Protest I

How does it feel / to be on your own / with no direction home / a complete unknown / just like a rolling stone? I am terribly alight with rage, so laden with sorrow—sometimes in passing, other times for days, weeks, longer (I don’t know what proportion of my days are spent this way, […]

“We don’t talk about it.”

My mother’s side of the family keeps secrets–semi-secrets partly known to me. My mother allows the secrets out here and there over the years, gives them some sun and air, lets them stretch and run a little. It must relieve her, a little. My mother tells me things others might color with shame, maybe because […]

Our Own Worst Enemy

In all truth, it is often the people to whom I feel most closely allied that I fear the most. Some of the harshest judgments, even insults, I’ve absorbed over the past few years have come from progressive women artists of color, some of whom I imagined to be family, people who understood […]