vanesha.mcgee

I dreamed I had a baby. It felt real. I was sweaty and in pain. I pushed and you were there. I was afraid it would die. It lived. He lived. I think we named him Bruce. That felt weird in this dream, I remember. But I was so happy. I gave birth at home. A different home than our home, yet still ours. I left after the birth. I felt I had to flee, to give him a chance. You stayed with him and when I next saw you there was silence. I cried, knowing he had died. But he lived. There was shock, I think. From you and from me. I cried and cried and you told me he was alive. My heart lifted, joy grew. In my dream, I won 400 dollars. I didn’t care. I had a baby. Something bad happened to Carol in my dream. No one would say what. There was a meeting about it. I missed it, talking to my brother, about the baby. I came in, to that meeting room, a cafeteria I think. I was happy, but you were sad. I didn’t understand, so I moved on to someone else. I told her I had a baby. It was Julie. She was thrill...

2017, you took away my father. I’d like to call you a thief, but he was never mine to begin with. You nailed the coffin on an irretrievably lost hope. You turned my fire to ash, creating a pond of all the things I had never wanted, all the things that had destroyed me. Things started to sprout from that pond. Dark spirals, unseen roots. My soul grew tense, fighting against an expanding fear of these mysterious sproutings. As mystery flourished, I remembered the beginning, 2017. You brought a newness to that old feeling of rage. You taught me that clenching my jaw caused more than just a physical ache. I learned that my body is in a constant state of rage. Black rage. I learned that black rage is different from all other forms of rage. Black rage has deep roots, it is dark, it breeds in ash. 2017, you brought me freedom-tethered to fear. You let me roam in my existence, just enough to show me that I needed a way to untether myself if I had any hopes of survival. You opened a door that I...

This week marks the first days back to school. And as a teacher, I will be absent. I made a clarifying decision to leave the world of teaching and to enter into the world renewed, as a writer. One of the hardest decisions I have made in some years, it is also proving to be one of the most breathtaking and rejuvenating. I am a writer, always have been. In high school, I tried to take an advanced writing course. It seemed the perfect way to learn better skills for something I loved, to dig deep into reading and writing in ways previously unavailable to me, to grow intellectually in a field I desperately wanted more from. I was denied entrance to this class. I was devastated. The teacher told me I had to be a better writer in order to take part in this class. Perplexed, I asked myself how I was supposed to get better if I could not be pushed, advanced. This moment stayed with me. I took writing classes in college - loved every single one of them, never considering for a moment that this w...