Reflections
Terry a. O’Neal is an American writer and photographer. O’Neal was named one of the century’s great Black women writers in a book entitled Literary Divas: The Top 100+ Most Admired African-American Women Writers in Literature.
Before I wrote color essays for an arts magazine, I was curator of a gallery. Before I became a curator, I was moving 3000 miles across the United States. Before the 3000 miles, I was meditating six hours a day in the snow. Before the stillness and cold, I was a marriage counselor causing many a divorce. Truth telling breaks up static. Before the truth, I gave shiatsu massages where I had to do pushups with my thumbs to keep them strong. Before weak thumbs, I memorized Shakespeare while training my voice to project on stage without a mike by repeating daily manalathavaza and other voice exercises, using a bone prop propped between my lips to keep vowels open and consonants sharp. Before those three years, I modeled flannel nightgowns in NYC and waited on tables, and before that flunked junior year of high school but managed to fake my way to graduate on time. Before that I was stuck in the middle of three brothers in the middle of the United States. And then I was born. In between all this, I hitchhiked for two years through the Middle East.
Hitchhiking on trucks, sitting in smoke-drenched cafes with only men, following a stranger to a dark hallway in Aleppo to change money for a better exchange rate, riding through Damascus in a beat-up Fiat instructed to remain silent lest the government hear us while 16-year-old boys with machine guns guard the streets– it’s impossible to know what my boundaries are. How much to assert myself. How much to speak. It’s difficult to know what is cultural and how much is individual bias. I drink four tiny cups of Turkish coffee with a Bedouin family and it is one too many; tradition deeming three as hospitable and four you’ve outstayed your welcome. Being a woman I tend towards remaining quiet and later question whether I should have spoken up. Invited to dinner ends up sitting on the floor with eight men, eating with our fingers while a woman’s hand keeps passing plates of food through a curtain. One of the men says, while casting sidelong smirks my way, “Women change with the moon or rather the moon changes women and money changes the man.”
I write this on a table of weathered wood, the turquoise paint peeling into the knot beneath my notebook. My past settles behind me and the future is now. My heart expands and my forehead softens and the sea is turquoise beyond the blond sand. Through the open window the sun lies gentle on my face. I don’t want religion. I want to experiment with other realities, but not with drugs. It must be possible.
If society is narrow then I must be wider. The world is in me. I am the world. A colorful shawl, some warm tights, a pair of wool socks and I’m on my way. I move less as I move. It is a consideration of tasks.
Dian Parker’s essays have been published in 3:AM Magazine, The Rupture, Anomaly, Epiphany, Tiny Molecules, Channel, Event, Burningword Literary, Westerly, Critical Read, After the Art, among others, and nominated for several Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. Her art writing is with Art & Object, Fine Books & Collections, Art & Antiques, Art New England, London Observer, and others.
I write about my mother in beginnings. 1187 words. Then 1090, then 886, then 690. Finally, something I title, “Mom, Trying,” but it’s a blank page. A pretend surface for zero ideas. A bald-faced failure. Mine and hers.
Then not-made-up short fiction: a 1971 protagonist, sedated by Elavil and Valium. Her doctor calls her one of his unhappy housewives. She walks through her living room in the mid-afternoon, her gauzy nightgown brushing the carpet, the house empty. She picks up the local college newspaper from the coffee table and sees a headline: “Sexuality Conference Begins Next Week.” She reads the words women’s liberation for the first time.
Her legs fail her. She grabs the back of a frayed wingback chair and holds on. She does not fall. She reads the story again and again.
She leaves her husband, a drunken narcissist English professor.
But also her two children, who are none of these.
Here, I stop writing.
A few years later, my mother files for custody and wins, her debt a mountain, her regret an ocean below.
She now appears in essays I write: At 16, I make myself vomit as she pounds on the locked bathroom door. At 18, I withhold plans to drink and drink and drink as she waves goodbye from the front door. At 22, I sob in paranoia and panic as she drives me to a hospital.
At 25, I ache with morning sickness and shame as she asks no questions and, I am certain, wipes out her savings account when she mails the check inside a folded note. I’m so happy to help, she writes. I’m glad I can do this. Make sure you get enough sleep. Each line level across the page, her cursive steady.
