What I told the generations of a strange illness

by FEATURED WRITER

Bec Bell-Gurwitz

Digital photograph. Courtesy of Unsplash.

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What I told the generations

of a strange illness

Bec Bell-Gurwitz | Feb 2025 | Issue 42

it had to do with units
of time of squares of dollars
of birth orders of birds migrating
of immigration of crossing borders of tilling the land of
a people killed

it had to do with
fabric drying
while dinner cooked the days
slowly
it had to do with
hungry dogs who pace
dead grasses
yards and playgrounds
and perimeters

it had to do with the land
cracked and thirsty
it had to do with
power
icebergs melting
standardized tests
brothers with eyes
beat to plum

it had to do with feeling
older or younger
generally
it had to do with
being born to an era
of measurements
hips and strengths
and intelligences

it had to do with tongues
how they
fought the names that did not fit

what I told the parents of the children
who wanted to die
who moved in songless waves
in generational murmurings
their fingertips busy with longing:
this body which does not belong
to you came up through you
up up like plume
no choice but to breathe it out  
no choice

I told them time is a natural movement
I told them—

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Bec Bell-Gurwitz (they/them) is a writer, teacher, and social worker living in Northampton, MA, on unceded Pocumtuck and Nipmuc land with their white wolf/dog, Milou. Their work appears in the anthology Strange Attractors: Lives Changed by Chance, The West Trade Review, The Citron Review, Khôra, Pithead Chapel, and others. Bec is a 2021 Pushcart Prize nominee, won 2nd place in Pithead Chapel's 2023 Larry Brown Short Story Prize, as well as the 2024 Cara Parravani Memorial Award in Fiction, and has received support from Writing by Writers, Corporeal Writing, Bread Loaf, Juniper Institute, and others. Their work primarily concerns queer bodies, generational legacies, care economies, and climate change. Bec is an MFA candidate and teaching associate at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.