Prose, Poetry, and Art since 1956
Re-reading American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes (Penguin Poets, 2018) at the end of 2018 was literally hard to stomach. I revisited the politically charged poetry collection on the day a seven-year-old child died while in U.S. Border Patrol custody and was reminded of the work’s visceral nature. Hayes’s keen focus on bodies creates a striking portrait of contemporary American…
Step 1. Exposure: My grandma wanted a burial at sea. It sounded like something beautiful—like something worth immortalizing in marble, or on canvas. An oil painting the size of a billboard. But this place is nothing like an oil painting. Not slick, not exact. Instead, the Salton Sea is like a Seurat painting: beautiful at a distance, the shapes familiar and concrete—until you walk closer, realize…
In an unknown village on the outskirts of a small town miles away from the city, a girl not more than six years of age lives. Three hundred steps from her home, there’s a small, eerie cave. At first, it was almost an hour walk with her clammy little feet. Doing it every day, back and forth for some time, cut it by almost half…
~ Estero Recreation Center, September 2017* DAY ONE or THIS SUCKS “We’re just waiting for the water to recede.” In the gym, over four-hundred olive green cots, white blankets stamped with red crosses. A white stranger in their bedroom; brown, beautiful children smile up at me. How would it feel? All your belongings, stuffed into two black trash bags? Are the most vulnerable the…
In the moments just before anesthesia took me to the bottom of the ocean (and then back), I looked down my hospital gown and admired, for the last time, the fullness of this original body. My original body had many marvels but I always wished it for someone else—spent years daydreaming of my flesh neatly disassembled, and sent to more deserving homes. But you cannot give…