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The Unbearable Whiteness of Being, Part I

We are comfortably rooted in autumn now—only a wind away from winter. On late walks, we smile at those flames that still ripple above our heads, but the leaves beneath our feet undeniably crinkle and crunch. The year has stolen itself away—but its end seems welcome to all, tired as we are. So tired of […]

Pain // Power // Protest II

Celebrity deaths tend to be straightforward news for me, easy enough to accept, even when I’m an admirer of the star in question. What ends befall the famous rarely wound or trouble me much at all. When someone I admire disappears from this life, my internal monologue peacefully rambles: A person succeeded, impacted, inspired, created […]

Pain // Power // 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, […]

Quarantine V

The Long Emergency will be chiefly characterized as a “time out” from technology. It could plunge us into a dark age of superstition. My guess is that we will lose a lot of knowledge and skill. But I also believe the human race desperately needs this “time out.” –Howard Kunstler in a 2011 interview So […]

“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 […]

Pray for Blood.

Women know well the body’s intellect. We understand early our rhythm is bound to the sway of the planet and its moon. My faulty clock holds its breath, then releases all at once. It emphasizes my separation from the world, tells me I am a being offbeat. Still I wind up, I tick, exhale […]

Presence.

I come into this world as I am. In the dream, the love I mine is never enough. A woman I love attaches my name to disaster. To ugly things that crawl and poison her. For years I tell her the spelling of my name, but her language has no space for me. The woman […]

The tree of me.

This is the excerpt for another post.