IThere’s part of me that isn’t a girlWhen she stamps and ragesred lights shoot along the groundUnafraid of the moss-hung woods She goes therewhen the world wants to erase her Or to the ocean floorShape-shifter Tentacled Writhing and lighting upTetras float around herShe sends up a wave of soundIIOnce I had a friendWe dreamed in …
“We’re supposed to run,” Grant says. It’s dinner. We eat at the small round kitchen table underneath the multicolored rustic light fixture, which casts a warm rainbow glow. This is where Family Time is served. Also, it’s Taco Night. Classical music is playing from our iWhatever on the countertop. My wife likes to keep it …
Author’s note: A Dead Black Man is both a call to action and my love note to black men. I want to remind America to cherish black men and give them space to dream again. I want to imagine black men in all of their many hues, in all of their sensitivities, quirks, passions, and …
Imperative: “A grammatical mood that forms commands or requests, including the giving of prohibition or permission.” —The Logical Language Group Remember when you realize that you have fallen in love. It is not supposed to happen to you, a woman trying to become a nun. Renunciation. Not so much of the world in general but …
I’d heard plenty about how a mother’s devotion to her kids is primal. I got it—I could imagine that sort of wild, beyond-the-brain love, the kind of protectiveness that can sprout claws and incisors. I expected having a child to change my priorities, my routines, my capacity for tenderness and rage. I didn’t expect it …
ROSALIND: They say you are a melancholy fellow. JAQUES: I am so; I do love it better than laughing. —As You Like ItUnderneath this flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character —Oscar Levant, An American in Paris Oscar Levant is a melancholy figure, full of barbed wit, self-loathing, and Rhapsody in Blue, which he …
These days Isabelle’s exhaustion anchors itself in strange places. She feels it in her sagging wrists and the top of her head. As warm static at her fingertips. An oil slick in the gut. She’s been the night attendant at the Speedway for seven and a half years. Never before has daytime sleep eluded her …
Artist’s Statement My work deals with the Black experience in America, often using“mainstream” white culture as a critical foil to convey meaning. Thethree concepts that drive my current practice are irony, activism, andmy notion of Black coolness. I’m apt to pair depictions of grizzled hustlers,veterans of the street, with images of angelic schoolgirls. Dependingon the …
The Father, Deceased He appears in a hospital hallway. On the front porch of her home in Phoenix, with a clipboard in his hands, polite and distant, like he might ask her to switch internet service providers. Passing by on the sidewalk in Riley, the town where she grew up. Leaning out of his yellow …
Hard to say on which side of the Edenic divide she now lies, post divorce. Which was the land of innocence? The death of a marriage seemed an obvious kind of fall, but she was alone for the first time in years, grateful for it, discovering creation again and renaming things. Like wakefulness or archaeology …