Storytellers
The great-grandmothers told us our history, or they tried to, but we, distracted by sweetcorn & real butter & tiny bowls of rock salt & toothpicked cubes of government cheese & the sea in our hair & shirtless boys & our tanned and toughened summerfeet & beer stowed in black garbage bags in the canal & swimming in the bay past dark & older cousins out on dates & ashamed of their raised vowels & you are not my mother & still no indoor plumbing & you can’t give me a curfew & breaking into a boat in drydock & our missing parents & gashes stitched by scorched needle and sewing thread & will you just leave me alone something something your people & something something Canada & something lost their land and now—gone long—no one left to hand us our pasts, discarded on that sweaty August porch, husk strings at our feet.
Linda Michel-Cassidy’s story collection, When We Were Hardcore, from EastOver Press, was released in February 2025. Her writing has been published in Rattle, The Rumpus, Electric Lit, Tahoma Review, December, Catamaran, and elsewhere. She is senior reviews and hybrid/collaboration editor at Tupelo Quarterly. Michel-Cassidy lives on a houseboat in northern California and is a novice open-water swimmer. lmichelcassidy.com.