Somersaults

Nov 14, 2022

Rage. Laughter. Rage. Laughter. Is this the new way I breathe at this age?

Laughter. This 'nice' white mom tripped on a root, walk-running to my friend I was late to meet, two full somersaults across the lumpy grass in front of the Quaker school carpool line! I laughed at my unplanned gymnastics show, but my finger is now bent, rings no longer able to glide over its blooming knuckle.

Rage. At the binary which justifies all things evil, white supremacy its fave. The killing and raping and enslaving of anything deemed on the other side of that line.

One of my best friends, who I call my ass chat sister, I’m forgetting why, probably because we talk about every single thing, including our asses, and also call Candy because we sometimes believe we are too busy holding everyone else up to be human (see the very fabulous and fucked up Netflix tv show called Candy), reminds me to be the deep part of the ocean regardless of the storms or sunshine above.

Laughter. I remember now, we sat all day on a tipsy rock wall while our kids dunked in Carter Lake, usually glorious but now warm as pee in the velvet August air. We woke the next morning with our Buh-jay-jays as hot and sparky as falling stars. We called each other and screamed, itching furiously, scissor leg walking back and forth across our kitchen floors, roaring about our hot asses, saying we should host our own show: Next on Ass Chat ‘When Chigger Bites Cause Dire Gynecological Situations!’

Rage. The way they told her to tuck in her biracial bun, the way the middle school boys tried to carve up her body with their hate, the way everyone told her, while her tiny daughter slipped away in her arms, that she should move on.

Laughter. The way she now runs the world through her medicine, her work, her singing, sashaying, sword wielding, living children and the butterfly visits from the one who isn’t.

And how the ultra right wing conservatives somehow got my number and text me and call me John, is there a whiter white man name then that?

Rage. How often my own brain still perpetuates the very things I’m rageful about. Because John is part of me, that white line dug so deeply in me that the rest of my life will be spent trying to swerve off that never-ending, Supremely horrible highway, into the wide open fields where freedom might one day ring.