Mercy Tullis-Bukhari: No Love During Corona
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
No Love During Corona
My children’s father suggested that our children stay with him. That
I could visit, he said. The children are happy when I am there, he added.
Over the course of Corona, I have become the second parent, the parent
who lives across the bridge in the hazmat city the Daily News proclaimed
to be hell. So much I could do, I hear my neighbor mommys say, with the
children on the other side of the bridge. So much free time and so much
writing you could do, they say. All the dates you could go on, they say.
But we are quarantined, I think, with social distancing keeping me from
partaking in all that being a single woman without kids could invite. I
visited my children across the bridge, with the prominent presences of
his new girlfriend throughout the apartment: the matching paint and
sip paintings on his wall, a collection of her children’s art pieces in his
living room, pink razor blades in the bathroom, skin and hair products
crowding the dresser I helped pay for (that ultimately ruined my credit
score), and text messages of photos I glanced at as I was putting on my
sneakers to leave his apartment. I wanted to leave. The children kept
pulling me to stay. Four photos were waiting to be retrieved on his
phone sent by his girlfriend. I wondered if they were nudes. Or memes.
Or nudes. I chose to be quarantined in the hazmat city, without my children,
to reason through the resentment I still feel for the failed marriage, for his
ability to easily move on to the nudes of another woman, to give her the
relationship I so desperately begged for over the last decade. I don’t love
him, I know. I am too busy cleaning up the emotional mess and clutter
he left behind for me to feel any love. I am still just attached to the
expectations.
Mercy Tullis-Bukhari is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer who finds inspiration from being a Bronx-bred Afro-Latina American, Honduran, and Garifuna of Jamaican descent. Her maternal grandparents are from Belize and her paternal grandparents are from Jamaica. They all immigrated to Honduras, where her parents were born. As a result, Mercy grew up eating curried goat with tortillas, oxtail, fried fish with tajadas, baliadas, goat rotis, machuca, and jerk chicken. And because she was and always will be a Bronx girl, she grew up eating lots of pizza in between all of the homeland dishes.
As the very proud first-generation child of immigrants, Mercy considers being Afro-Latina American to mean a total acceptance of self. She validates her identity by celebrating her ancestral roots and proudly acknowledges that being a Bronx bred, Black and Latina American woman is the ‘sopa marinero’ of who she is today.
Mercy graduated from New York University with a Bachelor’s degree in English and American Literature, with a minor in English Education. She later received her Master’s from Herbert H. Lehman College in English Literature. More recently, she has decided to earn a Master’s in Fine Arts from The College of New Rochelle, in Creative Writing.
In her writing, she focuses on the female experience through explorations of individuality, motherhood, and sexuality. She has published two full-length books of poetry- Smoke (Blind Beggar Press, Inc.) and Mango (Ocean Taste Publications). Her third book of poetry, The Little Deaths I Barely Have, will be published by Get Fresh Publications later in 2021.
She is a Callaloo Fellow and was the Poet Laureate of the New York University 30th Anniversary Celebration Gala. She was also named one of the "8 Authors Bringing Afro-Latina Stories to the Forefront" by Remezcla magazine and was a Pushcart Prize nominee in 2016 for her essay “Black Dolls for Everyone,” published in the anthology All the Women in My Family Sing, edited by Deborah Santana. Two of her essays were published and recorded for Read 650: Where Writers Read on YouTube - "Spanish 1" and "When Mami Put a Gun in My Hand." The piece that she is proudest of is "Naming It," dedicated to her daughter, in which she writes about acceptance of self and body with raw honesty and love.
