YEARS LATER
Simona and Ramón loved different baseball teams. She would cook in the kitchen, watching the Yankees game, while he would watch the Mets game in the living room. He would scream out, “Jankee go home!” while she would scream out, “Bete pal carajo laga te la cocina.” (“Get the hell out of the kitchen.”) When the subway series was on, the yelling in the house would go crazy.
Each morning, Simona would walk to the Boulevard to check out the new sales. On Fridays, she would cook Ramón’s favorite meal: porgy fish. One Friday morning, she headed to the Boulevard, but tragedy struck. Simona had a heart attack on her way to the fish market.
Ramón lost his heart in human form that morning. He was soon diagnosed with prostate cancer, or, as he would call it, “cancer in the cuolo.” This wasn’t Ramón’s first battle with cancer; he had beat it once before. His daily routine remained the same even after Simona was gone. One morning, he fell in the shower and was rushed to the hospital. The prognosis was grim. He was given two weeks to live. He was admitted to a hospice on Monday and died on Saturday morning. He last saw his family the night before. But Ramón couldn’t wait another moment to be reunited with his one true love.
Destination World
VERONICA HILBRING
My piece “Destination World” is about finding peace of mind through travel. In my youth, travel wasn’t an option or a possibility. I have devoted the last three years of my life to traveling the world.
Life as a professional writer has had its ups and downs. I’ve had moments of back-to-back projects, freelance pieces, and savings to spare. At my lowest, I was underemployed in New York City with five dollars to my name dreading making the call to my dad asking if he’d pay my rent for the month. Travel wasn’t even in the realm of possibility. But the eternal optimist in me always knew that adventure was on the horizon.
After securing a permanent writing position, I planned a Mediterranean cruise for the summer. Without permanent work and being grossly underpaid, the only travel I did for three years was between New York City and Chicago. It was time for an escape.
The trip was life-changing.
I biked through the coast of Naples, Italy. Prayed in St. Peter’s Square, tasted the finest of wines in Tuscany, sunbathed in the French Riviera. For once, I exhaled.
I met new people from all over the world who were shocked to learn that I was on this journey alone. But I couldn’t do this with anyone. Taking journeys solo isn’t anything new for me. I’ve traveled stateside solo and even made the big move from Chicago to New York on my own.
Did I get my groove back? Not in the sense that I came back with a sexy, chocolate Taye Diggs look-alike. But I got the next best thing: unlimited inspiration to write and the new goal of always planning a vacation.
SADE ANDRE
YEARS AS MENTEE: 2
GRADE: Senior
HIGH SCHOOL: Millennium Brooklyn High School
BORN: Brooklyn, NY
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: Writing with Keciah has helped me find my writing style. She inspires me to chase my dreams and to write all my feelings out, which I appreciate tremendously.
KECIAH BAILEY
YEARS AS MENTOR: 2
OCCUPATION: Teacher, John Jay School for Law
BORN: Kingston, Jamaica
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: My mentee, Sade, has motivated me to keep writing, and seeing my mentee grow has been amazing. We have a great bond, and I am thankful for this amazing pairing!
Two sides of the Black Storm
SADE ANDRE AND KECIAH BAILEY
“Two sides of the Black Storm” is about what black people feel but never want to say.
There was once a man who stumbled upon a set of flowers in a kingdom of power and prosperity. Filled with jealousy and rage, he pulled them from their land in order to make his land more beautiful. Thinking the flowers only held the purpose of adding beauty to the land he owned, he then threw them in the ocean, hoping they would drown and be left for dead. But the man always needed the flowers, so, every time, the flowers would grow back despite the abundance of water—he takes them only when he needs, because at the end of the day he only uses us for his own convenience and greed.
Flooded, Flooded
We don’t drown
Here you listen when I make a sound
But let me show you
What I really mean, with the mask on—
Now hear my scream
Ctrl + B
Because my black, natted hair
Causes too much of a stare
And my curves are too
Wide and thick
Unless white women decide
It’s now “in”
Ctrl + B
Be-have we are told
Because protecting our lives and bodies that were once stole
Are now treated like punching bags
Leaving us bleeding and swollen
Ctrl B-B-B-Black Lives matter
They’re too loud and woke
Still lynching us by the throat
Expecting us to choke
But we are afloat
Stay Woke.
Let go, we will breathe.
CLEMENTINE AVERY
YEARS AS MENTEE: 1
GRADE: Sophomore
HIGH SCHOOL: Millennium Brooklyn High School
BORN: New Haven, CT
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: I have so much fun talking to Jen, because she has such a kind and positive vibe and I feel really supported. We talk about everything. I have so many great memories of us just talking about random things and going on tangents about weird ethical dilemmas. She is very open-minded, so I can talk about pretty much anything I want and she will jump in. And I have learned so much from her, too. I am so happy that I have gotten to share my poems with her—I don’t feel scared at all.
JEN STRAUS
YEARS AS MENTOR: 1
OCCUPATION: Development Coordinator, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
BORN: Washington, D.C.
