my knees release their stiffness and propel me to run. 
run away, girl. you don’t belong 
here.

there once was a time when words were holy ground, and Men would worship its feet like a false god, sacrificing themselves daily for something worth praising. Men would caress my skin, and grip firmly my jaw.

“Speak,” He ordered. 

my mouth released all its contents; every word, every syllable, and every idea flourished. everything i had was birthed into the atmosphere, the biggest explosion of the cosmos to occur in that century. i was an enigma of warrior’s wounds, accelerant of earthquakes. 

Helen had nothing on me, but Troy did.

He knew i was not worthy of being an idol. then, 

Murphy created His First Law. You know the one. 

Everything that can go wrong, will. 

thus, my words became a bunched basket of empty cradles. my teeth snarled at the aspirations of syllables, my tongue rolled into every other word like bowling pins, and my gums swelled at the idea of ideas – swelled at the idea of ever being heard

i became and remained just a poor little mute thing. 

finding this out, the Men stoned me, cracking every one of my words open. 
leaving them gaping,

massacring my words for the survival of their own, and soon

i forgot how to move, how to breathe, how to speak. 
my voice became formless, and my throat remained a barren well of
sult and blood – praying to one day ooze as its Ancestors did.

Here & Now: Girls Write Now 2024 Anthology

Do not read this book, unless you want to know what real humans are thinking. Taking poetic license to express things in ways that make AI fear it will be replaced by humans, the stories in these pages reflect the here and now: a collective urgency as the pandemic recedes, the world overheats, wars overwhelm, and the national discourse is conducted in a language far from love. In these pieces, cooking unites families, supermarkets become places of connection and adventure, neighbors evolve into mermaids as the sea levels rise, and every month nails are trimmed to cut down memory. The smallest gifts in life become impossible blessings of gratitude. There is a sense of battle with the norms and an understanding that things are not right, but they will be. This anthology is evidence of a future worth fighting for in which the long tradition of building community through the written word is upheld during the highs, lows, and everything in between.

read here & now

Process

After working for weeks with my Peer mentee, Asma Al-Masayabi, doing 10-minute free-write drills to prompts, we decided to write to the prompt: I’m afraid you’ll end up seeing me the way I see myself. I am unsure where this prompt was found; it was probably Pinterest. However, after reading Asma’s beautiful take on the prompt, I was encouraged and set on doing this prompt. One morning, on my way to school in the New York City subway system, I wrote a rough draft of the prompt, and from that point, I knew I struck gold.