As I revise this, she is dead at 83. She had dementia. All of her lifelong struggles gone, her final hours both terminal and restless, tremors of objection she could not control.
Mom, I said. I held my face in her line of vision as her knees shook beneath her sheet. Do you know who I am?
A storm of memory in her eyes.
Yeah, she said.
She would not have retained my thanks, I tell myself. She would have forgotten, immediately, who I am.
It’s your daughter, I could have said. Who you loved.
For the last two decades, Anna B. Moore has been publishing creative nonfiction, essays, and short fiction in a variety of literary journals and magazines, including The Missouri Review, The Offing, and Identity Theory. Two of her essays were nominated for Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net 2022; her first novel will be published by Unsolicited Press in 2024. She lives in Northern California—read more of her work at www.annabmoore.com.
Let’s begin with memory.
How do you usually find yourself
returning to your past…
thrust back by crisis,
needing overdue explanations
and ready to demand them?
Or slowly, a sadness
beginning to make itself
painfully evident?
Or swept away by emotion
like a swollen muddy river
on its righteous way
to take over a town?
Maybe you simply wake up
foggy after a midday nap
filled with the vague idea
someone didn’t tell you everything.
Though if you are lucky,
maybe you are be transported back
by the taste of syruped pancakes
or the smell of a box of old books,
so that you are transported
to familiar happy images
once vivid but now a bit clouded
by your mind’s cataracts,
giving you a soft sense
that all that has happened is a gift.
Anne McCrady is a poet, speaker, and peace advocate. In addition to her award-winning poetry collections Along Greathouse Road, Letting Myself In, and Under a Blameless Moon, and her original parable Kevin & the Seven Prayers, Anne’s writing appears internationally in literary journals and anthologies. Anne’s work has also been presented as short film, art song, libretto, and liturgy. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee. Anne also has editorial, review, fiction, and creative nonfiction publication credits and is an active poetry contest judge and workshop presenter. Anne lives in Tyler, Texas. Her website is www.InSpiritry.com.
This morning when I walk out to the pool
two mallard ducks, one green, one flocked in blue,
float quiet ripples, unfazed by yellow
buses’ loud brakes, vested city workers
unfolding plastic gates before they dig
up asphalt, drop sweat, cough words down below.
Watching blue duck submerge its head below,
how many headless seconds might green pool
duck spend in its head, abandoned, lone, dig
deep is overrated, I call, bounce blue,
then whisper my wisdom: Don’t let workers
interrupt your peace, your time in yellow–
streaks angling the pool’s surface, some yellow
lantana shrubs waving roots from below.
Maybe later, after sun and workers
set home, you can open our side gate, pool
our ringed fingers, guide me out in dusk blue
when ducks become airborne geese, a flocked dig
escorting sunset clouds when oranges dig
in, a film’s filter turning you yellow,
aglow, I wish I was Dorothy in blue
joining you in technicolor, below
a spotless sky, fluorescent bricks, green-pooled
lily pads inviting us over the bridge workers,
probably in sepia, raised, workers
parched from last night’s storm, if only to dig
us up here, tonight, colored like the pool
table you played pre-shift, the bar’s yellow
signs dilating eyes as we staired below
campus town street, flags waving mascot blue.
That old, loud window fan, framed by chipped blue
paint, we “bravo-ed” our install, proud workers
we sweat sleeping uncovered, smoke below
from downstairs neighbors rose muted yellow
through makeshift vents, as we let our toes dig,
then cross air, our pores, veins, freckled gene pool.
I read about blue worn by those who dig,
serve, ancient workers still lost in yellow
scene, no pool repose, no silked hands below.
Amy Lerman lives with her husband and very spoiled cats in the Arizona desert where she is residential English Faculty at Mesa Community College. Her chapbook, Orbital Debris (Choeofpleirn Press, 2022) won the 2022 Jonathan Holden Poetry Chapbook Contest, she has been a Pushcart nominee, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Box of Matches, The Madison Review, Midwest Review, Radar Poetry, Rattle, and other publications.
