Jonny Appleseed

by Joshua Whitehead

It’s home because it has to be—routine satiates these pangs.

We are both two queer bodies moving around in spaces that look less like a home and more like desperate lodgings; both trying to make our beds with other people’s garbage.

Hell, I played straight on the rez in order to be NDN and here I played white in order to be queer. You can’t win in every situation, that’s just the way it is. Best to avoid those topics, save your energy for when you’re down to your last pack of cigarettes and ramen noodles. Shift when you need to—become your own best medicine.

Instead of saying we liked or loved each other, we just lay there on our backs, our brown skin shiny in the rosy light that poured in from the evening sun. We surveyed each other’s body: him seeing the scar above my clavicle from when I fell down the stairs as a kid, and me seeing the patch of hair missing from his scalp. I knew then that I loved him. Funny how an NDN “love you” sounds more like, “I’m in pain with you.”

Tias and I used to wait at his place and listen to him and Kokum tell us stories about the good ol’ days which would usually erupt into an argument about who had it worse—that’s the thing about old folks, they think life is a competition of scars and suffering.

We fell asleep like buttons in buttonholes.

And I’ll say what humility got to do with shame? And you’ll say humility is just a humiliation you loved so much it transformed.