The Talk
1. Thirteen is the year I have to teach him things I don’t want for him to know. You think I mean sex, but that is easy next to the raw lessons every boy with dark skin has to learn. Wear your baseball cap face-forward at the mall. No, you’re not imagining that when you look at clothes, salesclerks shadow you. Don’t shop there. Stop when the officer says stop. Don’t reach for your wallet. Don’t make any sudden moves. He might think you have a weapon and shoot first. My son’s incredulous: “But I don’t have a gun. So, wouldn’t he be punished, wouldn’t he have to go to jail for that?” I make my voice as cruel as I can: “How will that help you when you’re dead?” 2. This afternoon he and a white kid from the team were playing horse. The court was empty, but it wasn’t their neighborhood. Four older guys took great offense. One had a knife that he kept opening and closing. In the end, they beat my boy and his friend unconscious. When the cops came, one thought he recognized my son, a boy whose greatest crime so far is talking in study hall. “I remember you. Last week we had you in for auto theft.” The first doctor lied when he said re-setting a broken nose wasn’t going to hurt. But our own doctor, a priest at heart, cleaned the concrete grit out of the scrapes, with a mournful tenderness: “It happened to me too. I got off the bus in the wrong place. I thought speaking Spanish would save me, but I was wrong.” My son is silent, trying not to flinch when the doctor touches the worst places. 3. I tell him sleep will help but he’s afraid of dreaming. Sleep by me, I say, although it’s been years and years since nightmares drove him to his mother’s bed. He decides that it’s OK just to rest here for a while, and puts his sleeping bag on top of the covers, on what used to be his father’s side. We leave the light on. In a whisper he recalls that just before he slipped into unconsciousness, he heard them talking about his shoes, and whether they were worth taking. They were not. To him, this is another badge of shame. 4. I have no brothers. His father is gone to a new wife, a new son. I don’t know how to show him how to be a man who sees things as they are, yet still is whole, upright, able to live without rage or shame. All night long I look at him, the bruise on his temple, the boot mark on his ribs, and thank the powers that let him live, that brought him back to his mother’s bed just this once. It isn’t often that you know the last time is the last time, but this time I do.
Salome Aging
I don't dance for men anymore, but sometimes the younger women ask me to show them the way we danced then when all we had were curve of hip and silk to get us our pleasure. Or revenge. I've made the old symbols mean something new – the scarves not something to hide behind, but to be given up gladly – illusions stripped away like our beliefs in men. Slowly we know them incapable of justice, compassion and (what was surely obvious) of love. At the end, I am dancing almost naked, left only with a cloth that could not cover anyone. Rather than let it fall, I drape it a across my hair, my eyes, and gaze through the last veil at the women watching.
Sharon Hoffmann is a 75-year-old writer–mostly retired–based in Atlantic Beach, Florida, where she lives with her husband Michael and her rescue dog Ma Rainey. In the 1970s and 80s, she worked with Kalliope, a journal of women’s art, serving as ME for four years. She began publishing poetry and interviews. In the 1990s, she became a full-time journalist and stopped submitting poetry for publication, although she continued to write. In 2023, after a three-decade hiatus, she “re-emerged” and began to submit work again. Recent magazine publications include The Hooghly Review, Paddler Press, South Florida Poetry Journal, Letters, Poetica, Wild Roof, Sho, Qu and Remington Review. Her work is also set to appear in two anthologies, Of Their Own Accord and Signed, Sealed, Delivered: Motown Music. Awards include fellowships from Atlantic Center for the Arts and Florida’s Division of Cultural Affairs, two Arts Ventures grants and two Pushcart nominations. Her favorite fictional villain is Moriarty, particularly as played by the extremely dishy Andrew Scott in the recent Sherlock series with Benedict Cumberbatch. Sherlock’s investigations would be lackluster without an equally brilliant antagonist.