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: This is my first year as a mentor, and it’s everything I hoped it would be. Clem and I often get caught up in conversations about what matters most to us both as writers and as people, talking about the messiness of life. Clem is a deep thinker brimming with ideas, and it’s been a true joy helping her hone her voice. Her writing shows a careful consideration of the world, and I’m continually impressed by how creatively she expresses the big questions that are on her mind. I can only hope to follow the example she sets.
Sir Leo
CLEMENTINE AVERY
This poem is about feeling like an outsider or feeling misunderstood, and finding an inspiring leader who is able to overcome their fear.
Veterans with weary eyes wake up
Our hero has come back: Sir Leo,
The man whose heart is capable of rebounding
Who speaks of joy not as an emotion but as a
Broad stroke.
They called him the singing soldier
Who sang about real things.
Veterans
Veterans
Men and women and everyone else who walks up to strangers
And burns candles for their missing trust,
And has grown delusional and tired
Fighting the brave fight
Sweating at night
This is us, but with a smile.
Sir Leo told us this, that four things are real: the human soul, the animal inside us, the nature around us, and the timeline of planet Earth.
There is nothing else worth worrying about.
He who turned metal into clocks and metal into screws
(Beautiful creations that whispered to us twisty people)
He who was told to swallow his words so he put them onto paper
And painted the sky.
This is Sir Leo
who used his eyes
pressed his heart against the earth
and did not apologize
And he did not need to, because there were only
Four things: The human soul,
The animal inside of us,
The nature around us,
And the timeline of planet Earth.
Second Self
JEN STRAUS
The theme of this year’s anthology really inspired me, since boldness isn’t a word I associate with myself. This piece is my attempt to consider my inner boldness, or at least the potential for it.
The great project of my adult life seems to be recapturing the person I was when I was small and fought for breath but suffered no fools. I wasn’t fearless—there was plenty to be afraid of and I was conscious of it all—but I was stubborn, and that made up for plenty. Most important, I knew myself. That gets harder as you grow, with all the signal and noise of the world trying to dictate who you should be.
What parts of me, buried deep, could be uncovered through painful and necessary change? I picture an alternate timeline, where some small moment led to seismic shifts in the person I became. Some other iteration standing in my place.
What is she like, this other me? She’s someone, perhaps, who follows through on the impulses that mostly stay inside my head—to take up space, to speak up, to live without apology. She wastes no time bracing for the worst, the what-ifs of life, charging ahead with few regrets.
There are brief moments when she emerges: traveling in a country where I barely spoke the language; standing stoic in the face of angry protesters; stepping onto a plane and leaving my whole life behind for a year. This is the part of me who shouted down bullies on the playground, who read poetry to rooms of near-strangers, who sang constantly and reveled in the sound of her own voice. I wish I saw more of her. More than just glimpses, years apart.
What needs acknowledgment is that there’s never just one self, but many—serving different purposes. The beautiful thing is knowing that all of this exists inside of me; that I, like everyone else who’s ever lived, am full of boundless potential. So maybe it isn’t a recapturing of who I used to be, but synthesis—not rejecting who I am today, but giving equal space to these things that I thought were lost. Giving them a chance to bloom.
MAXINE BABB
YEARS AS MENTEE: 1
GRADE: Freshman
HIGH SCHOOL: High School of Fashion Industries
BORN: New York, NY
LIVES: Bronx, NY
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: Agnes and I have a lot in common. We were the same as kids, we like the same genres, and we love our pets. We have similar goals: one being to write a book together, which is in the works. Agnes gives me the advice I need as a writer. She has helped me achieve my goal of adding humor to my writing. One of my most fun memories was when we saw my favorite author, Angie Thomas. I couldn’t believe she had remembered! I’m so glad Girls Write Now paired us. There is nothing but good vibes when we’re together.
AGNES BANNIGAN
YEARS AS MENTOR: 1
OCCUPATION: Senior Academic Designer, McGraw-Hill Education
BORN: Cheverly, MD
LIVES: New York, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: 2018 Alderworks Alaska Writers and Artists Retreat Writing Resident
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: I’m lucky to mentor Maxine, who is fun-loving, curious, brave, hardworking, and inspiring. From our first session, we clicked and were surprised to learn how much we had in common. We’re both realistic fiction writers who value strong voices. We also discovered we were shy young girls (but shy no more!), and now we’ve planned to write a novel based on our real-life growth. Maxine’s vibrant and ambitious writing inspires me to think bigger about my own stories. Her natural talent for cultivating voice, creating characters, and pacing plot has taught me how to craft more imaginative and complex narratives.
Gone Boy
MAXINE BABB
This unfinished piece is outside my comfort zone, but I decided to be BOLD and voice it. It’s about a single mom with a secret. When her son gets curious, her problem becomes his problem.
My mother was doing that thing she did. That thing with the rag in the sink. She would always wait until I was sleeping, but one day I heard the sink running in the bathroom, and I just had to know. As soon as I heard the faucet turn on, I made my body as light as I could so that she couldn’t hear the squeaks from my rusty bedsprings rubbing together. I tiptoed my way to the half-open door, stood behind it, poked my head out, and looked both ways like I was crossing a street. I was so cautious. I’d never disobeyed my mom like this, but my curiosity got the best of me. I needed to know.
