linda chavers writes @lindachaverswrites - Tumblr Blog

onethreetwofivefoursixGO!

a four-part free verse poem

"And then they came and got us from our homes and they came and got us from the shores and then they took us on the boats and then they took us to the land we didn’t know we didn’t know and then they took us to their fields and then they took us to their homes but they didn’t take us in their homes they only took us to their homes theres a difference you see theres a difference..." -- Sporklet 12, Spork Press, August 2020

5/5: This book is a slow fantastical burn. It's been days since I finished it and I just keep thinking how brutal the story truly is. There were moments I felt like the story was adrift and I thought that the ending was a tad predictable. But that's just it: the ending IS predictable but that's not important. It's the significance Jones places on the CHOICES still within Roy and Celestial's grasp. It's how Jones ties these choices with the core of marriage AND imprisonment. The only way that the marriage would have stayed "intact" was if Roy became the very thing that he was falsely accused of a...

#goodreads #tayari jones

4/5: Yes, this was difficult to enter into and stay in but it is worth staying. I went from feeling distanced by the boys voice to feeling so intimately connected to everything and everyone because of the boys voice. Magical stuff.

5/5: I will think of this book for the rest of my life. More to say later. Later: There's lots to say and already been said about how important and meaningful Gay's memoir is. So I'm going to just applaud and bow down to the utterly beautiful form and display of her story. The chapters are vignettes, musings but not at all pithy. Sometimes not even a page, sometimes dozens of pages each chapter reads as a reveal into the interiority of living in an "unruly body." The contrast is so striking because Gay presents us with her body that has so many things already written onTO it by culture, society...

5/5: This is a truly important book. And so well done. Stevenson weaves the story of Walter like a novel (but it is NOT fiction) whilst telling the stories of the thousands of men, women, and children behind bars without justice in this country. There were many moments I had to pause and put the book down because the stories were just so brutal. I had to stop for a longer period after reading about two people who were diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis while imprisoned and the doctors believed it to be trauma-induced. I have MS and am working on a memoir about inherited trauma but that's another ...

Weekend Freewrite

This is not something she will ever get over. She will receive her first unwanted touches at ten years old, her first unwanted attention at eleven. She will eventually get over this. She will be touched a thousand times over and never fully reconcile if this was desire or domination. But these are things she will get over. She will get over her parents divorce. She will get over her grandparents long slow and painful deaths. She will get over a stepmother who hates her.

#literary #freewrite #girlhood

Weekend Freewrite

I will call it skin. There’s this – I am avoiding something or someone. All this time spent – wont say wasted but spent because cost is involved. Three things: I must stop picking my right thumb until it bleeds. This is not the sort of bloody writing I am aiming for. Yesterday I found a gray pubic hair and it is not lost on me how much time I may have spent (yes, cost) doing bullshit while this shiny, near-white, thick two-inch long wire grew in my nether-regions. And, finally – I must make this next growth more valuable – it must mean something. The next grey pube. Eventually there’ll be nothing left to pick – my smartphone has stopped recognizing my thumb ID or it can’t. I want to study this area of the nail and cuticle – this piece of me that I pick apart, heal, and kill all over again. For decades. I’m a sado-masochist – the executed and the executioner.

Perhaps I developed it in the crib. My mother says she found me one night covered in cloth and blood. I had unraveled the cast on my burned leg and picked it apart. My father wanted to put socks with rubber bands on my hands. I probably wouldve picked my way out of those, too.

I will call it skin.

#literary #freewrite

Anyone out there?

Blackademia

Headlines are not for those who know how to read. Headlines are not for those who use the internet. Headlines are not for those who know how to read good. Headlines are not for those who know how to scroll down. Headlines are for white people who need to feel good about that thing they did that one time for that black guy that day.

Headlines are for people who think nuance is spelled w-h-i-t-e.

Headlines are not for you and me.

Headlines will get you killed.

Headlines are not for professors who write dissertations and teach things and then cough and are fired for taking medicine.

Headlines are in the thesaurus under n-o-o-s-e.

If you get tenure you will not get headlines.

If you get tenure you must, above all things, be quiet. You must not do anything in bold or italics or worthy of clicks.

Unless you are white.

