We started MU Voices in 2009 to reflect the myriad voices in the diverse and colorful Madonna community. In the fall 2013 issue of MU Voices, you'll see beautiful photography by Marian Gonsior, Betty Jean Hebel, and Cheryl Pullen. You'll read evocative poetry by Matt Tochman, Josh Bloom, David Laing, Sharonna Johnson, and more. You'll also experience disturbing but powerful essays by Valerie Sawyers, Aron Walls, and Hannah Faber, to name a few.
Please feel free to post encouraging comments to our writers and photographers. We all benefit from an appreciative audience. You can comment on this blog if you have a Google account such as gmail.
If you have not contributed to MU Voices, please consider doing so for our winter 2014 issue (deadline: March 14). We accept poetry, song lyrics, fiction, creative non-fiction, plays, reflections, artwork (as long as it's scanned and sent electronically), photographs, and even video links. We'd love to include an even broader swathe of our Madonna family. Every voice matters.
Frances FitzGerald, editor
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Aron's Journey, by Aron Walls
Is
what you consider normal actually normal? I lived where people stayed up all
night blasting rap music and police never came; where in the morning I would
find bullet remains on my grass. Well, this is my city: Detroit. My name is
Aron and all I want to know is why did my life have to turn out like that? The
thing is, my life was anything but normal. Growing up I was never really a good
kid in school.
I
turned so corrupt that the same day my mom would put me back in school after a suspension,
I would be walking home with another suspension within a matter of hours. As I
walked home, all I thought about was how powerful I felt fighting and nothing
else. When this kept happening, my mother had gotten tired of me and gave up on
me being anything in life. I just never cared about her feelings; all I just
wanted was to be remembered for the good I did or the bad. Even when she gave
up on me, she still punished me, for my mistakes, and when she got tired of
punishing me, she started calling my uncle. My Uncle Nig was stronger than her.
My uncle, who worked all day lifting steel, would not only punish me by chasing
me around his house, swinging a belt at me and not caring where it hit, but he
also cut off my braids..jpg)
It
wasn’t until 10th grade that I made a change. I was sitting at one of my acquaintances’
house, doing nothing. I don’t know why I was thinking about him, but all I
could think about was my granddad. All I could think about was him making fun
of me, laughing at me, taunting me.
In
school I would always get into an altercation that would end with me on a trip
home with a short-term suspension in my hand. My mother would always beat me
with a belt for getting into trouble, and I would promise never to get into
trouble again, knowing I was lying. The thing about me was I always wanted to
be the cool kid, or the tough guy. I had no friends and no one showed even the
slightest sign that they wanted to be my friend. So I decided to be the tough
guy. I then thrived to become the guy everyone feared.
He
and my mother kept giving me bad haircuts just to punish me. I would be so embarrassed
that I did not want to go to school, walk out of the house, or even look at my
family members. I hated my uncle for a long time, and felt as if he took away
my manhood and my pride.
What
they never realized in my family was that I
was bullied. I hated how I had to defend my pride at school, just to come home
and have it taken away. Because of that pride I tried so hard to defend, I
failed a grade. Yet every day, I still acted tough, as if nothing was wrong.
Every
day I went to school, and I had no friends and very few acquaintances. The few
people who talked to me would only talk about video games for a short period of
time. People who wanted to prove they were better than me would taunt me. They
threw bars of wet soap from the restroom at my face, pushed me in the hallways,
call me names, and even spit on me. All I did was give people what I felt they
had coming. I believed I was the punishment they deserved and received. I was getting hit at school, just to
come home and get hit again. I hated my mother and my uncle for a long time.
All I thought about day in and day out was killing them for not understanding.
As
time went by, my hatred grew. Day in and day out for years, all I saw was my
uncle beating me for getting into trouble. After a while, I grew to despise
him. His very existence enraged me. Every time I looked at my uncle, I was
enraged and felt as if I was going to die if I did not take him down. All I
could smell was my blood when he was around, but I also felt as if as if I was worthless.
I felt like I was nothing compared to him, and I knew that it was the truth. I
say this because I knew I could not win and I knew that physically I was weaker
than him, and because of this I hated myself even more than I hated him.
When
I entered high school, things went even further downhill from there. During the
first week of school I already had people who hated my guts, but I never really
cared. Within the first couple of weeks
I had gained some acquaintances from all different grade levels. By the time
the third month of school came, I was hustling snacks with them, charging
everyone outside of my group double what I had paid. One day a guy named Ice stole
some of the snacks and ran while I was talking to a teacher. What he did not
realize was that I was angered easily. My acquaintances and I found him in a
bathroom stall and beat him until we saw blood.
During
my 9th grade year, all I did was fight and skip school. Almost every day I was supposed
to be at school I was ether at the mall, downtown, or at my friend’s house
playing video games. My grades were so low, my cumulative GPA for 9th grade was
around a 1.0 on a 4 point grading scale. When I did get suspended for fighting
I had to stay home, take a thrashing from my mother or uncle, and clean
anything that was dirty in the house.
During
my 9th grade year, my family had a get-together for Thanksgiving. I sat in the
room next to the adults, just listening to everyone talk. I failed to
understand how I had become the topic of the conversation, but my mother was
telling everyone about the latest Aron screw-ups in school. My grandfather, who
never has much to say, spoke. He was telling everyone, “That boy is never going
to learn. He is just stupid.”
