there. I think she wanted to be but emotionally and mentally could not be. I saw her as Joan of Arc, having visions of archangel Micheal instructing her to support Charles VII and recover France from England’s domination late in the Hundred Years’ War. My mother saw visions, heard voices, felt panic. She was trying so hard to fight, but in the end it was too hard. Her sorcery was poison, mine was freedom. Magic can come in many forms, many feelings, many shapes. I loved her and my love would be my spell, the only one that can survive this. I would hold on tight, close my eyes and sage the shit out of my bedroom, chanting for the right words to fill my mouth so I could finally get her to see that I love her. I have always loved her. A witch’s love never dies–it swirls. It lingers in a bright cloud above our heads, feeding us at the right time.
Just because my charms did not work didn’t mean they were broken. I wasn’t a kid who only wished for love at first sight and sweet kisses, I had darker spirits to chase out of my family. In the end I knew I didn’t need the physical charms, or the pastel rainbows…I had to embrace what my spells could not make disappear. I had to give my mother room to live, in whatever world that was. As an adult I still needed cosmic spirits, I still needed caldrons of hot love brewing secretly in my basement. Only this time, the wishes were for hope–not a cure for sadness–but a small, glowing orb of hope, that mixed together with the steamy air like smoke in hopes that it would make its way to my mother’s breaths. In. Out. Releasing my connection to her, giving it to her again and again…never giving up. I never grew out of being a witch.
Maggie Edinger has a BA from Columbia College Chicago, where she majored in Art Entertainment, Media Management and minored in Woman’s Studies She published her first body of work last March called Bubble and the Invisible Ghosts, a journal. She has been published in the Remington Review and is currently working on her second book, a memoir. In 2010 she started Lipstick Dinosaur, which she owns and operates, a web based fashion brand that has been featured in Nylon magazine, Time Out Chicago, WGN News and many more. Maggie lives in Philadelphia with her husband, daughter and pit bull Bubble.
An undergraduate professor was explaining the word iconoclastic to the class. As an example, she used ______.
The professor, “______, would you stand up, please?”
______, “Seriously?”
The class, laughing.
The professor, “Yes.”
______—standing, fearing, waiting for all the blows, and more.
The professor, “Now, there’s a ______ who marches to the beat of ______ own drum.”
Praise?
Foreign.
Somehow drastically more terrifying.
___
In ______ fantasies, ______ are/am/is on stage. Fully-bloomed. Performing with exquisite execution. Receiving endless applause.
It wasn’t supposed to feel like this.
Desiring to die as an imposter.
Needing to live as a believer
Exodus Oktavia Brownlow is a Blackhawk, Mississippi native whose writing aesthetic includes purposeful horror, character-driven fiction, and nonfiction writing that aims to create a healthier world for us all. She is a graduate of Mississippi Valley State University with a B.A in English, and Mississippi University for Women with a MFA in Creative Writing. She is published with Electric-Literature, Barren Magazine, Valley Voices, Luna Luna Magazine, X-Ray-Literary Magazine, Jellyfish Review and more. Exodus has a healthy adoration for the color green.
Creative Non-Fiction by Billimarie Lubiano Robinson
Everything has its intricate beginning.
Everything except for birth.
When people ask me how many weeks I am, I tell them two answers:
“Eighteen from conception. The medical industry wants me to say twenty.”
We are trained to be unsure of our own conceptions, to leave it in the hands of an exterior industry. I fight back against this conditioning in small ways, like giving different dates of my last menstrual period when asked. I watch with a wry smile on my face as professionals plug lies into their machines, then read wrong answers back to me. As I take joy in rebelling in small and playful ways—like asking obnoxiously why a waiting room filled with pregnant women does not offer healthy snacks during our visits—I present to you the real beginning, a departure from the stale tale and a return to a truth that belongs to the body, the spirit, and the goddess we call earth.
You came to me like a vibrant wind along the shore.
It would be wrong to say I wasn’t expecting you, but right to say I was not entirely conscious of your season.
Of course there were signs.
There were signs in the early days: the call to visit spiraling cities by the sea, a remembrance of all things coral white and deep blue. Collecting sea shells like a song. The intricate gifts from rivers and trees.
I think you’re awake, now. I know this because it is 3AM: the time you take to fluttering. The time I take to weaving.
I know exactly when it was aligned and decided that you would come into fruition. The night of your conception, I felt the universe in the palms of my hands, like a vibrating room, like a clanging cymbal. It was as though my waking being had finally caught up with the others: you, the force moving through the earth and the sea like a wandering wind seeking shelter, and of course the anchors to myself and your father, who I chose for his indefatigable strength of action and will—all of us played by the mysterious hands of the original womb, our Earth, of whom we walk as the world.
You and you alone know the true meaning of travel: to move and be moved and in moving so worship the Earth. There is no time for stasis, for sitting, for feeding on resources according to programmed buttons on a screen. Your father, who had no cell phone or digital device, is someone I admire and aspire to be like: someone who can walk through a neighborhood, a city—an entire country—and feel at home. Everywhere we went, doors opened. When they didn’t, we talked: we asked around, we looked for other openings. All of my life has been in service to this movement. I believe it to be called Action: a freedom to roam. A freedom deeply rooted to one’s place of being.
