Birth of the Blues Was it Miles Davis’ “Kinda Blue” bringing me home to you? Or the musical memories of our mutual histories? Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll laid back and fingering those piano keys, on an instrument played by Langston Hughes, Bontemps, Zora Neale and Countee Cullen while Black women danced a close sweating […]
Remembering. A beautiful word. And for the last decade, this was what Kathleen had done more often than during the years when most of her life remained ahead. Perhaps it was this afternoon’s dense fog, the gray whiteness that parched the color from the fresh green spring grass and the newborn leaves studding the oaks,
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The Seventh Column Once again Diderot’s beautiful ruin standsin the corner of my mind,the great book-city he described in Les Bijoux Indiscrets. It stands there with its cupola and wings and spires;the vast cranes that have been thrown up over the roofs,the towers of every color and shape, like laments;the wide-open windows that look out
“The Seventh Column”, “Anemone”, and “Health and Safety” Read More »
Cobalt Tears Before his body can form the needed musclesTo uphold the soaking load of precious cobalt,He is sentenced to mine,Collect,And carry this mineral.Fragments of cobalt tucked beneath his nails from digging,Its dust in his lungs,His tears polluted with it asPhotographers bear witness to the iniquity of greed,Greed of his country, that owes a debt
Medusa. There’s a reason they call you that. It’s not so much the mythology course you teach, or the fact that your last name is Gordon, or the curly snakes of hair that tumble down your back—it’s your eyes. That famous penetrating gaze that should by all rights have the power to turn one to
They were to write about their career aspirations. Scrawly English words rioted across a sheet of A4 paper. The paper belonged to Adnan*, a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy, a student in my English as a Foreign Language (EFL) class. The class was part of a US State Department-funded education program to thwart budding radicalism in East
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Neelakurinji The blue mountains are purple again as though estranged lovers have washed up ashore and poured paint stolen from the Gods over the Nilgiri. Did you hear the news rumored in mists? The Neelakurunji, Strobilanthes kunthiana, fireflies of blue hue, bloomed at last. Twelve years have gone by since the purple blue comets last
Collateral Damage i. then, as in the past, there were photographs of boys who died in Viet Nam / a girl torched with napalm nothing happy after that, nothing childhood ii. i quit the laundry / quit the boys who called me scoshi / quit gook or slit / quit geisha madame butterfly must die
“Collateral Damage” and “Bamboo” Read More »
Agatha tended the Vortex. It was her punishment for not obeying the Prefect of the Labyrinth, from where all life was sustained. There were rules to follow, laws older than time, although there was no time as we know it, and she had disobeyed the rules by being herself. The Prefect had shorn her locks,
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When the nurse came into the room, I had just awakened from a dream. She was a young woman with swift and accurate movements; her white and blue clothes blurred as she opened the curtains to an overcast day. “You haven’t moved since the last time I checked on you,” she said. “Still tucked in,
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