trace b allen

Acknowledgements & Writer Statement

"But was it really like that?As painful as I remember? Only mildly. Or rather, it was productive and fructifying pain. Love, thick and dark as Algala syrup… So when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die."

(The Bluest Eye, Morrison,12)

After my class viewing of Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, my brain started churning around the following questions: what happens to black people who, through trauma, have had their homes disfigured and changed?This was specifically prompted byToni Morrison speaking about being unable to visit her home for years following her father's death. Interpersonal, localized, and familial trauma add further complexity to relationships between home and self in what is already a polarized, displaced experience for people of theAfrican diaspora inAmerica.

The following multimedia project is a culmination of writing pieces I've been working on concerning black intergenerational trauma, the location of "home," the body, memory, domestic abuse in the home, and domestic abuse in romantic partnerships. It is also about healing and love. A huge aspect of my position as a writer is my life as a black lesbian in recovery as I attempt to work through the trauma patterns that I come from. Nature and the physical world pulse through the pieces inspired by the nuanced way Morrison approaches and transverses boundaries between the blackAmerican person and nature, notably in Beloved.

The images sourced are from my photography, my baby book (with my mother's words) which was passed onto me, polaroids my brother took at my aunt's recent wedding, and childhood photos taken by my grandparents and parents. Many thanks to my family for their contributions!

The first poem is in the voice of my paternal grandfather, asserting the implicit values of the patriarchal, but there is a large shift following it into my voice and concerns. The presence of violence by women, violence by men, and abuse haunts and infringes outwards into the text.

mask; ivory coast; bantu tribe

In the voice of my grandfather

In the attic, I’ve hung masks of varying African origin. Each with a different mouth: some screaming, some with frowns and wild hair and clean fangs that I touch and dote upon.

I configure myself a man just as they are.Aman as the men before me. I dig my heels down into fresh colonial soil. ThisAmerica that I have purchased a piece of for you.

Here blood runs thick as mud and I welcome it under my teeth. Under my nails. But my dear, you are flat footed and nothing grows here anymore. Still, we stay. We plant.

I bury a seed for my son to condemn my daughter; I butcher a lamb to feed us all. The land is weary, I know, but honey bees still swarm when I pour liquid sugar down the drain. Better for you than for me. Do you love me still?Then listen.

I am searching for my father in the garden. I call out to him but he does not answer. I look up at the sky and shake my fists around his name. I beg. I spit up at God and he spits down at me.

Maybe I am blessed.

The revolution visits me in my dreams some nights. Distant. Hazy.The ink is still there but faded with no bullet. No sorrow.You think it has lost me but it lays embedded as an arrowhead at the nape of my neck. It will be better now for you. I could drive you anywhere. I have forgotten the words: “I'm sorry”. Forgive me. It has been ages and I cannot love you.To trace the roots of our lineage, I sniff out men like bloodhounds. I roast yellow corn with butter. I send letters. I transcribe.

The memory of my father wraps around me like a wife. What country do I have? I will grab at what I am given and strangle it till it is cold. What country?

I carry only what I can and take no more.This America. It was worse back then for us.Your daughter’s son will make our land beautiful one day. LikeAfrica. I will lay in our marriage bed until I am only earth too.

Photo by Kevin Zaouali

Am I a god? I rule over nothing but this body and even then, boundaries have been crossed through pillaging and violence. Let us not forget the war when I begged N for rest and he gave me nothing. Even with his hand clenched around my throat, I knew I could control my own death. Many times I have willed it. But I'm a faulty god, I can only quietly nurse my commitments.

My nana and I share bunny teeth and a Libra sun. My mother’s mother is a fine monarch, unearthing brown bald babies in legions. She worships an empty sky and means to convince me that this, from an angle, could look like a father. What's a father but a blade? I'm still paying for a few limp thrusts and a broken promise. I am still paying for a dark, silent room where I called out for anything to love me and only got back one answer.

Mother, did you stay for so long because, like your mother before you, you believed in a Holy Ghost behind anything? Did your God see him bludgeon you through a car window as winter frost coalesced on the fragile glass framing? Was God there blessing me as I stared, no larger than a pomegranate core, swaddled in the manger of your backseat? Was God there when he broke your heart where there was none, when all had been stolen? We have free will and are still God-soaked.

