Shhh.

You named her: Rashida, after her father, in hopes that this would inspire him to linger. He said he liked the “Shhh!” in the middle: We’ll need that. You laughed, heartened. Maybe a namesake was all it took to tether him.

This laughter came before you knew that he was a spore adrift. Before, you’d felt accomplished when you’d cupped your hands and caught him; then one day, you kissed him and saw him float away.

She’s five now. Sometimes when you peek into the darkness of her bedroom and your narrowed eyes find her, a warm cashew-colored lump, snuffling softly under a fluffy pink comforter, you frown.

Today, Rashida needs you, needs you like you needed Rashid. Her hair is a complicated clod, matted mostly to the left side of her head. Somewhere, beneath the tendrils you’ll likely have to use scissors to untangle, there’s a ring of elastic you once thought would be useful.

“Mommy!” she squeals like the pig that she is. “You watchin’?!” Her fat feet thunder across the thin carpet. If you were soberer, you’d worry about the neighbors downstairs, the Asians who seem so prim and reserved and whose feet likely never make noises as loud as your daughter’s.

But now, curled on your couch, nursing your third rum-laced coke, you really don’t care. Alyssa Milano is brandishing a pistol on the Lifetime network. You cackle at her Jersey accent and begin to forget that Rashida has made your living room a miniature of the post-Katrina Astrodome.

She’s dragged her plastic rocking horse to a spot by the front door and ground potato chips under its runners. With a bat from her whiffle-ball set, she’s whacked several Happy Meal toys ten feet, in all directions. Their plastic appendages have scattered and landed half-hidden, like mines. A sticky red splat seeps into the cracks between your kitchen’s linoleum tiles, the emission of a drink box she spent fifteen minutes squeezing after lunch and, wedged under the rickety leg of your coffee table, is the trapped, flaccid arm of a naked Black Barbie–the only thing her father brought up to the hospital the day after she was born.

“You watchin’?!” Rashida presses again, pushing her weight onto her toes and reaching her crayon-wielding hand high above her bobbling head. She’s poised to draw electric blue curlicues on your rented, eggshell wall. You take a long sip and turn away. The small squeak of wax against paint lets you know she’s begun her work. Your eyes roll back and you feel submerged in a pool of liquor, which makes your grin. The grin lets slip a stream of drool.

When you come to, Alyssa Milano is gone and your apartment has been swallowed up in blackness. You pull a few strands of your hair from your mouth; it’s longer and oilier than you expect. Manic rushes of rain smash wildly against your building. Something furry and warm is nuzzling against your bare ankles and feet. You panic: you don’t have pets. Has something feral found its way under your door or through the windows that should’ve been closed before the windy torrents and thunder?

You want to move; you are very still.

A pressure damp and round presses, wet and warm against your ankle. You feel fur, hear a sigh, a smack (of lips, of snout?). Your heart seizes in the dark and, with all the might you can muster, you kick.

For seconds, there is silence as the animal sails backward, then a thud as it hits the ground. Relief slumps your shoulders, and your chest loosens. Then you hear her wail.

You’re almost sad; it was only Rashida, kissing you, quiet for once, in the face of real bedlam. Ragged, wounded sobs gurgle out of her now; you can hear her scrambling. Soon she’ll be on her feet. You reach out, where you think you’ll find her, somewhere by your ankles. You’ll pull her to you until she settles, at least. “Shhh,” you’ll coo till she’s fine.

A sharp burst of pain shoots into your palm. You can almost hear your skin breaking.

“You little bitch!”

You hop up from the couch too quickly and can’t decide whether to hold the side of your head to stop its wobbling or rub at the toothmarks punched into your hand.

But before you’re focused enough to hear them, Rashida’s footsteps are far left, up the narrow hall, toward the bedrooms. Her wails remind you of a raccoon you hit one night last summer. Your windows were down and you could hear its alternating screeches and whimpers for nearly a mile.

A chute of lightning touches down right outside your front windows. For a second, the house is almost as bright as it was before the outage, and you see her, rounding into the bathroom. She’s cornered. You get to the doorframe and reach into it just as she’s swinging it forward, then recoil before it slams shut.

Your hand slides along the immobile metal knob.

“Open this door right now, Rashida. I’m not playing with you!”

