Matrix of all Relation: The Death Spiral
The Death Spiral by Sarah GiragosianBlack Lawrence Press, 2020. “To rend: this is what I want,” says the intrepid and metamorphic speaker of The Death Spiral, from the poem “Notes Toward an Apology” wherein the speaker slices a tomato open with her fingernail,...
The Social Virtues Series
Recent Posts
Nine Winds (i am only ever writing about love)
I. Pandemic IT IS THE FIRST WEEK OF MARCH WHEN WE CROSS THE BORDER INTO MEXICO, continuing the long drive from the temperate rainforest of the Pacific Northwest and head down the California coast, where the land is roughened into arid boulders. We are now cruising the...
Four Poems
Uterus, You Always the gracious hostess, stretched thinto accommodate your growing guests—threepregnancies a breeze. Until the physicaltherapist asked if mine was still intactI hadn’t thought of you in forty years.How rude of me! But in my defense,I never had a sense...
Keeping an Eye Out for Cougars
Narrow was what they called my cousin who is now as exquisite as the Kenyan model pouting on the cover of French Vogue, but before we were of age, I was the pretty one, light, with good hair, and regular. In every photo from the seventies she was my shadow. I’d...
There are no more silkworms in the wild
Maybe I am being sensitive but when C is teaching our Sunday morning Black-Lesbians- Only-Group about silkworms, I become anxious. We are curling over ourselves, watching through computer screens: a video of women's hands laying out carpets and carpets of...
Love Below the Stairs
Daryl lifts the top of the velvet jewelry box with his free hand and carefully scans the pieces. “Oh! Gimmie here!”
unit_52
thank you for being a present uplifting presence. main, these doors open the other way, what kind of truck we in? fade to live action footage of a haggard face man sitting on the curb with his shoes and socks off, picking at dead skin between his toes.
Two Poems
My aluminum-free/deodorant is made/of charcoal. Iterative/self-perceptions slam/into one another with/the incongruity of/perched hummingbirds.
A Review of G.C. Waldrep’s THE EARLIEST WITNESSES
Hailed by his contemporaries as a visionary poet, G.C. Waldrep aptly presents an intimate study of the literal, physical, and spiritual act and implications of seeing.
A Review of Jennifer Militello’s THE PACT
If you are someone like me who usually – but not always – closes her correspondence to friends and family with the word “love,” Jennifer Militello’s “The Pact” (Tupelo Press) might make you want to think about what it means when you use – or withhold – that word.
Four Poems
As they were lowering/his coffin in to the ground/beside my mother’s grave/where the grass had regrown–