Heritage is an unconscious gift we offer to our kin. You are African American—a survivor of torture, slavery, and an incurious jealousy which we call racism—you are Filipino—the offspring of warriors caught in a new kind of battlefield—and Cubano. I know what I know about my own places of origin—not just the city and country of my birth, but all the places I have moved through, and in turn have been moved by. It will be an honor to watch you unravel the brown and black stories of yours, all the metaphors and mysteries we extract from the decrepit tales assigned to us by others. We dig. We call it a beautiful struggle. We reclaim the terrible beauty in surviving and thriving in a world so woefully plagued by foreign gods.
Your flutterings have ceased. I think it is time for a snack. I want to leave you with this—the most vivid truth I can offer—
When you came to me, I saw light brown pebbles, clear running water—an eternal wall made of pure river. Since then, I’ve seen waves thirty stories high conquer entire forests. I’ve seen hurricanes made of seaweed, I’ve heard the world go silent and static as you approach. This is to say you are of the force that makes people tremble. This is a blessing. To own this and carve it as strength for your people—whoever you decide them to be—has been the task of my lifetime, and will a task within yours.
In closing, I offer you my beauty—the ever ascending thorny spiral—and the thick strength of a line, which belongs not to me, but to your father.
It is 3:37AM on October 1st. A Tuesday.
—and in these last words, I have just been whispered what your name is.
Billimarie Lubiano Robinson is a wandering artist and writer. From 2011 to 2015, she traveled around the U.S. with her pink 1950’s Royal typewriter and typed hundreds of poems for strangers on the spot. Well-versed in the art of reckless wandering, Billimarie has backpacked Hawaii, hitchhiked the West, lived in a Parisian bookstore, and survived a Swedish winter alone in the woods. Her work has appeared in the Eastern Iowa Review, the Newer York, the Northridge Review, as well as on her website, www.billimarie.com.
NOT SUCH A COOL YULE… A SEASONAL OFFERING REVISITED
NOT SUCH A COOL YULE… A SEASONAL OFFERING REVISITED
This piece was originally published at Vinyl Connection in 2014. It is re-posted because I still rather like it and hope others who have stumbled across the blog in the intervening years might enjoy it too. * The first half of 1977 was spent sitting in my room. It wasn’t locked; I just couldn’t find many reasons for leaving. Other than one friendly human being, companionship came in the form of…
Hundred Years Publishing is working with ‘The Resilience of Being’. An upcoming anthology looking for creative non-fiction submissions of people’s experiences with their body image.
he woke me in the middle of the night with kisses and gentleness, i know you’re really tired but you need to see the moon tonight. it might be the most beautiful i’ve ever seen.
he dressed sleepy me in a sweater and comfy pants, took my hand and led me out into the cool summer midnight. i yawned my way across the tree covered lawn and pebbled driveway to the clearing at the path that took us to…
i flung open all the doors and windows and let the wind rush through the house. our little home we’ve filled with us. i hear traffic, i hear the trees, i hear the sprinkler as water droplets land with gentle splatters on our concrete driveway. i feel the warmth. my skin is so slightly sun kissed, my hair salted and wild. i’m happy.
we’ve been swimming in the ocean morning and night, filling our…
we walked along [hand-in-hand] sinking ever so slightly into the spongey, dampened sand. the moon followed us as we walked with it in sight, watching waves steadily unfurl along the length of the beach. we spoke about life and how we truly want to live.
there’s something energetic about watching the moon over the ocean in the morning time. like maybe it’s quietly talking to the tide, telling it c…
steady we go, wrapped in love and comfort and warmth. it’s so nice, to be so deeply in love, living morning to night with blissful moments flooded in between.
it’s time for big things and changes and newness all in one. it’s time for more risks and giant leaps and days spent chasing the sun. it’s time to find ourselves in mother earth’s embrace. without a clock or a watch or time to set our pace.
it’s in the everydayness. the messy morning bed, the smells and sounds of coffee making, the creaks in the floorboards and doors. the sleepy goodmornings, the kisses goodbye, the waiting and waiting and waiting for days end when we walk back into our together everydayness again.
and then there are these special days, summery and seemingly unending. filled with swims in the ocean and walks in the…
i’ve been dreaming of far-away places. of travelling and exploring countries anew. i’ve been dreaming of adventure, of cities stuck in my subconscious just waiting to arrive at my real life.
my mind is taking me to dreamstates i forgot even existed. and with so much talk of meant-to-be and mother earth with her whispers of wind and sea and silence all at once, it’s hard to ignore.
clouds above me sea below me i catch my breath on the ebbing of the tide. love within me earth surrounds me the magic of this life settles deep within.
i don’t hear a thing but the beating of my heart, racing to slow.
i float a while, my mind clears. [it’s never quite a while enough. so i hold these beautiful moments so near.]
we walked along [hand-in-hand] sinking ever so slightly into the spongey, dampened sand. the moon followed us as we walked with it in sight, watching waves steadily unfurl along the length of the beach. we spoke about life and how we truly want to live.
steady we go, wrapped in love and comfort and warmth. it’s so nice, to be so deeply in love, living morning to night with blissful moments flooded in between.
it’s in the everydayness. the messy morning bed, the smells and sounds of coffee making, the creaks in the floorboards and doors. the sleepy goodmornings, the kisses goodbye, the waiting and waiting and waiting for days end when we walk back into our together everydayness again.
