Anthology 6 Preview: Return

Sometimes, when we aren’t sure which way to turn, we turn around. We see ourselves from before, from beside. We plunge backwards into our old haunts and histories. "We write to taste life twice..." to gain from again.

Join Victoria and Emanual, Sarah and Carol and Norman, as they lead us "single file [down] a long dusty road" to some thought or experience or person that has a hold on them, to some moment that has called them briefly home.

WE WERE AT IT AGAIN

Victoria Huggins Peurifoy

Once more, we’re at it again.

Loving, musing, fussing, arguing,

and making love again. We feed on

each other’s intelligence, each other’s

heart strings, each other’s funny bone,

each other’s dancing the bump,

each other’s poetry, and each other’s

ways of being alive.

Yet, we are here, at it again,

or should I say, he was at it again;

getting up under my skin

with the drugs, drinking his life away,

smoking his weed with asthmatic nostrils

which had a hold on him. It was all

extreme to me. He was different,

he wasn’t the same person that I used

to know and play games with—

before he went to Vietnam.

I didn’t smoke, do drugs, or drink,

or intentionally waste my time—except on him.

His hold on me was the bat he loved to swing

and the constant rhythm with which I purred.

He had a hold on me, like the spiraling

structure of DNA with its double

helix of genetic information, except,

we were of no relations. There were

times when we were like the original

Pangaea, the supercontinent.

BEYOND RUSTY BARS

Emanual Marquez

Looking out beyond the horizon of the chained, and barred window the blue creature yearned for more. He longed for the freedom of the dragons and the bears. The wolves and the sheep but the blue creature was denied this freedom.

He longed for the freedom of the past although, to some extent he did not know this.

He longed to laugh, and play like the little blue creatures used to ways before. Back when his grandmother was nothing more than a blossoming seed in a rapidly changing world.

SALT

Sarah Velcofsky

Salt cleanses.

My hand slipped while frying an egg and my finger grazed the hot skillet. The skin puffed and pinkened and filled with fluid. It radiated with pain like slow, lapping waves. Grandma always said that anything could be healed with seawater, so I went down to the beach. The hot rocks and fragments of shells engulf and scrape at my bare feet as I wade in. I keep to the shallows and lower to my knees, resting there so the water meanders around my neck. Salve. The burn stings, then subsides. Seaweed fills the water. Robust and slimy, it tangles about my limbs. Bandages. The burn is just a flat welt when I emerge.

Salt parches.

My lips feel pruney and dry. Can’t stop licking them. Must stop. The water in my bottle, overwarmed by the sun, mixes with the salt on my lips as I sip. Briny bathwater. I’ll go the mile or so walk without it. The seawater on my body evaporates, leaving a crystalline shell behind. I feel tight and itchy and crusty.

STRENGTH LIES BEYOND THE SOUL

Carol Peña

Love. Something I've always wanted but not from a boy, pet or a friend, but from my father. A man I thought would be there when I needed to feel safe. There to keep me protected when I was in a vulnerable place. There when I needed someone to look up to and give me the motivation to stay strong. There when I needed him the most.

My life had changed in November of 2007 on a dark, cold, and rainy night. I went to my bed, never to imagine how different the next day would be and how much it had altered my existence. At first, I had been half asleep falling into a world of fantasy that I had been awaiting, but then I heard my room door open and heavy footsteps walking towards my bedside. I squinted to see who it was, trying not to get caught being awake, and as I thought, it was my father. He was tall with a bald head, caramel skin and a big ole gut.

He went around the room where my sisters and I slept and kissed all of our heads. I wondered as to why he was doing this since he never did it before. Why was he kissing our heads as if saying goodbye? Did he have to go to work? My curiosity kicked in and I had to find out why my father was doing this and where he was going off to.

ANCESTRAL TREE

Norman Cain

When I was born my forbearers presented me with the key to the straight and narrow, where opportunity laid waiting. I cast it to the wind. It landed on Bacchanal’s Wide, Wide, Wild Boulevard. I cared less. For me, at the time, the key was nonessential to my chosen destiny: tenure in the dens of inequity where I reveled heartily and drank abundantly—starting at sun-up to well after sundown—from the vessel of wantonness, which caused me to taste the bitterness of defeat and feel the painful clutches of despair squeeze lifelessness out of my ethereal core, which left me in the clutch of self-destruction.

One night, in the clutches of drunken slumber, I encountered through vivid vision three ancestors silently walking in a single file across a long dusty road. On each side of the road, there were cotton, tobacco, and cornfields. At the head of the procession was my great-uncle Charlie, the oldest of the Cusack Clan. He was dark, short, lean, keen-featured, dressed in bibbed overalls, and walking with his hands clasped in a fist behind his back. He was followed by my maternal grandparents: his brother Lexington, an ebonized short-statured Congolese featured man who was also dressed in bibbed overalls and his wife Virginia, an oliveskinned keen featured woman of medium height who always wore a house dress and apron.

When I told my mother, who had constantly warned me about my transgressions, and who had taken the head of the dinner table (a position I held after my father’s death), about my vision, she without hesitating proclaimed: “They came to tell you that you can make it.” The vision caused me to recall the times I traversed the same dusty road that appeared in my vision during the scorching South Carolina summers (in the days of my youth,1950-58) when, I, a Philadelphian, was sent south to reside with my maternal grandparents on their farm after school was out for the summer.

WE EXIST IN MULTITUDES

Hasciya Austin, Brenda Bailey, Patricia Burton, Rosalyn Cliett, Merle Curran-Ackert, Dejah Jade, Jordan McCullough, Carol Richardson McCullough, Darrell Omo-Lomai, Victoria Huggins Peurifoy, Mabedi Sennanyana, Devin Welsh

In July 2019, Writers Room partnered with Mural Arts Philadelphia’s guest curator-in-residence Daniel Tucker and People’s Paper Co-op artists Courtney Bowles and Mark Strandquist for the series Power Map: Historical Mural Activations. “We Exist in Multitudes” was created in response to Boy with the Raised Arm by Sidney Goodman (1990) at 40th and Powelton. This program was developed in conjunction with Whitman at 200 and was one of six new commissions activating murals created in Mural Arts Philadelphia’s first 20 years.

We contain conflicting stories. We carry generations of information in our DNA. We are standing on the shoulders of those who came before us. Our family is the backbone. Our source of strength. The vessel of love and support. It is the starting point, the spot from which we venture forth into the world and place to which we can return. But home can also be insecure. Our dreams can be stepped on by our family, friends, and other haters. Gentrification and displacement are all around. Building community means ensuring that everyone has a place to come home to.

We are healing from old and new wounds. From self harm. From abuse. From feeling we are nothing. We have many help us cope; to deal with what has stemmed from oppression and culture. We are a culmination of years of history, tradition, and experiences. Our personalities are formed from the countless people we meet. We are more complex than others might see at first glance. I constantly have new ideas and I’m learning to make them a reality. The world is a dark and cruel place, but only because people don’t know right from wrong. But I do. I wish for world peace.

Supported by Canon USA, the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, and TD Charitable Foundation.

Header image: Kyle Howey