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a space for youth writing on mental health & identity
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a space for youth writing on mental health & identity
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![]() [Content warning: mentions of suicide, strong language] After Kevin Coval. For Shlomo. Aba means Father. i. my manhood was a notebook full of suicide letters and a dictionary of people shaped into fiction and lavender. my manhood was lyric dug into every grave next to my grandfather’s, it was the tombstone woven into the soil like god had became human. suddenly, soon i knew that my manhood became desperate and wanted to vacate humanhood. my manhood was suburbia, i just hadn’t found it yet; my manhood was shlomo not aba, his manhood was predator, my manhood felt like the day he died sometimes i wish i had spat in aba’s eyes when he would tell me that shlomo’s manhood
was a mocking of his family. although the devil wasn’t something he brought up often, the colonialism in aba’s bones was meticulous enough for him to refer to his homeland as sinful restless; the bar mitzvah ceremony had just begun. it was springtime. my hands shaky when i woke up, i smelled pepper pirouetting with a coffee bean ii. asleep, i remembered looking at the north star thinking shlomo had touched the moon. foolish me, sometimes i mixed up venus with the north star, and i couldn’t remember if it was leukemia or a heart attack foolish me thinking that my friends wouldn’t raise their arms grazing their ears head down, trying not to laugh and getting death stares from my jewish-girl crush. foolish me thinking aba would be around much longer, or when i wonder what would’ve happened if he stayed a while iii. perhaps my masculinity was dissected when i spoke. or maybe it was when the fervor in my throat had risen, therefore the ideas gulped inside me had choked on the breath off of the tongue the dentist holds plastics, and soon my lips strung a lisp from the retainer. the plaque rips gums how my molars used to thaw out the pink of it with blood. my teeth were a neighborhood gentrified to construct the perfect skyline. built with the slang of aba’s generation on the forms of a proper jewish boy in puberty. my grandpa was woodstock mixtapes when on deathbed and peach pits near the get better soon cards. or dreams of boning joan rivers, or allen ginsberg: fuck the jews, no jew intended, no entendre intended. it leaks like gas puns sting like needles aba carved out my sephardic and pitted my ashkenazi against him, foolish aba for telling me that the word Palestine had no place in our home, because he said it is nowhere. foolish shlomo for marrying safta who refused his birthplace, lay sephardic, he did— in a home with a wife who did not accept his masculinity iv. foolish me, for thinking a bar mitzvah would do the trick. a bar mitzvah would do the trick, wanting to treat me as if a bar mitzvah means i serve israel. foolish aba, for denying the Black in Moses, Mohammed Pakistan for Allah silent crimson in the Dead Sea. the only other place in the world that could be called the four corners israel cornered colonies or in other words, colonizers, also known as, trump allies, also known as, netanyahu, also known as, benny gantz, also known as the jews of Palestine when i close my eyes, i liberate, because my manhood is aba-less, and left to deal with his toxicity through his diaspora, scurrying through every memory trying to find the one about his suicide, in every moment, suddenly, i'm a fool (sheani tipesh) Comments are closed.
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September 2023
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