I live by the fifth-most-dangerous intersection of roads in the state of Michigan. I once heard a car crash into a house across the street, and a woman shrieking no over and over again in the early hours of the morning. This is the only thing I dislike about where I live. 

When I walk outside, there are graffiti tags on electrical boxes that say things like sodomy forever. It lifts the spirits, or at least, it lifts mine. Sticker culture is alive and well, too. There’s a whole series of them that appear to be printed on UPS labels, with epithets like faggy dykes for dykey fags, written in a gothic font. There’s a lot of ambient gayness and transness around you wherever you walk.

This is also a place of strong contrasts. You will find those tags and stickers all over town, and then you will walk into a local Afro-Caribbean market to pick up some dawadawa powder, and the entire time you’re there, you’ll hear an evangelical preacher on the ancient, staticky TV perched by the cash register. He will be sermonizing in impassioned French, and you’ll find yourself grateful you remember almost nothing of your college French courses. 

I keep thinking about the effigy parade that I missed while I was out of town: 

Local artist invites you to join her in building effigies inspired by Polish folk rituals about Marzanna (the goddess of death, disease, and winter). Together, we will parade to Riverside Park with live music and use colored ribbon to create links between ourselves, our effigies, and the surrounding environment.  

It’s a running joke: whenever we leave for the weekend, there will be something we miss that we wish we had gone to. A workshop on making Faraday bags, hosted in someone’s garage. A “queer utopia” dance party at the local dive bar that isn’t technically a queer bar, but that might as well be, where the dress code is, succinctly put, “dress sexy.” 

And now the effigy parade is haunting me. It’s been haunting me for a week. I have no particular connection to Polish folk rituals or to any goddesses of death, disease, and winter. But maybe, I’m haunted because I cling to the threads of anything resembling my family history, especially my father’s side. I hold onto anything to do with the Assyrians who immigrated first to Canada, then to southeastern Michigan, at the turn of the twentieth century, fleeing genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, escaping from the outskirts of the city now known as Tehran. Then, more relevantly in this particular case, anything to do with the mysterious folks who all found themselves in Flint, Michigan, after leaving modern-day Slovakia, who were so profoundly unattached to any more specific ethnic identity that they referred to both themselves and their language as “Slav-ish.” 

I know at least some of those mystery family members must have been Hungarians instead of Slavs; otherwise, my surname of “Goulish” makes no sense. “Goulish” is a corruption of the Hungarian word gulyás, which roughly refers both to 1) yes, the soup, goulash, and to 2) the cowherds apparently known for cooking and eating said soup. The corruption was introduced by an immigration authority who clearly didn’t know what to do with gulyás and hoped “Goulish” would be close enough. 

I like imagining being descended from a long line of Eastern European Orville Pecks. 

I imagine one of Marzanna’s colored ribbons, strung between myself and the village plains those ancestors might have come from, and know I’m romanticizing the fuck out of a history that isn’t mine and that I barely know. The ribbon is very pretty, anyway. I imagine it is periwinkle blue. 

I keep a tight grip on my father’s side of the family because it is the side I physically resemble most: strong Middle Eastern nose bridge that got me mocked in the eighth grade, told I had a “witch nose”; olive skin, dark eyes, thick arched brows, you get the picture.

My mother’s side of the family, meanwhile, is frighteningly blonde-haired and blue-eyed. Whenever we went to a Proffitt family reunion in southern Ohio, my father and I would joke that we had to make a “brunette safe zone” in a corner somewhere. I bleached my hair for a while in college, and when I mentioned to a great aunt on that side of the family that I was considering dyeing it back to brunette, she visibly shuddered. “You know how the Proffitts are about blonde,” was my mother’s only remark.

It is only now that I am in my thirties that I find myself drawn to the Appalachian territories that my mother’s side of the family has occupied for hundreds of years, that I feel a strong draw to places in Kentucky and Tennessee. But it is equally hard to avoid the feeling, especially in the particular cultural climate of 2025, that the landscapes of those ancestral haunts will never love me back. 

