I’m a leaning tower of 8-track tapes, Dust-sparkled in the living room sun, Gleaming against burnt coffee table Ash before an altar of plastic slipcovers, A 72-inch of James Brown singles—Say it Loud, I’m black and I’m proud—Baby- Baby-baby baby-bay-beh screams crackling Static into the air, ricocheting off […]
Specter Sometimes I dream him but he is not beating me with his words telling me how to fix my hair my clothes, my laugh, telling me not to touch him. He merely hovers on the edge of everything, reminding me I am not good enough, and in the midnight […]
When she first found the bird, she wondered how a dead thing could flaunt such silk feathers. She even started to prod it with her gaze, then her finger— newly lacquered red with a bleeding brush. She asked the air, but how this thing reach here? It just drop so […]
Nat’s Vision in the garden black flowers growing like trees uninterested by the wind and like towers of shadowed bone and in the arcade the white death a funeral of shawls and dresses all strung like carnival lights and lanterns that reflected into themselves an infinite fire where moths found […]
We Don’t ( ) Anymore we don’t bare our teeth anymore no grit or disgruntled out in public keep your mouth a closeted fist keep your mouth a closed tomb keep your mouth a wired phone careful not to spill out too many too many’s careful not to show […]
There’s a joke in British politics that New Labour, the rebranding of the mainstream left led by Tony Blair in the mid-1990s, quickly morphed into neo-liberalism. Speak with a drawl and New Labour and neo liberal even sound similar. Voted in by the British electorate in 1997 on the promise […]
An interview Essay with Victor LaValle I first met Victor Lavalle in a Dunkin’ Donuts in Washington Heights (NYC) during the time he was drafting what would become his award-winning novel The Changeling. He was writing there, he told me, because it had just the right amount and kind of […]
“Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?” -Margaret Atwood The Winter 2018 issue of Radcliffe Magazine featured a picture of me on its cover. Over the last few years, I’ve deposited […]
“Why has ‘Black Freedom’ become so precarious (yet again!) at this historical conjuncture?” Taking up that question, I have posed another: “What Kind Freedom is This?”1 There is a very particular provenance for this question, which I shall elaborate in a minute, as we say. At this moment, however, I […]
By the time James Baldwin took the stage at the University of Chicago in May 1963 to speak on the subject of “The Moral (or Social) Responsibility of the Artist,” an impatient authority was immediately discernible. This recently unearthed recording of the novelist, essayist, playwright, and poet, reveals a weary […]
Apocalypse Now and ThenJuly 1, 2020
“For all the tea in China, all the oil in Texas”July 1, 2020
Horseman No. 5July 1, 2020
Dawn of Darkness 1July 1, 2020