Confluence

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Confluence
• Joy KMT (bio)

When I travel to the memories of my childhood, I can greet most of my plant friends by name. Crown vetch planted, no doubt, to stop the hillside erosion that might one day bring one house, built into a mountain, crashing down into the next. Hawthorn, whose branches made amazing weapons and wands. Dandelion, Plantain. White Clover, Red Clover, Queen Anne's Lace, Wild Oats. Rose and a smattering of Chicory. Maple and Burdock. Oak, mighty mighty Oak. Buttercup. Mulberry, Rose of Sharon with its little black bugs nesting in the bottom. Morning Glory snaking daintily around trellises and fences.

I can recall the friends and enemies I made with insects. Friends: Wooly caterpillar, sugar ants (sometimes, until there were too many of them) butterflies, lightnin bugs, potato bugs, katydids, praying mantises, grasshoppers, crickets, ladybugs. Enemies: anything stinging—sweat bees, honeybees, bumble bees, yellow jackets, wasps. Bee stings leave beauty marks on me; I have one above my lip, one on my index finger. Me and bees have come to a truce since my childhood. It was me who made them enemies, and me who mended the relationship. I cannot say the same about wasps.

I recall plump tomatoes from my nana's garden, sliced fresh and seasoned only with a bit of salt, tasting like new summer. My mother's violet, crimson, and fuchsia pansies planted in the thin strip of earth she was allotted in front of our townhouse in the projects. The watermelon man from down south with his trunk full of juicy watermelon posted down by the coliseum aided us in the wilting, non-air-conditioned July heat. Picking the low-hanging cherries with my brother in my nana's backyard and savoring each one on the back porch before seeing how far each tiny, hard pit could be spit with a satisfying crack on the concrete walkway. How we raced down hills, trusting the earth and our feet, our arms outstretched like wings, bidding the wind to carry us like Nike. Of course, the quintessential opening of the fire hydrants and the gush of coolness that followed. The rhythm of snapping string beans reminds me of my nana's hands. In the fall, we dodged and pelted one another with crab apples, traveled through foot paths carved into dense foresty patches, playing in the ravines and creeks until the streetlights came on, earlier and earlier.

A body can know a place, and a place can know a body. I don't just remember the wilds. I remember the salt box that sat outside our house for the neighborhood in the winter, right by the streetlight outside of my window that glowed like the moon in the fall when I went to bed. The Kaufmann's wooden escalator and fancy gilded bathrooms, especially near Christmastime. I remember tire screeches and gunshots, counting my distance from the gunshots like one would count the distance between thunderclaps. I remember "fuck" spraypainted on our patio door and the BB gun pellet shot through my mother's bedroom [End Page 40] window. I remember her Lane cedar chest and fall blankets. I remember polished wooden pews and the smell of hymnals at my nana's church. I remember the pool I never swam in because of the drownings, past the city steps and on the way to my elementary school. I remember the neighborhood celebrations of Fourth of July up Hilltop in Homewood with fireworks that rivaled the official downtown ones. I remember the Harambee festival and summer camp at the Homewood CCAC and Bethesda Presbyterian and later the Black Family Reunion.

I remember grinding beer bottle glass as a young child at the park behind the old Baxter Elementary after free summer lunch, trying to make sand, rivulets of blood flowing down my fingers from the failed attempt, and running to my nana's house, in tears. I remember skipping school as a teen and smoking weed in random trap houses with my friends, buying Newports from the machine uptop the O, WAMO's Juneteenth down at station square with my cutest daisy dukes on, and taking the 28X to the airport to hang out...