#for curry #for me #for all of us #headlines #media #literacy

This has to be the last time, Part I

Because I’m 35 years old and the bank doesn’t care. This has to be the last time I fall in love with ideas of him rather than the fragile person in front of me because I’m 35 years old and the bank doesn’t care. This has to be the last time I rob Peter to pay Paul because I’m 35 years old and the bank doesn’t care. This has to be the last time I don’t see a dentist because I’m 35 years old and the bank doesn’t care. This has to be the last tme I believe every text he sends because I’m 35 years old and the bank doesn’t care. This has to be the last time I take it too personal because I’m 35 years old and the bank doesn’t care. This has to be the last time I laugh it all off because I’m 35 years old and the bank doesn’t care.

This has to be the last time I create a world of helplessness just so that I can cry because I’m 35 years old and the bank doesn’t care. This has to be the last time I dismiss my desires for women because I’m 35 years old and the bank doesn’t care. This has to be the last time I think words of love and adulation on social media should mean more than real life because I’m 35 years old and the bank doesn’t care. This has to be the last time I allow feelings of resentment and jealousy fester from the success of others because I’m 35 years old and the bank doesn’t care. This has to be the last time I fuck it all up before I even get started because I’m 35 years old and the bank doesn’t care. This has to be the last time I avoid seeing myself naked because I’m 35 years old and the bank doesn’t care. This has to be the last time I talk myself out of loving because I’m 35 years old and the bank doesn’t care.

This has to be the last time I think about lives I don’t know rather than the life I have because I’m 35 years old and the bank doesn’t care. This has to be the last time I think everyone is smarter than me because I’m 35 years old and the bank doesn’t care. This has to be the last time I’m envious of 20-something black girls with book deals because I’m 35 years old and the bank doesn’t care. This has to be the last time I reminisce about my “skinny” period because I’m 35 years old and the bank doesn’t care. This has to be the last time I make one of these goddamn lists because I’m 35 years old and the bank doesn’t care.

This has to be the last time I crave solitude but hate loneliness because I’m 35 years old and the bank doesn’t care.

And this has to be the last goddamn time I have insufficient funds because I’m 35 years old and the bank doesn’t care.

#happy birthday #35

What This Is Not

This will not be about the fat body, the not-fat body, the marked body. This is not an essay about weight so much as it is an essay on flesh, my flesh and our tumultuous co-dependent relationship. My flesh wants me to breathe. I want my flesh to hold its breath. I have always tried to contain myself. I have been successful in some regards. I have been called stoic, disarming. That is no accident. For over ten years I thought of alcohol as the tool to hold myself back but when I got sober I found my wildness to be innate and still very much intact. Though I’ve managed to tame that wildness -- to turn it into an intense pursuit of a higher coveted goal I cannot say the same for my physical body. I cannot recall a time when I did not put on a pair of pants and wish my middle would disappear. I yearn for the day I do not think of my flesh when I am moving. When I do not think of my chest and the fleshy sacks that begin underneath my arms. Sobriety is acutely and literally sudden. You stop, the drinking stops. That is and will be the only quick and sudden thing. The first time my blouse ripped in the shoulders I dismissed it as aging cheap material. At my smallest I hovered around 135 pounds and I hated my body. At my heaviest I hover around 185 pounds and I hate my body. I have spent the better parts of 35 years loathing, tugging, hiding and battling the flesh that carries me.

I would like this to end.

#birthday #body #weight #flesh #sobriety

lindachaverswrites

The Story of Us and Them

Growing up I took the S2/S4 bus to school. The bus stop is at a busy intersection on 16th and Van Buren. Two-lane traffic each-way. From twelve to eighteen years old it was a physiological challenge waiting for the bus. I was a plump girl. Menstruating at eleven years old wearing training bras. The attention from the men in cars would be too much. I never enjoyed my encounters with the men who’d honk, slow down, stop.

