Edited by Peter Kahn, Hanif Abdurraqib, Franny Choi, and Dan Sullivan
Diluted
By Savastiana Valle
A few weeks ago I forgot who my mother was.
Looked her in the eyes and told her she looked like someone I knew.
It was two in the morning.
I was texting the boyfriend I didn’t even know I had,
thought he was a kind stranger who texted me at the perfect time.
I told him I needed a walk,
said not to follow me or I’d call the cops on him.
I thought he was being too kind.
I had no idea what he was trying to save me from.
He came to my house anyways.
I didn’t even make it out of my front door when he found me
and I hugged him.
A combination of feeling like I needed to
and wanting to find some kind of comfort.
I forgot everyone that night
and he sat next to me,
as I was puffy-faced and hyperventilating.
Sipping Sleepytime tea in the back extension.
My memory is a bit diluted
and I am petrified for the day I forget I’m a writer.
I used to let poems clot in my IV.
Tried to find a metaphor in every MRI and CT scan.
Hoped that doctors read the poems I was writing in my head, too.
Tell them to let my brain dissolve in a jar full of similes.
I have lost all my muscles to this disease
and I still find soggy pieces of myself,
even on the good days.
The bad ones, too,
where I forget my mother’s face,
my home feels like sleepovers at a new friend’s house,
and my body becomes the lines of a poem I can’t memorize.
To my brain,
my body,
or any part of me that wants to listen,
don’t let me forget that I am a writer
because this is the only thing I have found salvageable
because maybe one day I will publish all these poems,
and some girl will read this sodden in her hospital bed
and for just one moment forget about all the life she had to miss,
sedated and monitored,
needles and stethoscopes,
and know that one day all the pieces will come back.
Someday I, too, won’t be scatterbrained and numb-legged.
I will be strong and present again,
know when a memory has been rented or gone missing.
Remember what health felt like
on my skin
and in my lungs
and in my teeth.
and know that life won’t always be this muggy and watered down.
I won’t always be swimming in someone else’s backwash.
Savastiana Valle OPRFHS class of 2017. One time LTAB member. Graduate—Illinois State University. Middle school art teacher.
“Excerpted from Respect The Mic: Celebrating 20 Years of Poetry From A Chicagoland High School. “Diluted” by Savastiana Valle; Copyright © 2022 by Savastiana Valle. Excerpted by permission of Penguin Workshop. All rights reserved.”
Mixed
By Vann Harris
When I dream about having a mixed
kid, I have nightmares about her father
raping me in a shed. White men are
the most savage. Built to take blood
from the anemic. I’m afraid of my
high-yellow child because she will think
I hate half of her. She will be fifty percent
conqueror and fifty percent captured slave
who is fifty percent claws and teeth. A middle
finger to bigots; a victory for bigots. Blue
Island made me dream about blond hair and
blue eyes, a white boy with politeness in his
teeth. Even mutual attraction to white men
feels predatory. The only one I ever talked to
had eyes that were catfish-fried-too-hard brown,
and when he tells me, “I’ve dated Black girls before,”
he was just trying to lure me into a lynch knot.
For my proverbial daughter’s father, I am
a mantelpiece. A feast. A storehouse for his seed.
My baby will be the sun in a jar of fog.
Murky chitterling water. The corners of crust
on peach cobbler. Every time she likes a boy,
I will recall the quaking of my thighs. The sneering
of my ancestors. I hope she never asks how we fell
in love. Her father will suggest she bring me in
for show and tell. A foolish ape with sperm constellating
the fur of the lower jaw. Who am I to ask my child if
her father is Columbus enough to turn her hunter?
He taught her to aim a gun in my womb, so I wonder
if she’ll be surprised when I’m not naked on the opposite
end of the scope. When I dream about having mixed kids,
I dream about murder too. About my baby’s father building
a kingdom of blood, straight from my indentured arteries.
Vann Harris OPRFHS class of 2016. Two-time LTAB member. College student—North Central College. Library assistant. Rapper.
“Excerpted from Respect The Mic: Celebrating 20 Years of Poetry From A Chicagoland High School. “Mixed” by Vann Harris; Copyright © 2022 by Vann Harris. Excerpted by permission of Penguin Workshop. All rights reserved.”
On the Bottom of a Swamp
By Noelle Aiisa Berry
What I remember most about 5th grade,
besides the reds and pinks of dresses worn at recitals.
The ones Mrs. McDaniels cooed over, begging me
to smile more,
or the boy I kissed, tasting sweet for the first time
before I could even prepare for how green eyes made
me erupt blush. I recall the study of the layers
of rain forests, bottom to top.
Emergent trees that stretched, demanding to be hugged
close. The canopy bright birds could hammock beneath.
And the understory. I used to close my eyes onstage,
tilt my head down,
as if one could see their clear reflection in mud.
And though my loving audience probably sang
“I love you’s,” I could never hear it.
I’d always thought the understory to be like my smile.
It hides forest floor,
the way you hide grinding teeth,
the sun never truly kisses its bare skin.
I’m sure it tastes like the absence of sugar.
And though dark, its brightly colored critters warn you,
“Here lies swamps bottom.” For all of the forest’s
beauty, Mrs. McDaniels never warned me that rain-
forests and our minds match at every layer.
Any misstep could lead lips to Swamp’s Bottom.
It tastes like throat’s back,
where bitter things hit you hardest,
shoot their best shots.
She perhaps never saw that through my smile
I’d blush neon—“Warning! Kid afraid of her own voice!”
Most likely because I had volcano sound and mole hill
body. Whatever case, I never expected depression
to have a pretty colored warning sign.
Wouldn’t be till 14 I’d have the courage to stretch
toward sunlight or at least reach for a pen, a mic.
Be challenged to open my eyes,
lift my head above canopy,
find that sun smiles back demanding to be kissed.
Noelle Aiisa Berry OPRFHS class of 2011. BA in visual and performing arts—Columbia College. Actor. Entrepreneur.
Excerpted from Respect The Mic: Celebrating 20 Years of Poetry From A Chicagoland High School. “On the Bottom of a Swamp” by Noelle Aiisa Berry; Copyright © 2022 by Noelle Aiisa Berry. Excerpted by permission of Penguin Workshop. All rights reserved.
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