The third time M sees an ad for The Shirt drift by on her feed, she buys it. Everyone’s been wearing it, or at least everyone that matters: the blonde swimsuit model who just got back from Mallorca, the brunette always posing with her pair of teacup dogs, even the redhead perpetually running in kaleidoscopic wildflower…
Outside of its size, the first thing you notice about Tristan is how quiet it is when it moves. I had always assumed before my first pilgrimage, when the news choppers would stalk it for us viewers at home, that each of its massive trunk- like legs would make the Earth quiver and shake. I couldn’t…
They’d found her body in an empty field. A piece of her denim on a barbed wire fence. Her white handbag under a tree in the Cherokee National Forest, its kisslock loosely pecked. Days earlier, she’d begged me for ten dollars. I knew it’d go to the man who usually stood across the street watching us, but I cashed it out of my register and handed her the money. She looked ragged and tired, like she’d been running through the woods all night. Her arms were covered in scratches. I imagined her in danger and she suddenly became “Jessica.” When I first met her, she said that would be her horror movie name: Jessica. She said she might not make it all the way to the end of the movie—axe-beaten and swollen, blood on the brain—but she would at least be one of the final characters to die. You would definitely die in the first scene, she said. I didn’t want to believe her, but I feared she was right. She leaned across the bagging area while she talked, and my coworkers left their registers to come listen. There was no one in the store that time of day anyway.
You’re wrong about me, I said, and I tried to talk my movie character’s station up. I’d seen enough horror movies to know that the good girls made it through. The girls who had sex, the girls who smoked pot or got drunk in the basement, the girls whose boobs you saw while they changed clothes in front of a mirror—those girls were the first to die. I’ll be okay, I said.
Jessica did not agree. You’re too nice, she said. My coworkers, on the other hand, were tougher, and she thought some of them might survive but most would only make it about half-way through the movie. They were farm girls, girls from hollers. Girls whose fathers taught them how to throw a punch without telegraphing.
We were all impressed by Jessica. The loose men’s pants, the tiny tank top, all the rings she wore. The blue bandana around her neck. The homemade tattoo behind her ear. At first, we wondered if she was a thru-hiker. Middleton was a secret oasis on the Tennessee section of the Appalachian Trail, and MidMart was the only grocery store in town. We saw a lot of hikers, but Jessica didn’t carry a backpack, only a small white purse that she wore across her body. And she stayed around longer than any thru-hiker I’d met.
Over the next few weeks, Jessica began coming in early, just after the morning meeting when all the managers had headed back to their offices, to chat. We talked about horror movies, about the Poltergeist and Exorcist curses, the people who died or almost died, and about Jason Voorhees’s mother. One day I asked her about her own mother. Jessica didn’t look old enough to be on her own. She married her boyfriend, she said, and kicked me out.
We noticed Jessica wore the same two outfits over and over and every day that same blue bandana, so we all started donating to what we called the “Jessica Cause.” We gave her our old clothes and our books. We gave her lipstick and tampons, and a little of our money every payday.
But then she stopped coming around. We waited. We watched for her brown ponytail, her spaghetti straps through the sliding glass door. The man from across the street was gone. When the officers came in for Cokes just before they started their shifts, we always asked them about Jessica. That was the only name we had for her. They knew who we were talking about, but they never had news. We didn’t know for sure, but we got the feeling they weren’t really looking. But we didn’t stop. We kept watching for her blue bandana, her soft gait down the aisles. I’d stand behind my register, feeling transparent to the shoppers and my coworker, and twist the heart pendant on the necklace my mother had given me for Christmas. I’d twist it until I felt my fingertip purpling.
Then one day the officers said they’d found her. They told us she’d bled out. Later, one of the girls had to explain to me, Bleeding out means you bleed until you die.
We talked about Jessica all that day, but then much less in the days that followed.
All summer, I picked up shifts no one wanted and followed my parents around the house. Helped my mother repaint the living room. Chopped vegetables with my father for the stews he made. I dreaded being alone. I wanted anything other than to remain alone and unseen, hidden away in my bedroom. What had caused her to bleed out? There had to be an instrument somewhere that fit her wounds precisely. And the person who used it was still out there.
That fall, I would be going away to college, and I knew what sometimes happened to college girls—how quickly walking across campus at night could turn into its own kind of horror movie. I thought about Jessica’s prediction for me, my fingers rubbed raw from twisting my locket. I couldn’t stop seeing Jessica dying in that field alone at night. I could feel the blue of the stars above and the thin night air. I could see Jessica agape in the pale summer grasses, the dirt soft under her nails, the blood pooling under her shirt.
I twisted the locket, cinching it tight around my fingertip until a numbness came, until my hand felt as invisible as Jessica was, long before she’d been killed.