Then again, neither will Tehran. Neither will the villages in Slovakia. Regardless, there are more ribbons, tying me to these places. The colors are gold for Tehran and periwinkle for everything else. They are all stained, twisted, discolored. 

I have no good reason to cling to my family history at all, really. Clinging to it only makes sense if I am bound to it with invisible knots. It is not like my parents instilled in me any great love or reverence for it. My mother, blonde-haired and blue-eyed though she was, grew up matter-of-factly convinced she was my Nana Jan’s adopted child rather than her biological daughter. My father outright hated most of his family members, meanwhile, often adopting racist and xenophobic rhetoric towards them. Once, he told me, regarding the Assyrians, “the further we get from those crazy Arabs, the better. They’re a vicious people.” 

Never mind that Assyrians are Semitic, not Arab. That’s beside the point, though, huh? 

The real point, perhaps, is my isolation. 

The real point is that I was an only child. One who also had no cousins, in addition to no siblings. 

One who was homeschooled for most of her adolescence. Despite being homeschooled, I wasn’t raised in any sort of religion, that thing that is supposed to supply some framework for “community,” even if it can be a poisonous one. I wound up knowing traumatized Evangelicals and Pentecostals and charismatic Catholics aplenty, just by virtue of being part of a “home-schooling co-operative” wherein families pooled efforts to provide classes a couple times a week to teach each other’s kids. We met on Mondays and Wednesdays in the basement of a Presbyterian church. 

But my father was more into Colin Wilson than he was into the church. The one time my grandmother, his mother, brought me to a Roman Catholic mass when I was six years old, he cut off contact with her for a year afterward. 

And I lived in rural Michigan. 

And I knew from the age of eight that I was a lesbian. I knew it, and yet my most conscious reckoning with it came when I was thirteen years old. I was sitting on the school bus (yes, the only time I was in public school was for the first grade and then for middle school, go figure), when the lightning bolt of a thought struck me, and I knew it to be so fundamentally true that I couldn’t muster much of a reaction to the truth beyond a slight queasiness, a dizziness. 

When I came out to my best (read: only) friend at the time, I came home crying. I told my parents. My father supplied me with a script in which I would retract my coming-out to her. 

So, I dutifully called her on the family landline and retracted everything I had revealed to her, convinced I could somehow put the cat back in the bag. I was twelve years old and not brave, and not in a position to alienate a friend, let alone the only one I had. In a burst of inspiration, I’m pretty sure I also claimed that I had been overly influenced by my recent binge-watching of Sailor Moon. “You know Haruka and Michiru?” Good stuff. 

If Marzanna is goddess of death and disease, then I wonder if my father would have thought her the patron of my queerness. He was the one who told me that queerness was dangerous. “I’ve never been the type of person to use physical punishment,” he told me, “but I wouldn’t hesitate to use the back of my hand to stop you from walking into a meat grinder.” 

Sometimes, people look at me in some bafflement when I relay this quote to them. Maybe it’s such convoluted imagery that you have to be someone who grew up with my father’s rhetoric to parse it immediately. The implication was that “being gay” was the equivalent of a meat grinder that would mince my soul into unrecognizable mush, you see. And that it was only for my own spiritual safety that he would leverage physical threats against me. 

He doesn’t remember saying this. He recently asked me, after I reminded him, “Look, can we just say I’m sorry, and move on?” 

All this to say: I don’t understand why I cling to the idea of the places and cultures my blood relatives have inhabited. I have no reason to believe my ancestors would claim me, respect me. I’m married to a nonbinary person whose gender is marked “X” on all their legal documents; before that, my longest-term partner was a lesbian trans woman. I am childless and plan to stay that way. I’ve kept my head shaved for a solid seven years and will probably keep it like that the rest of my life, Sinéad O’Connor-style. I am the sort of person who loves living in Ypsilanti, despite the fact that people like my father joke about it being more like “pissilanti.” I am the sort of person who smiles, charmed, by a faggy dykes for dykey fags sticker outside my house. 

In short, I am not exactly the sort of descendant who I imagine would garner much approval from her ancestors. So why do I care about this? 

