Category: Arts

I had a cough all my life. It stood by my side.

Near dusk, we owe an appropriate fear to the light that may not show on the hilly back of the morning beast. Mother takes our picture at sunset. Her finger pushing and begging that button to hold everything still, appeases … Read More

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Poems

Dear Julia, our discussion regarding why ants
can lift up such relatively massive bits of plants
was inconclusive. So was our fitful tête à tête.

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Poems

Slug Polaroid ?I.?On a walk through Killarney, I dodge wet loaves.?They would soon stick to sole:?husky bits of polka-dotted licorice,?black pudding gnocchi.??II.?I imagine plasmodial slime mold and black bear cubs?would spawn something like this glossy lump.??III.?At a house near Volx, … Read More

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The Road to Confidence Goes through Cancun

I’d seen the shows and the movies. I’d been there three times before. I’d even written a play that took place there. But nothing really prepared me for my trip to Cancun this Spring Break.

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The Myth of the Reclusive Writer

In Rich Homie Quan’s 2013 classic, “Type of Way,” he joins a three thousand-year tradition of literary recluses in a single rhyming couplet: “I got a hide away, and I go there sometimes, to give my mind a break/ I find a way, to still get through the struggle, what I’m tryna say.”

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Dark Zeros, Dark Heros

The first time I saw Zero Dark Thirty left me shaken to my core, affected to an extent I rarely experience at the cinema. I was deeply moved by what I saw as a powerful meditation on obsession and revenge … Read More

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There’s Good News and Bad News

Dad, that email you sent with your top 25 YouTube vid’s from the summer of ’08 was great.

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Two Poems

On Conception Love making ends bottoms in seats – Virgin beginning from another virgin taken, And all hands on 12-day old heart beats. Or pre-determined Dates, earmarked for ovial optimism By women of long aching maternity, are vesicles of syncopated … Read More

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Return to Hue, Vietnam

The heat veil descends the third week of July and the market vendors feel its suffocation. Next to the stall of spices, a woman holds a cleaver, perched just an arm’s length from the spiked jackfruit shell. She brings it … Read More

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Mapping Nowhere

There were cities that stood boulder-like in the distance There were cities that I loved There were cities where kites could ease greedily among the buildings There were cities in which no honest man could find a life to suit … Read More

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Grace

Sig loves me. He’s sitting at the counter, eating a bagel right now, but I know he’s thinking about me. Today, like every Sunday, he sits all day here in this café where I work. A man across the coffee … Read More

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Shadow-boxers

Here’s how I saw De Quincey High then: stained bathroom walls; pregnant girls; boys with knives and guns and bandanas; teachers with fear so engrained that it folded into their faces in wrinkles; a gym that could have been a prison; a cafeteria that was one; cheap lipstick and cheaper condoms; a dirt track; fences.

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