When
I heard him say that, I jumped up and walked into the room so he would know
that I heard him, but he didn’t care. All he did was walk up to me, look me in
the eye, and say, “You will never graduate high school; you will never be
anything. You will die in the street like a dog.” All I did was grimace him and
then I walked away. As I walked away, I heard him tell my mother, “That boy is
too far gone. It’s over for him.” I had never even realized how far I had been
falling, and even if I knew, I would not have cared.
I
imagined him standing over my grave, laughing, saying I was nothing, saying I
was never anything, and it enraged me. The thing different about this situation
was that I wanted to prove him wrong. I wanted to graduate from high
school and laugh in his face, as I thought he would do in mine. At this time, I
had already moved, and no one from the hood knew where I lived, so I just made the
change. I changed my number and begged my mom to enroll me in The Academy of
Public Leadership At Cody. This school was small and everyone knew everyone.
The environment was friendly and I actually felt as if I belonged there.
The
problem that I faced now was the classes I had failed. I had failed nearly half
of all the classes I had taken up until that point, and just thinking about
them made me want to quit. But I did not. I stayed after school every day of my
11th grade year until 8:00 p.m. just to make up some of my classes. In 12th
grade I had to stay after school every day until 6:00 p.m. just to make up my
work.
My
original plan was only to graduate from high school, but after people saw me
trying so hard, it was different. My principal, Mr. Mathews, my math teacher,
Ms. Raye, and my counselor, Ms. Meyers saw something in me that most people
never saw a glimpse of. They saw my potential and helped me get into college.
My
life has been far from what people consider normal, yet I am proud of my mistakes
and everything else. I am now a Madonna University freshman. I also graduated from
high school with my last two report cards being a 3.8 on a 4 point scale. I
would never have made it to where I am if it was not for all of my bad experiences.
Even though I have changed my life around, I am still defined by that one
moment when my granddad said, “That boy is too far gone.”
Monday, December 2, 2013
Her Grimoire, by Danijela Zivadinovic
.jpg)
Waking
up in the morning and getting out of bed was the hardest thing he had to do,
let alone leave the house. Clouds turned grey, causing heavy rain to fall,
pounding on the windows. Keeping focused wasn’t any easier, either. Every
second became harder. A day later after he received the news about his beloved
witch, he wished more than anything to see her again, to say words he had forgotten
to say. An hour later, he arrived at the memorial site and parked the car. He
sighed deeply.
Taking
a few steps forward, he reached her grave and knelt down. Reaching with his
thumb, he lightly traced the engraved letters, reminiscing. His eyes shut
tightly. In that instant, a spiritual hand rested on his shoulder, except he
could not feel anything. The ghostly figure of his witch knelt beside him.
The
man started to talk. “How can I talk to my favorite witch about feelings when I
kept them buried and never opened up before? How can I admit to secrets when this
whole time, I led you to believe something different? You are truly someone
special. You and I have history. That’s a starter. I had a nickname for you.
The nickname is little bird, my little bird. I want you to know that I always
cared about you, even if I had excuses for why I didn’t. Those reasons were
just a cover-up. The truth is, I kind of love you. I just lived in denial at
the time because I knew if I got too attached, everything would change, and now
it has.”
She
took a deep breath as she looked at him. He felt a waterfall of tears streaming
down his cheeks. She said, “I am closer than you think. Even though I appear
dead to you, that does not mean I am gone.”
She couldn’t remember a single time when he looked this devastated. “You
showed me enough,” she said quietly.
Suddenly,
he did the unthinkable and grabbed the Grimoire, turning to a page that had a
spell. He read it a few times to memorize how it was done. He said the words
for the spell, focused, concentrating. He had to do this right because if not,
there wasn’t an “undo” option. Seconds later, he felt himself being pulled into
a new dimension he couldn’t recognize. Everything about the place felt
unfamiliar. He blinked once and then a second time, eyes glancing everywhere.
He turned himself around, only to see his witch present. The Grimoire belonged
to her.
He stared at the ground while he responded to her. “It’s not fair. You are a young and beautiful
woman
who had her life taken away. There is so much you did not get to do and
experience.” He sighed deeply.
Perhaps
she did not understand why he was feeling like this, but she knew he had to
move forward. “I want you to make me a couple of promises, please.”
She
remained silent for a few minutes and took a deep breath. “Life is not about
having what you want. Life is about expecting the unexpected.”
“I
wish it were me who died instead. You are going to miss out on so much because
I wasn’t able to keep you safe.” A thought crossed his mind. “Is there a
reverse spell we can perform?”
Even
if there was a spell, it always had a price. “Maybe, but doing spells can cause
problems I know from memory. I would not suggest it to you.”
After
the witch spoke, he took a dagger and aimed it at his heart. He just wanted to die
and never live another day without the love of his life. His body was shaking
in fear. He brought the dagger closer and looked at her. “This is for you. This
is for us,” he told her with a whisper. His eyes were closed.
He
moved the dagger inside his flesh a little bit, making blood ooze from the
wound. “I’d rather bleed. It’s the best thing to feel.”
Before
he could go any further, she snatched the dagger away. “No! Don’t you dare think about it. This is not the answer. We will
meet again in the future.”
She
smiled warmly at him. “I will exist in your memories, just as you will in mine.
I won’t ever forget you.”
They
embraced each other tightly, tears forming in both of their eyes. He didn’t
want to let her go; she didn’t want to, either. Time was running out. Before he
knew it, he emerged into his own reality, alone.
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