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, […]

“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 […]