I walked all the way to the end of the long hallway where the bathroom was. When I got there, I put my body behind the doorway and poked my head around the door halfway, and that’s when I saw it.
My mom was cleaning blood off the rag. I knew if there was one thing she wanted to keep clean in this house it was the bathroom. She hated dirty bathrooms. My eyes widened in shock, and that’s when someone came from behind me and covered almost my entire face with their hand.
It had felt so long since I had been thrown into the dark vehicle. I thought it was a van, because there was a lot of space in the trunk. I think it was around three days since I’d seen daylight, because I was on my ninth meal. I felt around a little. It was lumpy and dusty, like no one had been in there in ages. Oh, yeah! And did I tell you about the great bucket they left for me to use the bathroom in? It was absolutely disgusting. Maybe I was a little spoiled from the bathroom I used in my house that my mom was obsessed with cleaning, but peeing in a bucket isn’t supposed to be normal, either.
One time we stopped at a gas station. I was so relieved. I remember thinking I was getting carsick. During the stop I heard one of the men talking. They said something that made my heart skip at least two beats. Their voices sounded so familiar. One’s voice was raggedy.
“Do you think Cathy will ever get out of this? I mean, I kinda feel bad we’ve been doing this ever since Martin died. The kid doesn’t even know what’s going on. We just shoved him into the van with nothing. No one. He must be scared out of his mind right now, for all we know!”
The other man seemed a little annoyed. “Look, man, we’ve been through this millions of times! We are getting paid for this. We’re lucky Marlon even wants our business at all after you went behind his back, and he still trusted you. Don’t tell me you’re getting second thoughts about this job. It’s too late to back out now. You’re too far in, and you know what Marlon does to his men that get second thoughts. Just think, at the end of all this you could be in Hawaii like you’ve always wanted, getting your tan on and visiting volcanoes.”
If you didn’t know, Cathy is my mother and Martin is my dead father. It’s okay, though. He died when I was three. I can barely remember him.
I still couldn’t wrap my head around what I did wrong, but then I actually started to wonder, “Is this why Mom always tells me to stay in my room even when I hear a noise?”
I remember hyperventilating in the van, wondering, “What the heck has my mom been into all my life?! What if my whole life is a lie?! Does my mom owe money …? I told her I didn’t want the new Jordans, and I didn’t want the new iPhone X, either. Are they gonna bury me in the desert, where no one can hear me? Are they gonna kill my mom?” I was totally freaking out. I almost lost my head that night.
When I was finally working up the courage to ask the two men—whom I could hear in front, one whose voice was raggedy and hoarse like he smoked a lot and the other who sounded a bit younger, midtwenties—where they were taking me, the car stopped and the doors swung open and I was blindfolded a few seconds after, but I was happy that I at least got to be outside again. The soft breeze on my face felt amazing, even if it was just for a few minutes, because something was telling me I wasn’t gonna be outside for long.
Once I was able to take the blindfold off, I
got pushed into the dark room by the driver, and that’s when I saw all the eyes staring at me from the dark.
Gone Boy
AGNES BANNIGAN
After playing a creative-writing brainstorming game, Maxine and I were inspired to collaborate on a dark and suspenseful story. This vignette explores a single mother’s guilt after sinister circumstances resulted in her son’s kidnapping.
That night, like so many before, I had trusted Chris to stay in his room. Even now, three years after we found him, my pulse still starts to pummel me as I remember it all. I had been no stranger to loss. Chris’s father, Martin, had left us for good when Chris was only three, and Martin’s ghost haunted my heart and frightened me into doing things I couldn’t undo. But nothing can prepare you for the terror and heartbreak of losing your child.
I know I will cry through this long confession, but I can start with one small truth.
I think I heard him that night. Chris. I think I knew he was out of his room. There was some noise that sounded exactly like what it was—like Chris opening his door, like his bare feet stepping into the hallway, like a sharp inhale, one he tried to stifle. But I had dropped my vigilance, for just a moment. I was exasperated and felt I deserved a break. So I took my tiny break, the duration of one breath in and one breath out, one slow blink, one squeeze of the scalding excess from the rag in the sink, blood running over my knuckles and snaking into the drain. I told myself that the noise could’ve been our missing cat coming back, could’ve been the radiator’s clank and hiss, could’ve been that rat between the walls. I told myself that it could not have been Chris, my good, good boy.
A long time ago, before I had Chris, I visited a girlfriend down south, the first single mother among our friends, and I watched her in that precipice at least once a day. I watched her at the diner, as she let the young couple with the new baby entertain her toddler son while she ignored him to consider the dingy menu above the counter. I watched her disappear behind a closed door, a bathtub running, while late-night party guests held her son in one hand, beer bottle in the other. I held him, too, and swigged my beer. I wasn’t a mother then.
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