eight years
not nearly enough to cleanse the stench, funk / grime and crime within the walls of an estate corrupt / not enough to baptize a new beginning or / dissolve evil embedded in historical detail
The Social Virtues Series
Recent Posts
Review of Maze: an epitaph for the soul
Maze by Matt Bialer.Finishing Line Press, 2021. Matt Bialer’s Maze is a wonderfully composed epic in narrative prose to his late wife, to society,...
Summer Land
EVER SINCE VERNON WAS A TEENAGER, HE WAS GOOD AT SLEEPING. SO GOOD in fact, that his mother was scared he’d never wake up when he went to bed. Vernon held the record for the longest sleep ever taken in his family. And there weren’t many records between him and his mom, although she was good at all sorts of things.
Three Poems
Blue Dress I've hung my light blue evening gown on the bedroom door so that at night, when I turn away from you to sleep, I still have something to...
Two Poems
Poetess Anoints Herself In wild audacity I wedded Word, obscured ragged frock made fit for my existence. I claimed branch broken weavings as my incendiary hair. Hovered over crumbling coast while my silken breath swung bare-breasted. The sea was nothing but spit in...
How Can Black People Go Camping at a Time Like This?
LIKE A BEACHED WHALE, THE REFRIGERATION CONTAINER RESTS ON LOWRY Avenue behind North Memorial Health, a trauma hospital in Robbinsdale, Minnesota. It’s been there since March. Either whitewashed or dulled by time, the hand lettering on its side reads, Frank’s Vegetables.
A Review of Kerrin McCadden’s AMERICAN WAKE
American Wakeby Kerrin McCaddenBlack Sparrow Press, 2021 From its epigraph to its final line, award-winning poet Kerrin McCadden’s exquisite third book, American Wake, is about going places. In its energetic momentum, we encounter who moves on and who and what is left...
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.