The threat sounds slobbery, toothless. You realize you’re slurring and blush.

What would Rashid have done if he were here? He’d probably have bitten her back.

“You come out of there right now!” you shriek, stamping your foot for emphasis.

Rashida’s sobs are petering. First, you figure it’s the rain getting louder. It’s the thunder rising, the wind clawing and gathering howls.

Then the high whinnying of the pipes breaks through and the bile pushing up your chest starts to curdle into a lump, nearly blocking your breath.

“Rashida?” you whisper. “Sweetie, open the door for Mommy.”

Your dulcet tone suddenly shifts your voice into strange, unfamiliar octaves. The vomitous splashes of water crashing into your tub grow heavier, scarier. You scream and kick, throw your shoulder into the door, but the old, weighty wood is stalwart, like a bouncer at the rope of a club.

You keep trying, until your head begins to throb and your mind clears. Then, you know: he wouldn’t have been here. He’d have seen all your late-night frowns. He’d have hated you, taken her, left.

The door swings, finally, forward and you fall before the tub, where your daughter floats.

Remembering Where the Wild Things Are.

Two seconds into Where the Wild Things Are, I was in love with it. Two minutes into Where the Wild Things Are, it’d reduced me to tears. It didn’t matter how terrible and reckless and awful Max was; I couldn’t shake the overwhelming urge to brush his shaggy bangs from his damp little face. I just wanted to sit on the edge of his bunk and reassure him that, someday, he’d grow into himself.

This is the real triumph of Where the Wild Things Are. The genius is not the puppetry and effects of the Wild world; it’s the unexpected evocation of the emotions we try to repress, of those awkward, selfish, dazzling years when no one understood us and we had yet to discover that we were also supposed to be trying to understand others. It’s strange how easy it is to forget what it felt like to be ten years old. It’s equally strange to find yourself feeling ten years old again, alone at a movie theatre—and not in that romanticized, apple-cheeked way Hollywood favors, but in the realest and ugliest of ways: destructive and lonely and certain it’s not your fault.

Strangely, the best parts of this film occur in the collection of moments before Max meets the Wild Things. Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze so masterfully captured the strange isolation Max feels; every inch of his body has grown attune to the full range of human emotion but no part of him has figured out how to manage it. For the first twenty minutes or so, Max wins and breaks our hearts about five times. He tugs at the toes of his mom’s nylons while telling her an imaginative little story. He frolics in an igloo built of heavy, wet snow and endears his older sister’s friends by starting a snowball fight with them. Then, he begins proving himself incapable of handling the situations he rips himself into. His tears are large and understandable. Like a tornado, he’s constantly spinning with awe and destruction, and you can’t look away.

By the time the precipitous incident occurs, where Max flees toward an unknown world, we understand him as our proxy and want him to find peace and acceptance, just as much as he does. So we feel genuine concern, then outright fear for him as he becomes more and more entrenched in his new place as “king” of the Wilds, a cluster of self-destructive narcissists even farther gone than Max himself.

Their appearance, at once monstrous and sympathetic—in a comforting homage to the 1963 source material—would be irrelevant here, if each creature weren’t so beautifully rendered. They are serious, complicated and duplicitous—just like Max believes his mother and sister are. But here, the stakes are even higher than they are at home: if Max doesn’t learn to figure out how to navigate the labyrinth of his new friends’ mercurial emotions, it’s very probable—almost imminent—that they’ll eat him.

For the sensitive, imaginative child, a fantasy world is not simply a retreat; it’s an academy. Max is in the accelerated program—and so are we. Fortunately for us all, Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers are very capable teachers.

In Case You’re Wondering…

I know I haven’t been posting new Maranatha chapters. It’s because I haven’t been writing new Maranatha chapters. And that’s because I don’t have any time.

But it’s also because it’s occurred to me, as I’ve gone back through and re-read a few segments, that Chapters 13 and 14 shouldn’t exist.

I definitely don’t think these two should’ve bedded down as soon as they have. For one, I’m not sure how to play that out. And two, it seems rushed and out of character for them both.

So what you may have, whenever I get the chance to really get back to this, is a reboot that starts with an alternate Chapter 13 and beyond.

… And that’s where I am with that.

Thanks to all who were reading. I hope you’ll join in again, whenever I join in again.