I keep dreaming of your face when you were younger.You are half-posed and smiling alongside people who adore you.They are unfamiliar to me, left frozen in time. In one, you look as though you have just stopped crying. I don't know how I can tell this but I like to think I’d know you anywhere. Mom, you weren't a baby but I raised you.You burned each of my temples with a flat iron tongue. When I was five, you changed my name to Selfish.You chased me around our two-bedroom apartment until I fell and cut my leg in our open dishwasher.You terrified me. I loved you with my hands tied. It was me lying next to you when you were pregnant as anything. We sweat through your bed sheets as the NewYork City summer blackouts cooked us like stewed fish. Where was god? Out in wine country or Seattle or Georgia on business. I don’t believe in your god but you make the truth inconsequential. What is more god-like than loving you without option?

my brother swears he doesn’t remember what happened to us as kids but i know him better i know he still sucks his thumb and just because you wish something didn’t happen doesn’t mean it isn’t true it was still us still me who came up onto your bunk bed as we poured through ghost stories w a flashlight

i

i want pressure

I want to want nothing and for that to be enough today my brain is begging for liminal space the nowhere you can’t kiss my temples there you can’t kiss my toes i have to feel everything to feel anything i love you and you make me think of staying over i cannot know shame when i am with you lover i must only be in the absence of nothing i look to irregular cloud formations and bitter cold i look to the warmth and love of perfect strangers i watch myself dance under heat lamp in my bedroom trace this pulsethis ache which grew from perfect peril perfect victim perfect heat

want someone to make my needs signify nothing i want silence

who’s to know what’s normal? who’s to know what’s safe?

sometimes i wish you were crueler to me maybe i’d respect you more if you killed me or at least let me feel the impact of your knuckles

did i respect those men? no but i loved them and i hated them and i never came but i got something better my body bruised and splattered with pathetic loops of opal i felt useful the wreckage justified and fated it was destined me i that bed my forehead against headboard arms bent directions they didn’t go peach sake on my breath i was maybe born for it and it felt kinda good fit for a time

z rutting into me stretching me out when i was dry and unamused let me fuck you quickly i can be done in 5 mins and he was right we made the screening on time i was aroused only by how much he wanted me

i don’t know why i have any fondness for people who treated me so terribly, who made my body godlike while they disposed of it. something lasts. something has stained me and i wish it didn’t. i just want to be free but, freedom comes at a cost. freedom is a prescription and years of therapy. freedom is a gun or a swallowed blade or a strawberry in the summertime. why does my body beg and brace for impact? have i suffered enough? i think i have mourned a lifetime and still no. i don’t know if i’m brilliant or just still alive.

i fell in love with the idea of men with men in fragments.

you haunt each scene of domesticity my body thrusts into manically cleaning at odd hours

you are why i do not trust my impulses cannot let myself sink into Wife or Mother without sheer horror

grandma told me no matter how hard i try i cannot cut myself from family (we are connected through blood )

i will rest easy knowing i will be remembered by you dear friends i cannot believe i have known such gentle love

love that makes the flowers grow love that tucks me in love that holds my pinky toe

i will also have peace knowing i was the person by the river on a bench that lent a man a lighter to light his cig this sunday the Water is a big body it pulses and stretches like a muscle i wish i was baptized in the river surely that could save me salt on my lip and my nose salt lining the membrane that separates me from nowhere how do i map out my body small on this ground cement that will outlive me only to be eroded once we are all taken back

what is source? surely i’m begging to be swallowed but i cannot name her archaic mother the wind that pushes me gently when i was 10 i thought a hurricane would come each year like clockwork but i was wrong i thank god for it maybe we aren’t that blessed only children to statistical averages once there was a birth and we pay everyday for it i wish i was in the mountains i wish i was nowhere but i have to wait cannot upend myself from this bench i have lived so close to strangers for too long their intimacies feel like my own naked on a park bench a cowboy sings and weeps for what reason i do not know

my mother was a tidal wave and i a whirlpool i the algae on a half submerged wooden plank manhattan is just an invention man-made lest we forget it sunset is magic but most days i miss it my father used to come into my room at night and speak spanish it was the only time i ever heard him softly i was tortured anyway by what i can’t quite remember the dreams never leave you though you cannot forget the horrors of your body or the threat of a car collision today what song will i mourn to? or will i busy myself with bass synth and daydream of movement being drunk enough to feel free and be selfless i know i should find some comfort in my youth and feel held in the breast of a stranger i don’t want to feel pretty today it’s too lonely can't hold myself in anything other than coldness did you know there are two West Streets? how funny separated by traffic and always looping me back

with time, you can outgrow anything. my new face is slimmer in the cheeks. sharp metal bursts through taupe undertones.

the roped girl is unleashed into nothing. i am matter begging perpetually for form. i do not look like anyone you have ever seen before.

