root

Maui Smith

the thing about three am in fourth grade?

it’s like discovering you can pause time

provided you can keep the TV volume

below twenty-five. i met her there

on HBO after dark, the only black girl

in the softcore porn i visited nightly.

i heard the word gay before but it didn’t

have anything to do with me watching the

girl i liked fake fucking other girls

on my tiny sticker covered silver TV

so it should surprise no one I thought I was

a boy before I thought I was a lesbian.

eighteen years plus one point five,

as in one decent year and four months

so awful they should count as six with a

white boy - a white boy! – i had never

been in love before but I had been loved

before so I knew what a kiss from plantain

sweet lips felt like and still chose wrong

but when I stopped pretending to like

hockey and started being myself it all

fell apart and oh, the freedom in losing it

all! i shed masculinity and danced and

danced out of spring and into summer days

of kissing brown nipples in the park and

intertwined brown hands and black women

loving black women under an almost black

night sky and I thought to myself: how

did I ever pretend to like men?

Maui Smith is a junior studying Information Science and Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh. They are currently working as a Technical Writer Co-Op at ANSYS Inc, and a Spring 2020 intern at Study Breaks magazine. They are currently based out of Pittsburgh, PA, but are originally from Maple Heights, Ohio.