Other Publications — Sheree L. Greer

From around the innanets…

“If You Scared , Say You Scared”

“If you scared, say you scared,” is one of my father’s favorite lines. I remember it most from childhood basketball games. On sunny, summer afternoons in Milwaukee, my father and I would walk to the nearest park to play one-on-one. With the ball in my hands, I would dribble up the lane, working for a shot, and when I found one, I would hesitate—scared of making a mistake, afraid of making a move, struggling to believe in myself. He’d face me, arms out or up or both, and say, “If you scared, say you scared.” I wore that fear like a second skin well into the realities of adulthood. I might have been afraid, but I’d never say it.

When I started lactating in 2006, it scared the shit out of me, but I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t pregnant: I hadn’t slept with a man in over two years. At the time, I was in graduate school to earn an MFA and was initially too consumed with writing and drinking and working multiple day jobs to visit a doctor. Three months passed before I finally went to Planned Parenthood and was referred to a women’s health center on Chicago’s northside, thankful for their sliding scale. They ran levels for all sorts of hormones, and mine were all in normal range except one—prolactin. This pituitary gland hormone that induces lactation in the breast is usually less than 30. Mine was 145.

The doctor at the health center asked me a few questions, then recommended I get an MRI of my brain. She said she had a suspicion that it might be a tumor but wanted to be sure. There was more after that, some attempts to comfort I think, but all I heard was: Brain. Tumor.

“Unorganized Field Notes from a Neighborhood Run”

Location: Clearview Oaks Community, Kenneth City, Florida

Date(s): A collection of months across Spacetime

Overview of Activity: Staying with my mother while she recuperates from hernia surgery and going for runs on the weekends. Most runs take place in the late morning and early afternoon, the neighborhood sights and opportunities for rumination and reflection and wonder are at an all-time high for the spring season.

Initial Ideas/Assertions About Running: During my first creative residency (I spent three weeks at Ragdale in Lake Forest, IL, in 2017), I read Haruki Murakami’s memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I was just getting back into my running practice, taking run-walk-jogs through the nearby prairie and through the quaint, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it downtown. I took notes in the margins and highlighted passages that resonated with me.

When reflecting on training for a marathon, he writes: “But just as our consciousness is a maze, so too is our body. Everywhere you turn there is a darkness… Everywhere you find silent hints, everywhere a surprise is waiting for you.”

Topics Pondered While Running Include but Are Not Limited To: Mortality, Rayleigh Scattering, Lung capacity variation as determined by semi-regular pre-roll use, Urban Colonialism, Property Taxes, Mortgages, Venus as Evening Star and Morning Star, Black Holes as Portals, Enceladus…

“What We Tell The Children”

I. Tell Them About Our Lineage

“Trouble don’t last always” is what my mama says and it’s what her mama said to her and her mama to her and her mama’s mama was thinking it while working, hunched over the green leaves and prickly bolls. Her hands are swollen and bleeding, cotton sticking to sores that won’t ever fully heal. “Trouble don’t last always,” she thinking it while she’s watching her children in the rows beyond her, head on the swivel for the sweat-stank, dead-tooth overseer, because her youngest child, the one who looks just like her—them eyes ready and roaming, that jaw set tight and sure—is bound to be broken for standing with a back too straight and speaking with a voice too clear. She whispers it softly through dry, sun-cracked lips, “Trouble don’t last always,” then she blink slow, a dream behind her eyelids, the flash of black the safest place for imagination, the darkness a hiding place for hope. She’s dreaming for a day like today, when her child’s child’s child’s child will stand in the living room of their own house with nothing to fear and no one to answer to.

II. Tell Them How to Read the Sky

Pops liked to sneak about sliding between sycamore slats jumping over junk piles

Pops liked to laugh and dream riding other people’s horses picking other people’s fruit

Voices on Addition

“None of this is Bullshit”

I Was on That Bullshit

June 10, 1998, I decided my father had abandoned me for the last time. My father didn’t attend my high school graduation and as far as I was concerned, he could fuck off forever.