My client wakes at eight on Sunday, so that’s when I appear in his doorway. The schedule says he has two hours of Mr. Yazoo time before he needs to get to Mandarin lessons. We eat our usual breakfast of gluten-free, high-protein, extra-calcium cereal. Despite its professed lack of sugar, he’s doing his I’m-wired-and-want-to-play dance in…
Daughters of Ma-ao grew like stalks of rice, best left to fester in pools of rainwater. Tsoy will only pluck them out, when they begin to gourd on the dirt. Flies feed on the mud burying their bulbs into the plants whose roots blister. Stalks can also thrive in the heat, swollen, until the sun…
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DOCTOR’S OFFICE – DAY There are no windows. PATIENT, a 25-year-old woman, sits on an exam table, alone, clutching the end of the table and wincing. The room has one computer. On the screen is a patient file that is too far away and too oddly angled for the patient to see that it says…
Yellow Medicine Review showcases the works of Indigenous writers and artists, both emerging and renowned. The journal takes its name from the Yellow Medicine River running through southwest Minnesota, a place where all peoples—Indigenous and settler alike—came together to dig for the root of a medicinal plant that grew along the riverbank. It brought healing. Such is the spirit of Yellow Medicine Review. Each issue is guest edited by a different Indigenous writer, and submissions come strictly from an Indigenous perspective. It is a journal created by Indigenous peoples and not a journal about Indigenous peoples, so that authentic and contemporary voices replace harmful stereotypes and misconceptions.
Admonish and relish little cobbled quayside The home pleasant locus of Iroquoian costume The warrior of social disintegration still standing as her old people walk abroad, may be used to a relaxing politics gist Inexorably annexed from Zapotecan culture we see “Spanish-style” grow in-line and have complicated feelings about what that means, standing still as the old people walk abroad, maybe used to a black sapote, red sapote, marmalade sapote Mami Americana, Mammy in Cuba, Mama from Buenos Aires to Santa Fe to Santa Fe to Santa Fe There are at least three Santa Fe in Colombia Holy faith wherever you look, in a conquered land Where clothes become costumes Where we are consumed A reduction Half the world in five stanzas and marmalade trees.
from Beaded Mask
2015
seed beads, deer hide, ermine, and ribbons on Iraqi gas mask 9 1/2 x 7 1/2 x 6 1/2 in.
lent by the Tweed Museum
Naomi Bebo, Ho-Chunk and Menominee
one of 15 featured works in a 2022 exhibit, “Air,” to protest pollution
Utah Museum of Fine Arts
Salt Lake City, Utah
The gas mask was for the smoke from burning oil fields. He tells her.
They set their own fields on fire in defiance.
And the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke—
when day was night, and night was without moon and stars.
She travels through pokeweed for the relic of an old war.
Her headlight steady.
She drives her needle through small holes in the beads.
She finds the tunnels she ties with thread.
She remembers the beaver. The badger. The wolf.
The thick lakes and forest of the north woods.
She knows distant fires spread remnants of ash on the road.
She beads the gas mask white as frost on sycamores with sparse floral pattern—
a vine and leaves.
Men don’t like to get forgotten Women, expect it the illusion of noise is created, it’s easy to fake it what makes a generation devoid of apathy/compassion Children left unchallenged unable to focus without ambition Big Auntie Energy is where I live this love is why I write look at me in protected stance arms spread apart like wings for you, you don’t even know... layers of boundaries built to move in freedom within them the lack of distraction becomes your legacy not forced responses to questions so stupid so putrid yes stupid Journey as achievement blind to the binaries of Sexes characteristics still exist, but different show me an Uncle who didn’t evolve from Knowledge and Instincts to support good Women around him and the Children bring me into circles of creative beings who listen committed to connections at all costs no sacrififice, no such thing but constant Investment who cares who, really cares find us in the middle of roads hoisting signs high above us reading, Give it ALL back Damn that thing that makes activism fashion and those who practice it, popular perhaps we need to wait just a while more for politics to truly intersect with influence, and influence becomes a pinnacle of change Big Cosmic Energies on the move simultaneous urgings of keep up, and wait and if we get forgotten in the end, we’ll dust off our stories because our voices didn’t get the attention our egos won’t feel the sting of insult because of it it means we’ve moved on the kids will be what they be the state of Indigeneity will be, we are here briefly as men and women and all others are healing from life to goddamn life we are here witnessing, participating in the fluidity of our times.
It’s all in the smile. If they smile back, you got them hooked. They smile back, they’re already wondering what your tits look like under that dress, or whether you do anal. You’re thinking “not all men.” But the “nots” don’t matter, you’re not there for the nots. You’re there for the ones who smile back…
I heard someone say there are no more ghosts in West Texas. That the oilmen drained them all from the ground when they built the derricks that dot the desert plains. I don’t think this is quite true. I see the edges of their bright plastic hats and leather-palmed gloves around every run-down corner in Odessa,…
An Interview with Kelly Sue DeConnick Kelly Sue DeConnick is a comic writer and editor whose credits include Avengers Assemble, Captain Marvel, Pretty Deadly, Bitch Planet, Wonder Woman Historia: ThThe Amazons and many more. She is an outspoken and ardent advocate for expanded opportunities for women, LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and other marginalized populations within the comic book industry. Kelly Sue started the…
Flexibility: • the ability to bend easily or without breaking • the quality of being easily adapted or of offering many different options • the ability and willingness to adjust one’s thinking or behavior My first memory is a grasping, hard hand on my upper arm. Anger powering through my mother’s fingers, leaving bruises on and…