The internet is now old enough for online literary magazines
to have a memory of 9/11. Magazines
across the globe watched as the towers fell. More online magazines
sprang up from their rubble, the massive chunks of their busted concrete
sucked up by the magazines’ roots. We were all terrified
and in the face of that terror, some people printed T-shirts
that showed Osama Bin Laden getting a missile shoved up his ass
and some people wrote poems during high school algebra.
Me, writing poems and arguing with Mrs. Reese in the afternoon
of September 11th: she couldn’t know how the planes met the towers.
She was such a racist, the mother of my neighbor who fed us dinner
all the time because my parents were never home, and I
had just turned 15. I am still struggling to reconcile the tenderness
morally abject people regularly show me, still, to this day. As a 15-year-old
in Ohio, it was a given that I would be constantly surrounded
by far-right sectarians. The possibility of avoiding them
never even occurred to me. Now, working for my literary magazine
at a university, all systems of domination are more insidious.
Some people don’t see them at all (faculty). But—none of this matters,
in terms of storytelling. What you really need to know: I didn’t
lose my virginity until I was 19. Does that help? But who was I
going to fuck from my high school, honestly? Back then,
there was no one acceptable to whom I might open my legs.