I can claim I don’t understand. And yet, of course, I understand. Of course I do. I’m not totally devoid of empathy, even when I’m the person I need to turn that empathy toward.

What is family history if not a convenient personal mythology to contextualize yourself? At least, I find myself wanting it to be that.

What would I have crafted at the Polish effigy parade, half a mile from my apartment? 

I find myself thinking about how, despite their mysteriousness and distance—I could never get a straight answer out of my relatives from this particular corner of my family about why they left Slovakia, for instance—I was still taught how to make pysanky growing up. Pysanky and paska bread. 

Pysanky, for the uninitiated, is usually thought of as a Ukrainian craft wherein you use multiple layers of wax and dye to create the most intricate Easter eggs you’ll ever see in your life. Though I grew up making them, I later took a workshop on them in which I learned that, at least in Ukrainian culture, these pysanky could be both protective talismans and the carriers of a prayer. If you crafted one and left it in a bird’s nest, tradition held that the bird who nested there would carry your prayer to God—or, in pre-Christian times, the gods—for you. Birds are messengers to the heavens, after all.

And paska, well, it’s an Easter bread my dad likes, but that I don’t. It’s a heavily turmeric-stained loaf riddled with golden raisins. The golden raisins in particular are not my thing. But I was taught to make this bread and eat it all the same. 

I’ve spent so many hours of my life making “pysanky-inspired” witchy talismans for myself on watercolor paper. I’ve spent so many hours of my life using acrylic paints to recreate pysanky designs on other surfaces. 

Marzanna herself is supposed to be made from rags and straw. And ribbon, it seems. In the liminal and vivid space of my imagination, sometime shortly after I am processing the regret of my absence, I conjure up a crafting table where I will create this Marzanna. I decide early on that she needs to be wearing vintage clothes. I like vintage clothes because they are so singular. You can tailor them. You can dye them. But you cannot find duplicates readily in stores, sized up or down for convenience. Ultimately, you must take the clothes precisely on their own terms, as they are when you find them. 

I imagine taking my current favorite outfit—this power suit monstrosity, authentic from the 1980s, and searing hot pink, a neon shade that looks shockingly good on me—and using it as Marzanna’s outfit to keep for the season. I know I would be too greedy to allow that, really, but let’s imagine it. Let’s imagine Marzanna in a hot pink power suit. 

She would look the same way I do in that ensemble: like a gay Heather Chandler. This is the first image that comes to me, because it is the first thing that I thought when I tried on that suit for the first time and saw myself in the dressing room mirror. Not that the OG Heather Chandler wasn’t also a lesbian. Heather Chandler is, to me, the most gutting depiction ever filmed of a self-hating closeted gay whose soul has rotted out and left her body, and left her only with the impulse to control and mold other girls whose freedom she envies. In my humble opinion, the cutesified Pinterest art of queer Heather Chandler and Veronica Sawyer isn’t up to snuff with the 1988 film Heather Chandler, spitting at herself in the mirror after caving to social pressure and giving a boy a blow job. 

In the effigy, somehow, death, disease, winter, queerness, my own past, and the film version of Heather Chandler all immediately and intuitively collide and meet. We could even continue the Heathers theme and wrap our Marzanna in the red ribbons so emblematic of a Heather’s power. This effigy would even be complete with straw blonde hair, blonde enough to make a Proffitt proud, except that this hair is literal straw. 

Here’s what comes next: in the springtime, you are either supposed to burn your effigy, à la Wicker Man, or you are supposed to drown it. I would prefer drowning my Marzanna, maybe in the Huron River running through the park where I crafted her. I wonder what sort of winters would die with her, and what sorts of prayers and dreams would be reborn and enter the waterways. 

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Melanie Goulish is a lesbian writer and academic librarian based in southeastern Michigan. She writes the most about the Midwest and Appalachia, and about queer girls figuring out how to be queer women. When she is not writing, she is usually watching Project Runway or reading Latin American horror novels. Her poetry has been previously featured in Pangyrus and TIMBER.