That morning, I sat up front in the first two rows of graduates, a sea of purple caps with gold tassels. When my name was called, I walked across the stage and strained my eyes beyond the seats to find my family. I saw my Jama first, her wheelchair a great marker for finding everyone else. My mother, my sisters, my aunt, my cousins, and my uncle—my father’s brother. No sign of my father.

I went through the rest of the day feeling excited and proud but distracted, my father’s absence a sharp, jagged hangnail that snagged every moment of celebration. Fuck him. Forever.

I ignored my father for three hundred and eighty-seven days.

CONTINUE READING…

“I Feel Pretty”

When I was seven, I cut myself shaving. I remember when I did it, the sharp sting of the blade slicing my cheek, a stripe of pink flesh and red blood from cheekbone to chin. I didn’t scream. I dropped my father’s razor – one of those cheap, white plastic Bics that come in a pack of six – into the sink; the hollow clack and splatter of red against porcelain shocked me into action. I fumbled for tissue, pulling it frantically from the roll, jamming the two-ply to my face.

When my mother came into the bathroom, she grabbed me by my thin, narrow shoulders, pulled at the tissue, some of it already sticking to my cheek, the cut stinging anew as she cleared clot and cotton from the wound. She cleaned me up, blowing mama-breath on the cut after she dabbed it with peroxide. She fastened a square of gauze to my face using small strips of medical tape from the first aid kit we kept on the bottom shelf of the linen closet.

“Perfecting My Jenifer Lewis Face to Fight White Supremacy”

My sophomore year in college, I found a surprisingly spacious studio for a reasonable price and made the move from my mama’s basement to a just-off-campus apartment. I had only been in it a week when I realized the house across from me was a frat house, a White one. I don’t recall the name of the fraternity, but I do remember the tipped over car on the lawn after one particularly loud, all-night kegger. I remember the crushed plastic cups always strewn across the steps, the sidewalk, and the street. I remember the bonfire, and by bonfire I mean pile of 24-pack beer boxes, wooden chairs, and clothes the frat boys sometimes lit up in a trash can to the left of their porch. Campus security, and even the real police would roll through, but the frat house behavior went unchecked. As irritating as this was, there mere existence isn’t what brought on my Jenifer Lewis face.

Other selections…

“They Were Talking About Love Being Gone”

The scene is now a dude trying to holla at a woman who is passing by on the street. He’s trying to get her to stop. The click of heels continues. The woman is voiceless. “Come here!” dude says with more force. She won’t. He says, “you ain’t gone stop for me?” And she apparently keeps walking.

He calls her a bitch. Harshly. With disgust and hate.

“Beats a Speculum Up Your Ass”

Last night, during one of these now and agains, I watched Black Ink Crew. On the show, there’s a lot of shit going down. Donna getting a job at a rival tattoo shop, Ceaser’s moms basically telling him not to marry the woman to whom he’s currently engaged — and she’s battling illness — and a whole lot of other drama that you don’t really care about unless you watch the show.

The show has its problems, like all reality shows do, but last night Black Ink Crew did something important and commendable…

Hypertext Interview w/ Kiese Laymon

“Great question. I am an activist. And I am an artist whose work has influenced some of the most committed social activists in our country. And yes, I do consider it my responsibility to actively fight for the world I want to see. So yes, writing is part of my activism, but it’s not the same as the organizing, strategizing, and executing. I want my work on the page and every other place to do its part to ensure good love, healthy choices, and second chances for our people.” - Kiese Laymon

Hypertext Interview w/ Khaulah Naima Nuruddin

This was the most challenging aspect of resolving the Allusions paintings. I knew I had the technical skill to paint a believable chair or chaise lounge, but I needed to anthropomorphize the furniture piece so that the viewer could receive the experience of the lover-figure, now removed. You are correct, Sheree, furniture does stand in for the women involved, my lover and me. When I engage in problem solving the most successful way to present this alternative figure, I start with the story I want to tell then think about what type of chair the person is, in that moment.