Artist’s Statement Making a photograph involves finding ways in which a fixed frame can house the complex intersections between light and shadow, stillness and movement, proximity and distance, the individual and the societal, mortality and the metamorphosis of time. Being African American can mean surviving the perilous crossroads between history’s severities and the future’s indeterminate …
Right in front of the staircase leading to the college library doors, a huge vertical bronze wrist leaned slightly backward, its fingers half-opening, half-closed, its palm pierced through with a massive bronze nail. “Here’s the Hand of Christ,” I told Victor. I searched his face, wondering what he was thinking about our Catholic college replete …
In early March 2020, on my last visit to the Carnegie Museum of Art, I waited for the one o’clock tour at the bottom of the stairs leading to the galleries. The docent arrived and led our little group up the staircase, to the galleries on the left, as she shared bits of trivia about …
For the life of him, my father cannot decide where he wants to be buried. He’s narrowed it down to two potential sites: McGandy Bluffs overlooking the White River, near his birthplace in southern Indiana, or Prairie Grove Cemetery, his current place of employment, just a few hours north in Fort Wayne. “The perk about …
It’s a pity almost nothing is known of Li Chun, master stonemason of the Sui Dynasty. While Trajan’s collapsed bridge rotted and the Persians invented chess, legend says Li Chun crafted the Anji Bridge by suspending twenty-five hundred tons of limestone over the Xiao River in a single night, creating what one poet has called …
The same spring my sister Kaylee was naked in Hustler, coyotes came down from the hills, knocking over garbage cans and killing people’s pets. One morning the Vasquezes next door found their cat under the hedges, and you should have heard Mrs. Vasquez howl. I went out to look, but all that was left was …
You have the tiniest little baby cataracts, the ophthalmologist tells me, and he laughs a little, because apparently cataracts, when small, are funny. I’m in the chair with the thing that looks like a 1970s TV robot hovering in front of my face, and I don’t think it’s funny because (1) all I can imagine …
Here on Route 25, there is a ravine between the road and the barbed-wire fence, a fence with tires filling in gaps at the bottom, a fence that is all local tradition and pragmatism. The dirt is a full red, and the weather is almost summer. Three cows have escaped and walk easily, gracefully even, …
Text: One hundred and sixty-five wingbeats from a ruby-throated hummingbird. Nearly six / hundred from that same hummingbird in front of a perched female. Two hundred / and seventy from a ladybug, or thirty less from a monarch butterfly. / Only fifteen from a swallowtail butterfly, loping when compared / to other insects, but it …
Sometimes when it’s this dark, I light matches & let them burn the tips of my fingers while I watch the flame—this is what I know about memory. It flickers when it feelslike it. I’ve tried to forget that bare- knuckle night I left work,thanking Nick for the quality of his daiquiris. He hada toothy …