My Mother Told Us Not To Have Children

She'd say, Never have a child you don't want.

Then she'd say, Of course, I wanted you


once you were here. She's not cruel. Just practical.

Like a kitchen knife. Still, the blade. And care.


When she washed my hair, it hurt; her nails

rooting my thick curls, the water rushing hard.


It felt like drowning, her tenderness.

As a girl, she'd been last


of ten to take a bath, which meant she sat

in dirty water alone; her mother in the yard


bloodletting a chicken; her brothers and sisters

crickets eating the back forty, gone.


Is gentleness a resource of the privileged?


In this respect, my people were poor.

We fought to eat and fought each other because


we were tired from fighting. We had no time

to share. Instead our estate was honesty,


which is not tenderness. In that it is

a kind of drowning. But also a kind of air.

Light (Excerpt)

When Enebeli Okwara sent his girl out in the world, he did not know what the world did to daughters. He did not know how quickly it would wick the dew off her, how she would be returned to him hollowed out, relieved of her better parts. Before this, they are living in Port Harcourt in a bungalow in the old Ogbonda Layout. Her mother is in America reading for a Masters in Business Administration. She has been there for almost three years in which her eleven-year-old bud of a girl has bloomed. Enebeli and the girl have survived much in her absence, including a disturbance at the market which saw him and the girl separated for hours while people stampeded, trying to get away from a commotion that turned out to be two warring market women who’d had just about enough of each other’s tomatoes. They survived a sex talk, birthed by a careless joke an uncle had made at a wedding, about the bride taking a cup of palm wine to her husband and leaving with a cup of, well, and the girl had questions he might as well answer before she asked someone who might take it as an invitation to demonstrate. They survived the crime scene of the girl’s first period, as heavy a bleeder as she was a sleeper, the red seeping all the way through to the other side of the mattress. They survived the girl discovering this would happen every month.

Three long years have passed and the girl is fourteen and there is a boy and he is why Enebeli is currently entrenched in what passes for the lobby to the headmaster’s office, a narrow hall painted a blaring glossy white meant to discourage the trailing of dirty child fingers but let’s be serious. He’s seated on the narrow bench meant for children and his adult buttocks find awkward purchase. The girl is in trouble for sending the boy a note and it is not the first time. Enebeli has seen the boy and, even after putting himself in the shoes of a fourteen-year-old girl, doesn’t see the appeal. The boy is a little on the short side. The boy has one ear that is significantly larger than the other. It’s noticeable. One can see the difference. Whoever cuts the boy’s hair often misses a spot so that it sticks up in uneven tufts. The only thing that saves the boy from Enebeli is that he seems as confused about the girl’s attention as everyone else.

Zerious Meadows was sentenced to life without parole at 17. Now, he's struggling with freedom

On Zerious Meadows’s last day in prison, he woke up at 4 a.m., as usual, because his cell mate works in the kitchen and leaves early to prepare breakfast. He listened to the radio — a station that plays R&B and rap from “the time when it had meaning” — and then went about distributing the last of the items he’d accumulated in 47 years behind bars.

Meadows, 63, gave his television to an 18-year-old who had just arrived at Macomb Correctional Facility, in New Haven, Michigan, and his radio to one of the older inmates. Someone asked why he didn’t sell the radio — it’s a large, solid one, unlike the ones the prison sells now, and he could have gotten as much as $200. Meadows had no use now for what passes as prison currency: “I didn’t want to be paid in potato chips or whatever other commissary items,” he said.

He gave away his dark blue prison uniforms, jackets, sweatshirts, and T-shirts, but kept the underwear he’d recently purchased, to wear under the clothes his sister Pamela had bought him.

And then, he waited.

When I met with Meadows on the night of November 13, just hours before his scheduled release, he seemed at once calm and nervous. He would not look at me directly, beyond a passing glance, and instead often looked at his impeccably shined black shoes. He hadn’t eaten all day, and his head hurt — “probably from the stress,” he said. He listed all the things he planned to do the next day — see his family, including the many nieces, nephews, and their children, some of whom he had never met. His mother was going to cook one of his favorite things — a turkey leg — and he just wanted to have some time alone with her. But he didn’t want to dream too hard, in case it didn’t happen, because this was the second time he’d been promised his freedom.

“When I go home, I just want to sit on the floor up against the couch next to my mother,” he said. “But I won’t believe it’s happening until I walk out those doors.”

Meadows was never supposed to get out of prison. In 1971, he was sentenced to life without parole, charged with throwing a Molotov cocktail into a house on Lemay Street, about a mile west of the Detroit River, and setting it on fire. Two children died in the fire, 12-year-old Ruth Taylor and her 4-year-old sister, Regina. Meadows was just 16 when he was arrested and 17 when he was sentenced.

The United States in the only country that sentences minors to life in prison without parole. In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled in Miller v. Alabama that mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles were unconstitutional. In January 2016, the Supreme Court tackled the case of retroactivity, ruling in favor of Henry Montgomery, who was sentenced to life for a crime he committed in 1963, when he was 17, and allowing the approximately 1,500 people who were sentenced before 2012 a chance at release.

Full of Worry Ending With My Birth

I worry that my friends

will misunderstand my silence


as a lack of love, or interest, instead

of a tent city built for my own mind,


I worry I can no longer pretend

enough to get through another


year of pretending I know

that I understand time, though


I can see my own hands; sometimes,

I worry over how to dress in a world


where a white woman wearing

a scarf over her head is assumed


to be cold, whereas with my head

cloaked, I am an immediate symbol


of a war folks have been fighting

eons-deep before I was born: a meteor.