A Post-Pentecostal Musing.

People hear that you grew up religious, and they can’t imagine you’d have a complex relationship with faith. If you believe one part, you must believe it all. But who gets more chances to see the absurdities than the devout? An answer that’s satisfying on Sunday becomes contradictory by Wednesday night. Belief is a wrestling match that lasts a lifetime.

– Victor Lavalle, Big Machine

What I am is haunted: stalked, reticent, silent. I can’t dance to any song, watch any film, hold any man without feeling surveilled. No thought goes unheard; no motive remains mysterious. I am hawked, dogged, tracked. There are no restraining orders. I can’t speak to the degree of shell-shock in others; I have only my own to catalog, to manage. What I have are memories, of an elderly woman shoving a huge leather-bound bible into my hands so the devil the pastor was about to cast out wouldn’t “jump into me,” as I sat waiting two rows behind the altar; of a man lifting a leg to the back of his neck and standing on one foot while ministers prayed for him; of the HIV-infected visiting prophet whose testimony involved locking himself into his church for three days until the spirit of homosexuality left him.

What I have is a residual belief in the strangest of all my strange experiences, a lingering pre-intellectual instinct that keeps me from being an entirely rational thinker. Some nights, I still think I’ll see a demon at the foot of my bed. Some mornings, I still wake and panic about whether or not the Rapture occurred while I slept and I, for whatever transgressions I committed between dusk and dawn, have been left behind.

What I see when I envision God is a vapor overlaying everything. A voyeur, a protector, an executioner, depending on the day. Binocular eyes, a sword to slay giants, and sickles for hands. Body of stone and body of air, at equal turns.

What I see when I envision Jesus is a hippie, barefoot, in blue tattered dungarees and a white linen tunic embroidered with navy thread. Listening and pacing and staring through the cookie-sized holes in his palms. Smiling and running frustrated fingers through crazy-thick hair.

What I hear when someone tells me he/she is a prophet is an echo: an imperceptible white noise beneath loud and sincere speculation.

In some half-carved hollow that logic can’t touch, I believe everything. No matter how thoroughly the messages of my brain excavate the corners of my body, they never find this hollow. Their reason can’t be heard here. I believe that prayer has the potential to animate paralyzed limbs. I believe people who insist that their malignant growths have shrunken to non-existence. I believe a bush can burn without being consumed. I believe a too-wistful woman can transmogrify to salt.

No amount of evidence or education can completely erase my socio-spiritual imprinting. What is there will always be there.

But age intensifies suspicion. Experience encourages examination. I cannot be a scholar without questioning. I cannot be a woman without relinquishing some of my naivete. I know that I know very little for certain, and wondering calms me.

I know that the answers I’ve always been given are not quite whole answers at all.

36 Tweets About 9/11.

This morning, I found myself on Twitter, reading a lot of reflections on the collapse of the Twin Towers. Usually, I don’t write about 9/11 because I don’t feel like it impacted me as profoundly as it has many of my friends, friends who were there, friends who lost loved ones, friends who’ve since gone to war. In short: it’s never felt like my story. It’s never felt like something I’ve earned the right to write about. But today, it just happened.

These are my tweets.

here’s where i was: in an elevator, surrounded by suits & secretaries. “someone bombed the world trade center.” “again?” was the bland reply.

we were expecting to arrive in our respective offices to find news of a corridor or even a floor taken out by a small handmade explosive.

my own boss sent our office home. “go be with your families,” he said, clearly speaking to himself, having forgotten he wasn’t alone.

we scattered, with words rapping woodenly against our intellect. “one of the towers collapsed!” “oh God, the other one, too?”

we couldn’t fathom it–and without footage, with only words to paint the picture, it hardly seemed real.

at the time, i was living in a foreclosed house with my mother, every day fearing the arrival of a sheriff and eviction minions.

when i called my mother to tell her i needed to be picked up, she was wholly annoyed b/c she’d just dropped me off.

“they sent us home b/c of the world trade center bombings?” i said, words like “collapse” receding under my vision of a small-scale attack.

“somebody bombed that place *again?*” mom said. she huffed, “fine; i’ll pick you up at the train station.”

the streets of baltimore were all but empty at 9:30 am. the deserted thorofares were what first struck fear in us.

