Articles

The dog / rests her head on my knee. A person is not like a god. / A person is not like a dog.

from where I was broken I could not flee.

When my mother said
Linda
and looked that look, I could

see it all before me.

One second he was riding on the river and the next he was in it, watching his canoe float away upside down, its silvery hull a bright line on the dark river.

Our blood sugar was so high that our wounds
had stopped healing. We were either a tapestry
of Band-Aids or very careful.

The racetrack, famously built before we knew of such things, straddled a fault line at the joint of two very active plates. As a result, fissures spread through the walls of the old grandstand like capillaries. The world was tearing it apart naturally.

I’m waiting for that strange experience when a picture speaks, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes with a shout, sometimes with a reverberating silence that pulls me to the edge of a precipice where I’m not sure whether I’ll fall or fly.

“Literature…can hold up those things that mainstream society doesn’t believe: that Black people are there. One of my jobs is just holding that up to the light so that everyone can see that they’re there.”

Your heart stands wide for all to enter in: it should have been a door for me alone.