IKEA was terrifying. Striking and bright, people juking and bumping. Sharp, hard edges. Intersecting geometric shapes. Endless rooms of feng shui’d minimalist low-set furniture, color-blocked retro yellows and oranges. I wished I had a shell. Fucking Kevlar shell—vest, helmet. Rifle. Goddamnit, I wanted a rifle. Can you imagine clearing this? I didn’t say it out …
After my cousin canceled her wedding, Dave and I still decided to go. We had invested too much in the idea of it, plus a new dress, a room reservation at the small New England inn, a route to peep at the changing leaves on the way in and way out of the state. We …
Artist’s Statement My fiber art reveals my exploration of African American cultural identity, channeling messages from the ancestors. Notions of family, spiritual life, and cultural history are intertwined in patterns, symbols, and sewn lines. Often described as art quilts, my creations act as fiber story maps. Inspired by Lukasa, memory boards from the Luba people …
Artist’s Statement My methods have included forays into drawing, painting, murals, and cold-forged metalwork, and in 2015, I started making portraits on wood panel, using the grain to illustrate individuality and represent spirit. Through my portraits I examine what it means to be Black and queer. I find inspiration in natural materials, allowing the patterns …
Artist’s Statement My work explores a personal landscape where nature is inseparable from consciousness and the ephemeral state of the body. Settings vary from microcosm to macrocosm, but my style is inspired by the transitory—ocean waves, the cycle of life in the garden, and the breath. There are metaphors of loss, connection, strength, and vulnerability …
Despite Spooky Spaghetti being the next day, despite Mina knowing it might be her only chance to get Devon back, she and Jacob stayed up all night drinking Vadorades—vodka mixed with Gatorade so you wouldn’t lose so many electrolytes or whatever—and playing Tekken 3 on the PlayStation Jacob had bought on eBay. After the vodka …
A man by the name of Skinner becomes famousfor keeping caged pigeons, whom his clock feeds or starves at random. Their tiny twitching heads exaggerate until one bird swings its weight like a pendulum; one turns counterclockwise three times; one aims its beak to the corner and sings, My lovelet me break, which has nothing …
I am sleeping when the pain starts, dreaming of full hospitals and empty classrooms, a dark tunnel, dates on a computer screen, a diminishing roster of students, dead links, a riot of wildflowers—yellow to orange to code red—a superbloom of fires. My body jerks. My eyes open in the dark, and I am sucking air. …
There’s nothing much wrong with the Bridgeway Motor Court. The carpet in Coleman’s room is dappled with burn marks, and the exterior wall, the one with the windows, has these psychedelic zigzags at the bottom, like somebody’s kid was left to run their crayons back and forth over the same spot, rubbing them down to …
In the university gardensfull of “native and nonnative” trees I come across a leafless bushwith twigs surrounding its branchy base, and there, the plaque painted over, in pencil but somehow formal, its new given name,“Butt Stuff Flower Bush,”and I think of the long historyof butt stuff and bushes, of husbands and sons who experience salacious …