by Mikaela Brewer for The 44 North
Senior Editor
Please note: this short story discusses targeted violence and death. It may activate folks with similar lived experiences, beyond what feels safe to spend time with. Please engage with this story how/whenever it feels safe for you.
For a preface to what’s been transpiring in the U.S., please read this article by Gillian Smith-Clark, our Editor-in-Chief.
***
“I’ll say it again and again: trauma is not what happens to us, it is the space between us.”
—Erotics of Liberation, “Accountability is not moral achievement but somatic capacity”
They say that in the last seven minutes of brain activity, approaching death, a person re-experiences their whole life. Others say it’s just surges of memory and awareness. Me? I’m a writer. At least half of my life happens in my head with characters I’ve never met. But they’re the residue of not only people I’ve known, but people I’ve passed in life—on streets, at schools, in restaurants. Mothers, poets, fathers, cooks. So I say, why not?
In some way, I know Renée Nicole Good, Keith Porter, and Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, because so many others did. Because ‘I’ is such a falsity, sometimes. It’s lonely before it grows branches into the ‘T’ of ‘Tree’ or ‘Together’ or ‘Truth.’
We breathe in what trees breathe out. And we walk and run. We’ve breathed in one another.
With that breath, I imagine Silverio’s seven minutes. Even in his focused severity, he relives the moment he dropped his two children off at day care and school. At each place, he does the same thing: moves their dark hair from their foreheads with a warm palm, and places a kiss. I picture him first learning to cook, maybe from a family member. Perhaps he remembers the scented smoke in a kitchen with windows overlooking beautiful Michoacán on the Pacific Ocean. I see his fingerprints across kitchen utensils in a restaurant near Franklin Park. His careful, responsible hands make art for eleven hours, and then, in the sixth minute, reach back to his children.
And after seven minutes, the world is without another father.
In her poem, “In the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice so I don’t lose my fingernails. But I took a risk today to write this down,” Andrea Gibson writes:
“I know how to build a survival shelter / from fallen tree branches, packed mud, / and pulled moss. I could survive forever / on death alone. Wasn’t it death that taught me / to stop measuring my lifespan by length, / but by width?”
Width. I imagine the width of Keith’s heart beat, soul, and smile. He relives meeting his best friend, Adrian, in 1996 as a teenager. He hears his nickname echoing, “Pooter!” He sees the laughter and life his jokes brought to parties, the students he supported, and the teens he helped Adrian foster parent when he was only in his twenties. Two beautiful girls’ faces sparkle for him here, as they always have. There are Dodgers games and rich conversations with God and family. In the sixth minute, his spirit never broke—love kept repairing any cracks.
And after seven minutes, the world is without another father.
“The role of us poets is to witness the world,” writes Danez Smith in “An Elegy for My Neighbor, Renee Nicole Good.” But it’s the role of everyone.
I see Renée crafting her award-winning poem, “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” which won the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2020. She relives the sparks of that better life in Minneapolis—maybe a drive from Kansas City with her wife, Becca, and her youngest son. The wind is warm and made of dreams. I see her feeling the joy, vibrancy, and safety of new friends and community—felt because she helped make it real. I imagine she ventures through moments with Timmy before his death, her second husband’s love. And her three children’s lives, like the once disparate strands now a fierce braid, tether together the expanse of her life. She revisits the moment, perhaps on a soft couch after school, where she and Becca taught their kids to “believe that no matter where you come from or what you look like, all of us deserve compassion and kindness.” In the sixth minute, she’s smiling. The sunshine she radiated is returned to her, and she feels its glow: every moment she stood up for others.
And after seven minutes, the world is without another mother.
Minneapolis, LA, and Chicago keep fighting amid the plummeting temperatures—the coldest we’ve seen in a long time. They will not be frozen. Together, they’re warmest. And we must keep the fire burning against what freezes; against the threat of ice build-up on bodies, hearts, and minds.
Laura Gilpin’s “The Two-headed Calf” reads:
And then, years later, Matthew Dawkins writes, “Even two-headed, the calf is mourned.”
Who is called two-headed? And targeted as such?
Maybe the two-headed are the people most balanced by two heads. That is to say, those who hold much more than themselves.
And what a beautiful thing this is. ICE may have killed one head. But beneath twice as many stars to navigate with, there’s another. And it’s always been us—each other, right now.
***
Resources
Recommended: Take Action Against ICE - A Comprehensive Guide by Reimagined News
F*ck Your Fascism by Sean Sherman
Renee Nicole Good Is Murdered by Cornelius Eady
Share the Cold: What Penguins Teach us about Survival—and What We Owe Each Other Now by Karli Elizabeth, PHD(C), originally published on Substack & reprinted on The 44 North with the kind permission of the author.
FCI Refugee Centre: Breaking Barriers: Services and resources for undocumented Torontonians and precarious migrants
Canvas Programs: Undocumented, Refugee, Newcomer, and Immigrant Services