you told me my face was special, unique. it is a silly and accepted platitude.

i believe you. i love you and i hope you can see me and see the people i was before: pimpled and biting, obnoxious and wine-drunk, stepping recklessly on my father's toes, and flung from a ponytail play structure.

i never fit in, you know the story before i tell it. hair too coarse, afro too big, body too much, and my skin.

the real boyfriend is the one who almost killed me. the real boyfriend is a series of men i wish i could stomp into nothing.

n said i looked like this old black porn star and lucy wanted me to step on her and everyone thinks i am the knife's sharp edge, but i have been pounded out into nothing.

will no one see my grief, the wrestled scream of a full-grown child, and forgive me?

"you deserve to be loved irrespective of what you can provide," you say, this person i love.

i am losing myself. i am scraping myself from the bottoms of fingernails.

maybe no one should’ve hurt me when i was only 17, when i was only 9, when i was just how i was.

the ghost hides in the closet the ghost watches me on the train with legs open the ghost drenches himself with cologne and breathes down my neck the ghost loves my bones the ghost thrusts and juts the ghost shoves women where is the ghost? the ghost hides in the body naturally he burrows within scar tissuebites down on unsheathed tendons the ghost loves your favorite music but he doesn’t understand any of the words the ghost steals your name and hides it in the attic the ghost is the attic is the sandpaper air the ghost is your body the ghost is your grandmother and the deft slap of hand against cheek skin against skin the ghost probably knows when you masturbate It’s a ghost afterall it eats up your privacy stands with you while you sway drunkenly in the shower the ghost is a foghorn the ghost is the black beneath your clipped nails the ghost is money the ghost is your lack of it the ghost is green as a large mouth turned rotten the ghost stinks of nickel and age

Margo isn’t a boy, he’s a country

Margo smells like Vicks VapoRub and CBD sour gummies. He has a tongue like an electric bass guitar, so I let him learn me. We go at it for hours, trading limbs and scrubbing pearlescent appendages clean. I worship him bubblegum pink and neon yellow just before the climax, the place your feathered eyebrows kiss together. He rubs my skin like it is only skin. His hands just barely grazing parts of me I have only met with anger, tendons I have only pinched or mangled shut. Who first taught me shame? Was it my mother? In a Macy's dressing room or on that brassy living room couch when Emmanuel spread me open, and I didn’t want it, but I thought if I could play a girl well enough, maybe they'd put me onTV.

Maybe I could live in that digitized image, just a barely blurred slab of ribs and stomach fat.All I lifted (my pigeon chest, my neck into his hands, my body into tepid air) and all I pushed down (my stomach lining, my personhood). Margo, you love me whole and in my wholeness I am overflow. I cannot know a self till it is war-carved and taken from me.Then, trust me, I mourn. I think of them kindly although their brain matter is unknowable and haunting, whatever is just between these same odd temples.

In the images, corset bones give in to collapse and edges rupture.A wine bottle poses between yellow teeth. Glitter highlight is a horizontal line on a nose hated, disposed of. It is always Me-ness that is the crime and original sin.At 19, I had never binged so bad. At 19, my father said he didn’t know me and I thought I would miss the man who tried to kill me because I didn't quite know substance yet. I didn’t know that my body could be a body on its own with no husband bounding at my heels and with no mother or country that loved me. I’ll tell you, Margo, I love you even if you cannot promise permanency. I love you even if the sky is red and crumbling, even if I drop the ash onto my bare thigh and burn it, even if we destroy your bedroom’s sheets. I can only hope to grow our hair thick and be old with you.This is what I know.

my mother, bloated with time, loves a man who cuts like a razor blade. in the beginning, he was so beautiful. this is my origin story.

i know grief

i know empty hands and spoiled fruit i know the dream of father i know wreckage i believe i know my body (although each time i think i understand the depths of its pain, it finds new ways that escape me)

i know what happened to me i know the gaps in my memory i know space that i can only trek through photograph, pictures of bite marks on shin

i know what it feels like to be 17 and know nothing i know the taste of ripe mango and pineapple sugary guts between my teeth i know laughing with imani high as anything till our faces split down the center i know the jingling sounds of my mother’s bracelets like dancing rain on tin

i know a lifetime ofAfter what can i control? my habits my routine i may not be able to Control my emotions but i can control how i nourish and treat them i can be dedicated to my own healing and be kind in the world

will my skin always stink of him? no this is my own. my flesh. my body !!! mine. mine to love and heal and cherish. mine to admonish and forgive and choose.