9/11 wouldn’t be real for me until 10 am, when i got home, sat in front of a TV and didn’t move until 10 pm.

i was afraid to pee. afraid to eat. afraid to leave the foot of my mother’s mattress.

we sat there, watching peter jennings report himself parched & haggard, with rolled sleeves & red rimmed eyes, w/tears caught in his throat.

“the people who jumped, ” mom whispered, “some of them were flapping their arms.” determined to fly.

mom swore she heard bin laden say, “i did not do this thing. but praise allah.” i’ve still never heard this. i wonder if it was imagined.

i wonder if our hearts heighten villainy when our eyes and ears disbelieve it.

years later, i lived in yonkers. @feministtexican & i could see twin shafts of light shuttling into the firmament, from lamps in manhattan.

@feministtexican and i were determined to get to ground zero that year. “let’s go see the lights!” we got stuck in traffic.

we detoured first, for cupcakes.

we didn’t make it till midnight. no longer 9/11.

but there were still lingerers, poring over the pictures and withering petaled bouquets. the lights still coursed toward some spot above sky.

i remembered a weeping CEO who blamed himself for being out of the office the day he lost all his employees.

i remembered a 20/20 profile on all the immigrant workers who lost their lives that morning, working their shifts at Windows on the World.

i remembered.

i never write abt 9/11. so i don’t know what made me do it just now.

there are things i’m leaving out, like how i called a frenemy to make sure she was okay. she answered, agitated and spooked.

said she was walking from manhattan to brooklyn b/c the trains were closed and the roads were gridlocked.

she described the sediment, rolling like clouds.

that day, as always, i envied her.

it was a child’s envy: there she was, centered amid the mythos, while i was at the foot of a mattress, unable even to imagine her experience.

(i hate writing honestly.)

and i’m not even being *as* honest as i should be. i haven’t talked abt how my mother and i laughed that day.

laughed the way family laughs at repasts.

i haven’t confessed my wry commentary while @feministtexican and i were bumper to bumper with mourners.

i didn’t mention how my own drama diminished my ability to absorb the full impact of the images i watched that day.

Poetry Sundays with Stacia: A Conversation with Tara Betts.

Just a quick reminder that I’m blogging about poetry over at AliyaSKing.com on Sundays. This week, we feature an interview with the lovely, gracious, wonderful poet Tara Betts whose book, Arc & Hue, was released September 1.

Here’s one of my favorite excerpts from our conversation:

There is no easy path to writing. It’s hard work and you have to read deeply and widely. Don’t just read things that you relate to or that mirror your experience. Read about what you find different, unusual, informative. When you do sit down to read anything look at the structure, the word choice, the turns, each sentence or each line. Take notes. Reading can teach you a lot about what you want to write or don’t want to write.

Read the rest of the article here.

Poetry Sundays with Stacia.

Great news! Starting today, I’ll be writing a Sunday column for journalist/novelist/co-memoirist-to-the-stars Aliya S. King’s website!

I’ve started to write poetry again this year, after a seven-year hiatus. So Aliya has invited me to write about my return to the genre in an ongoing series of Sunday posts.

Poetry Sundays with Stacia will discuss:

- the ups and downs of the poetry-writing process
- the works of poetry legends like Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Sonia Sanchez, and Langston Hughes
- the works of contemporary poets like Suji Kwock Kim, Major Jackson, Tara Betts, and Randall Horton
- elements of poetic craft, such as musicality, internal rhyme, voice, and form/structure

It’ll also feature:

- Poetry Vlogs submitted by readers
- Interviews with burgeoning and renowned poets
- Poetic works-in-progress by myself and other guest contributors

Check out the inaugural article right here! Hope you like it! If you’d got suggestions or would like to be featured, please be sure to let me know!

a birthday poem.

My aunt’s birthday was last weekend and a lavish party was held in her honor at the Radisson in northeast Grand Rapids. This is the poem I penned and read for the occasion:

Aunt Melita, you’ve been
our moment in an African homeland,
otherwise only fabled.
You’ve enabled your nieces to feel
beautiful and pixied, your nephews
to believe themselves warriors kings:
our very own urban fairy godmother.

