by Tamuira Reid
The left is now rationing life-saving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating, just denigrating white people to determine who lives and who dies. In fact, in New York state, if you’re white, you have to go to the back of the line to get medical help. If you’re white, you go right to the back of the line. —Donald Trump, January 2022
*In Memory of Neema J. (1945- 2020)
One
Neema could sing. Really sing. Thick songs with smooth edges, full of blood memory and knowing. I pressed my ear against the floorboards of our new apartment, the one we would shelter in during the height of a pandemic we didn’t know was coming. In-between moving boxes and piles of books, I lay listening, pressing my palms flat to the ground. The steam pipes rattling alive with each husky note.
Neema was also crazy, people in the building would tell me, in hushed, apologetic tones. “Not right in the head.” “Not all there.” “Gone.”
“Dementia,” the Super said flatly, after I called him in the middle of the night, called about the smell of something burning beneath me, one floor down. The smell of a slow burn, a deep burn. A castiron skillet left unattended for hours burn. Neema’s mind had become a slippery slope where important details often fell to the wayside.
Singing never left her, even as her mind closed shop. Songs took root like trees in her belly.
I learned if I turned the lights off, I could hear her better. Read more »