First Grade

“Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. I am in first grade, with a pretty knapsack and a lunch she packed me, and first grade always made me cry. “But I want to stay with you.” It was, to my five-year-old self, the most dramatic thing that I had to spend the whole day away from her, and I didn’t understand it. “You’ll be home soon.” -- “Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. It’s a habit that, as a twenty-something year old woman, I pretend I had grown out of. I’m sitting on her couch writing poetry – a piece from San Francisco that would one day become a friend’s housewarming present – and airplanes always made me cry. “I’ll just miss you, that’s all.” “You’ll be home in a few months.” None of us could have predicted a fucking pandemic that had probably already started, or known the next time I’d come back would be almost two years later. -- “I told you not to cry,” but I know she is also crying. She has stage four colorectal cancer, and we both wrote a piece with the exact sam...
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About Me

Abrielle is the founder of Wandering Fighter, LCC; a woman-owned self-defense and empowerment company. She holds a third-degree black belt in Taekwondo with belts in kung fu, kuk sool won and hapkido, and experience in krav maga, judo, karate and Brazilian jiu jitsu. She has been teaching martial arts since she was 15, and now travels the country running women’s empowerment programs.

She is the author of young adult novels Crow Dancer and Lady Shadow, with a publication in the anthology Strange Fire: Jewish Voices from the Pandemic. This is an excerpt from her upcoming memoir, Weddings in my Coffee Cup.

Abrielle is a relentless community builder and effervescent nomad, who currently calls Philly home.


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