Your house on Hall our sanctuary,
on Elmdale, our moated castle,
we summon you when we feel hassled
like Black Cinderellas or aggrieved like
Afro’d Auroras in Sleeping Beauty,
come expecting you to wield your
glittering wand of wisdom and save us
from our latest little snare.

And you do,
and you do it with flare.

We’ve been known to stare
after your flowing garments,
wind whipping through them like sails,
as you flit from room to room
a whirlwind of amenity.

You:
who taught both rebel yells and respect,
are a phoenix risen from the ashes of
your namesake in Natchez,
the bottomless ear into which
we whisper our secrets.
You’ve quelled fears and kissed knees
and cried the tears we’ve learned to bottle.

We love you because you do not coddle.
We love you because you leap and
you beam and you scream from all our sidelines.
We love you for all the guidelines you gave but never
forced us to follow.

You will genius and beauty into all our darkest hollows.

So this is not just a celebration of your birth
it is an intricate dance of mirth, a sacred act
of thanksgiving to a God gracious enough
to form your bit of bark on our family tree,
a homily in honor of a woman whose
loveliness we’ve all been blessed to see.

Our Little Boys are Growing Up!: Mutemath’s Armistice.

Mutemath’s sophomore album (if you’re only counting the full-length LPs and the Warner Bros.’ releases) dropped two days ago. I preordered it, something I’d never done in the several years that I’ve had iTunes, so I was almost startled Tuesday at the crack of midnight, when it became available to me. (What? So soon?) I downloaded it immediately thereafter. I was flying to Grand Rapids from Baltimore that day, so I didn’t get a chance to listen to it in earnest until I was at the airport, and even then I resisted.

You want your first listen to a new project by your favorite band of all time to be exclusive and undivided and hallowed.

So when we boarded the plan at 2:20 pm, only to learn from our pilot that we’d be captive on the tarmac for at least an hour, I finally pulled out my iPod.

I’ll admit that, on first listen, I wasn’t entirely impressed with this album. There are songs on it that practically scream: “Maybe this’ll be the one that lands us that headlining gig at Madison Square Garden!”

I almost let myself feel a bit betrayed—and I’m usually not one of those toolish indie band fans who gets genuinely irritated when its band “goes mainstream.” I’m usually not one of those people who has to stand on a soapbox and rage into a bullhorn, “I knew them when! I had them first! You don’t deserve them!”

Because it’s pretty lame to get downright proprietary about people you don’t even know.

Even so, this wasn’t the Mutemath to which I’d grown accustomed. The sounds on Armistice are milder, quieter, tamer (appropriate, given the album title, but still). Whither the Paul who shouted through most of the tracks, backed by frenetic percussion and landfill-funky bass? Whither the songs that allow you to envision exactly the moment at which Paul will handstand on his organ in concert? These songs simply weren’t as full of bangs and blasts and crackles and roars.

One thing seemed certain: gone were the days of the Atari.

Maranatha: Chapter 15.

- Chapter 15 -

“Tell me about your wife,” she said in the morning, with her head at the foot of the bed and her toes tapping out a rhythm on the wall above the headboard. Gideon flounced onto his left side and propped himself up on an elbow. Maranatha felt deliriously happy and childlike, and though in the back of her mind she worried that too much silliness would remind him of their age difference and make him recoil or rush her back home, she couldn’t wipe the grin off her face, even when her cheeks began to ache with the effort.

They were up until 4 am. She glanced at the clock on the nightstand. It was after 11. They’d squandered all but an hour before check-out and she knew they should hustling to avoid the late checkout fee, but the thought of leaving this bed was just too maudlin. Tears burbled deep in her stomach. She bit them back, already missing him. She’d have to go home eventually and Anne would need to know where she’d been all night, even if she didn’t ask outright or right away. Maranatha was already concocting her cover, something vague and uninteresting that didn’t reference Gideon at all and wouldn’t require any follow-up.

She covered her eyes with one hand, sobered. It was all too much.

Gideon’s lips landed on hers and she peeked out at him through her fingers.

“What do you want to know about her?”

“I want to know whatever you want to tell me.”

His brow furrowed as she’d watched it do all night and goose bumps rose on her arms. He kissed her forehead. “This isn’t a bed conversation,” he said. “Get up. I’ll take you to breakfast; we’ll talk it out.”