no contact/i tasted hell and it wasn't so bad
by DYLAN AASHA
in Spring 2024
Julia Mallory, this (porous) aftermath is an internal geography (“Maroon Choreography” series #2), 2021, acrylic on unstretched canvas, 7 in. x 9 in.
no contact
nothing can prepare you to be without a mother in this mundane home we’re all trapped in. to never have a home within the vessel you lived in for nine months, or in my case seven. I never truly got a chance to mourn you because you showed me how sharp your teeth were when I still lived on your milk, you are still a bruise I nurse and analyze. Your fingerprints on my skin are a story I’m still too scared to translate. I know your mother was a wicked tight thing and you cry for her once a year when you light a cigarette and every year I ask myself if I’ll forgive you but to forgive you I'd be complacent in all the ways you killed me before I truly took a breath. I miss you. I miss you. when I succeed because I know you’d be proud of me in your way; squeezing your nails into my shoulder as a teacher praises me. That was never what you were expecting to hear; that the child you killed the moment she stepped into your home was somehow still a defiant growing thing trying to become more than the roots we were given. I believed I would share this gift with you. I'd buy you a dark green house because that’s your favorite color and make you a garden because I saw you crying over the watermelons in t&t before we got back on the plane. I will always love you but I can never forgive you for feeding me to such big wolves without so much as a knife or an ‘i love you’. we will have to watch one another grow from different sides of the city.
i tasted hell and it wasn't so bad
I once had a mother whose laugh was so beautiful people mistook it for music, her laugh was so contagious if you didn’t join her with a shy chuckle you couldn’t hide a smile. I had a mother who cried happy tears into her husband’s lips when they discovered she was pregnant. They were scared but they were excited, motherhood was an adventure they would go on together. The mother they created was one of the best, she was the one who sang out love, and handed people flowers. I also had a mother who cried when she was sad, when she was angry–when the news reported a death or accident. She cried when she was happy too, when her children started a new hobby, when they told her they loved her, when they thanked her. I had a mother who lost her husband too early and it was the first time she was ever truly alone and the first time the child holding her hand heart broke in two different ways. It broke for the family she lost and the mother who dug her nails into her hand like claws and never held her like a daughter again. I had a mother who cried as she left her island with bright skies, hot rain and the fullest moons for America. I once had a mother who studied her citizenship test on the three train, the book sat atop her belly that swelled like a full moon, holding l one of my mothers. To the son she hoped she was having, she whispered “you will be my new beginning” to the daughter she feared she whispered “I will pour hell into you”
Aasha is a writer and artist living in New York City.