Excerpts
These Hands
Wiconi
I swim in darkness or shadowsfor protection and youare here with Creatorknitting my bones togetherin your willing vessel. Each day your bodyyields to mine, your beating heart,like a drum taut with hidebeats above me or around me,its comfort lulls me to sleep orsets my feet to dancing. I twist and spin in the depthsnever needing …
Island of Misfits
Winner of the 2023 Nonfiction Essay Contest We drive over the Atlantic Beach Causeway twice—on the way in and on the way out. The leglike piles holding the mile-long bridge plunge deep into the coastal waterway that separates Morehead City from Bogue Banks, one of the barrier islands of the Crystal Coast in North Carolina. …
the author to the dead
Beloveds, beneath the surfaceof your last place, the tiny, oblivious fishes form wreaths above the sea grasses& their long reach— Some mornings, in my own city far away,I run to greet “you” come to me as sea, & carry myself out into your long, dark time like a child meetingits older cousins. I touch …
Meditation during the Sufferings and Deaths of Others
I did not deserve to be beaten, and I did not deserve ballet lessons– except insofar as everyone deserves ballet lessons. Me mum thought I was well worth beating. She would not have thought that I deserved to starve. I deserved the milk in her breasts–I had put it there. When I was a baby, …
sonic icons
I if I say duvet, night, bed you’ll expect you heard sleep if I say raw, China, worm you’ll think silk and if I say I love you, I love you, I love you hear eye olive yew
Go Hard or Go Home
NOT NORMAL On April 26, 2019, the former quarterback of the record-setting Clairton Bears in Clairton, Pennsylvania, was shot dead a block from the stadium where he once led the team to its fourth straight state crown. He was twenty-three. At his funeral, a preacher pointed at Armani Ford’s white casket and said, ‘‘This is …
How to Survive a Pandemic
the plague comes, the plague grows we stop going outside and call it social responsibility as if we need a reason not to see each other as if we’re not already only seeing each other through the pixels of a screen glued to it like babes on a tit or drunks at the bottle is …
This Town I Knew
I hear the women in the bus swaying, heavy as birds I hear their breathing widening in concentric circles I hear the ice in the souls of men collapsing onto the children I hear the sirens of the silent train and the slobbering Alsatians sniffng the air for faults, unkind fires in their eyes I …