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 […]

The Pen Is Mightier Than the Paycheck

The skills and traits I’ve cultivated that have strengthened me as a writer have harmed my capacity to hold down a “normal” job. As a writer, I have struggled to unearth my individuality as much as possible. To own and know my own voice, my own truth, and to express that truth without hesitation. To […]

“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 […]

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.