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Losing my father Ola Osaze I crossed the threshold of the American border on a sunny Fall day in 1991, not too long after yet another military-backed coup rocked Nigeria. The riots and subsequent government-sanctioned reprisals meant more school closures, curfews, harassment, and abuse at the hands of police for indeterminate lengths of time. It also meant more killings. As we walked through the tarmac of the Greensboro, North Carolina airport, my mother clutched my 15-year-old sweaty hand in her cold dry one. Approaching the queue for customs where we would declare our possessions for inspection, a prominent sign on display caught our attention. The bright green and white colors of my country’s flag read, “Beware of Nigerian Drug Smugglers.” And just like that, we were placed crudely into the reality of racism in America. Many of us leave our African homes with our hearts brimming with optimism and our heads filled with delusions about what these American places will make possible. What we find instead, as Africans in America, are deep struggles for economic survival in the midst of an ever-evolving and complicated sense of racial and ethnic identity. For queer and transgender Africans living in the...

Nonfiction

NONFICTION: Take, Eat by RJ Eldridge

Apogee Journal

14 Oct 2015

Take, Eat RJ Eldridge The Corrector in my mind tells me Just be straightforward. Tell about how the big things we don’t earn make the little things distant. Lately, I can’t feel what my words gesture to. Lately, I don’t know what’s real. I’m supposed to look at what’s right in front of me. Stand before my own reflection and say I am. What does it matter what I say I am? Say I’m a writer. Say I’m an artist. Say I’m a black, a man. Say I’m a mouse, a dog. I don’t know if I want to be human. If human is enough. I dream. I go to sleep and the images come. Same as all men, and all mice. I am nothing new. What’s new, or at least what seems new, is the gap between me and my self. Between what light does with a form I call mine, and my body’s pure vernacular. Between the me I am, and the me I believed I’d be. I’m in a dark that feels cold to my skin. I’m supposed to be here. I suppose I am here. I may be another, in another place. You want...

Nonfiction

NONFICTION: What I Want to Say by Nancy Jooyoun Kim

Apogee Journal

12 Oct 2015

What I Want to Say Nancy Jooyoun Kim I call my mother twice a week. Now that she’s retired—no longer hanging women’s clothes in the small swapmeet shop she owned for over 20 years—I worry that maybe she’s lonely. I live in Seattle, and she’s in Los Angeles. Maybe she’s sitting in her house waiting for my sister and I to come home, as if we were children who had just gone off to school one morning—our backpacks full of notepads and stickers and sandwiches—and never came back. When I worry about her, the worst of my imagination takes over. I see her dying in the driver’s seat of a half blown-up car, Universal-Studios style, with an animatronic Godzilla hovering overhead, breathing fire mechanically out of its great mouth. I see her as the child in the red coat in Schindler’s List. Or, like in those commercials that make you think of the elderly as completely vulnerable, utterly broken (opinionless) birds, I see her fallen—and she can’t get up. Basically, I call her because I want to know that she is not dead. It’s a tremendous feeling really. That fear. You don’t actually want to talk to...