Decades before in the mid-1970s my parents met at this same stop. My mother waiting on the S4 to get to Wilson High School where she was a senior. And my father in his charcoal Corvette headed I presume to Howard University where he attended the law school. The story goes that she gave him the hitchhike thumbs up, he picked her up and that was that. It could be a meet-cute in a Hollywood rom-com. I imagine her in 1970s glam. Bangles and over the top curls cascading around her face and neck. The traffic creates a wind-tunnel so I’m sure my father saw her from his windshield – jet black hair blowing around a sunbeam yellow face. Perhaps, though, she looked at him first. Perhaps she had moved on from what happened two years ago. Or, maybe she missed her days of running away. Maybe she missed the bad and the unknown. I know one thing, though. She smiled at him. And if she smiled at him it was done. Things must have already been done on my father’s end. Light skin, long hair and an ass – that’s his type. He exhibits a rare self-awareness when, later in life, he admits there’s some self-hating colorism going on. “But it is what it is,” he says now with a sly grin. If she smiled at him that day on 16th street then he most certainly smiled back (I can’t imagine my father at that age smiling first but maybe he did feeling confident with the cover of a windshield and dark sunglasses). The mother I know now would never do what came next then: the thumb sign. This part of the story is what makes me think she wasn’t over anything – that she was very much haunted by what had happened to her, with her. Or, perhaps – and this resonates – things had been improving so well and that well feeling scared the shit out of her. And so, she did the not so well thing – she flirtatiously smiled back at a man in a car one morning at a busy intersection. I’d like to think that she assumed the man would just smile and nod and keep going. Maybe she was delightfully surprised when he didn’t speed on when the light turned green. The bus, other cars, must have honked, swerved around cursing out of their windows. Is that why she got in the car? Like me, so self-conscious of bothering other people that she got in the car just so he’d drive away? Is that where I get it from – this crippling desire to please? My father says that she talked his ear off. I wonder what about. Did she lie or tell half-truths?

lindachaverswrites

#metro #washington #washington dc #memoir #bus #storytelling #street harassment

The Story of Us and Them

Growing up I took the S2/S4 bus to school. The bus stop is at a busy intersection on 16th and Van Buren. Two-lane traffic each-way. From twelve to eighteen years old it was a physiological challenge waiting for the bus. I was a plump girl. Menstruating at eleven years old wearing training bras. The attention from the men in cars would be too much. I never enjoyed my encounters with the men who’d honk, slow down, stop.

Decades before in the mid-1970s my parents met at this same stop. My mother waiting on the S4 to get to Wilson High School where she was a senior. And my father in his charcoal Corvette headed I presume to Howard University where he attended the law school. The story goes that she gave him the hitchhike thumbs up, he picked her up and that was that. It could be a meet-cute in a Hollywood rom-com. I imagine her in 1970s glam. Bangles and over the top curls cascading around her face and neck.

The traffic creates a wind-tunnel so I’m sure my father saw her from his windshield -- jet black hair blowing around a sunbeam yellow face. Perhaps, though, she looked at him first. Perhaps she had moved on from what happened two years ago.

Or, maybe she missed her days of running away. Maybe she missed the bad and the unknown. I know one thing, though. She smiled at him. And if she smiled at him it was done. Things must have already been done on my father’s end. Light skin, long hair and an ass -- that’s his type. He exhibits a rare self-awareness when, later in life, he admits there’s some self-hating colorism going on.

“But it is what it is,” he says now with a sly grin.

If she smiled at him that day on 16th street then he most certainly smiled back (I can’t imagine my father at that age smiling first but maybe he did feeling confident with the cover of a windshield and dark sunglasses). The mother I know now would never do what came next then: the thumb sign. This part of the story is what makes me think she wasn’t over anything -- that she was very much haunted by what had happened to her, with her.

Or, perhaps -- and this resonates -- things had been improving so well and that well feeling scared the shit out of her. And so, she did the not so well thing -- she flirtatiously smiled back at a man in a car one morning at a busy intersection. I’d like to think that she assumed the man would just smile and nod and keep going. Maybe she was delightfully surprised when he didn’t speed on when the light turned green. The bus, other cars, must have honked, swerved around cursing out of their windows.

Is that why she got in the car? Like me, so self-conscious of bothering other people that she got in the car just so he’d drive away? Is that where I get it from -- this crippling desire to please? My father says that she talked his ear off. I wonder what about.

Did she lie or tell half-truths?

#memoir #storytelling #perhapsing