I wonder what I’ll say When she asks me one day. Was he handsome? Were you in love? Was it Daddy? It’s no, no, no, and I’ll never know the wanting glow of a first bow who agrees to go slow with the parts of me I had yet to grow. Maybe I’ll tell her…
Author: ourcityheart
I’m All Flat Fists & Little Toes
reflection from a weekly workshop I am participating in where we are doing a lot of self exploration and working together to individually and collectively come out from behind our masks. She said honor your feet. We all breathed in one deep, collective breath standing side by side and dreaming midday of a single strand…
Side Effects
So far it’s been mostly nausea, fatigue, headache, and loss of appetite (thank god!). But there has also been a bit of intense irritability, the kind that rips you out of the small amount of sleep you managed to slip into and trips you into arms folded across your tight and pounding chest, throat sore…
In his eyes, he’s still at war
His shoes are dusted over with years of street living. His hands are cracked from white-knuckled unforgiving. This old soldier never came home. He sucks the air out of his lungs by the minute He piles trauma and dog shit on the floor and sits in it This old soldier never came home. He holds…
Season of Faith
For 40 days and 40 nights, we wash away our sins. We give up all the things we love, and hope that He’ll forgive When we drink or when we think He might not even exist. And when we bruise our knees each night, we rattle off our list Of all the good we’ve done…
Silent Miscarriage
A used-to-be-bright-yellow kite climbed inside the branches of my backyard tree, clung like a child to its mother, and waited for me to see. It waited and watched while I waited and wondered why my eyelids were suddenly so heavy and my pants getting harder to pull up over my belly and, if this were…
Last year broke my heart. Over and over and over again.
Happy days were even harder to find in the second year of the pandemic than they were in the first. What is the word for getting knocked back down the second you find the strength to get up? That was 2021. It was the first full calendar year without my grandmother, my Baa. She was…
6 Weeks & 1 Day
LA Rams onesie, collecting dust, tags still on, your new logo sucks.
Readying Joy
The room — cold enough to pull up the hair on a pair of thin, freckled arms — fills slowly. The television — on the wall facing an audience of side-by-side mothers — jokes loudly. The eyes — wet with the secret of the hour and lashed with shame — open rarely. A woman in…
Grown Ass Woman
I am a big girl When they laughed me out of our childhood clubhouse because “no girls allowed,” I felt my girl rain down the sides of my face while they watched my open-tooth smile fall out of place and erased every trace of me from our secret play space. I tried and tried to…
Moth-Eaten Sweater 