Arik at the Jerusalem Print Workshop shows us something the cost of this month’s mortgage payment. The cost of painting the walls in the two girls’ bedrooms and the accent walls in the kitchen and on the staircase.
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Grandma is usually quiet. She forgets names, dates, places, but she has moments of lucidity. She says she’s become a bird.
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i am not always small, somebody’s little sister, somebody’s baby girl born with pneumonia. i guess that makes me a miracle & on god’s green earth how can any miracle be small?
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They give Darrell Grayson the option of Yellow Mama or lethal injection. There is no real fairness in this decision. In not being strung up in a Michael Donald sort of manner.
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I was afraid of cockroaches until I looked at one underneath my microscope. Dialing the lens, my sight spun in and out of focus over a rough, brown landscape.
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Gloria Gao was the first girl I ever hurt. I punched her in the face for calling my family a bunch of dirty mainlanders. I was Taiwanese like her too, but just half, on my mother’s side, which meant the other half of my family must be made up of organ sellers, gutter spitters, and
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The mama mammoth is always there, knee-deep in tar, sinking. Her partner and child wait on the shore. They’re still waiting.
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My colleague and I are drinking beer in a strange town, which confuses him. There are too many consonants, and the gargoyles look odd. The conference we’re attending is inter-disciplinary, and this sets him on edge.
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My grandmother moves mannequins out of the way to get to the refrigerator. It’s a small fridge meant to store kimchi, hidden from customers’ eyes because she covers it with a plaid shawl.
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Michael’s dad died, so we went off to smoke by the BART tracks. Everything meant more when we were stoned, every leaf, every rock, every half-assed piece of graffiti work.
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He found sex disgusting, and I found sex terrifying, and in that way we reached an understanding.
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March 27th , 1981
I twist the curly wire connecting the rotary phone’s receiver to base. My first call to India from nine
thousand miles away.
The first time a guy said I look like a man was at the Jamba Juice stand in the mall. He was still a boy, probably my age and sticky from adolescence. You look like a man. He said it as if he had the right to say anything to me.
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It’s a sticky July Monday in 1972 when Norma Jean Negri hears about the elephant from a traveling circus who’d just been struck by lightning and died. The elephant’s name had been Norma Jean too.
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March 27th, 2017 (AKA Night One)
Mr. Chuze calls it a science project but we know there’s more Art to it than Science. He wants us to create a poster showing how genes pass on phenotypic traits, to make it bright & colorful & ready for mass consumption.
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In the darkening days of fall, Tiffany listens to the Isley Brothers on repeat, not a rhythm but a mood. She sits waiting in her Harlem classroom, where soon twenty sets of ten little fingers will grip her shoulders.
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manguitos
puerto rico’s the land of my grandfather. whenever he talks about his childhood, the island treasures into golden sunsets & moons, into pandulce plazas & beaches where women who eat the sun walk around. no other place, he says, bleeds & blooms the sun.
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In sixth grade, D spent all of one recess asking me to say dirty words, because she liked the sound of dirty words but didn’t want to go to hell for saying them.
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He takes a sick day. He isn’t feeling well, he explains to his wife in a text. You’re sick? she responds. He looks at the words on his phone. He keys an emoji, a shrug. I feel untogether, he writes.
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