Two tree-limb-switched heretics born of Baptist parents, we reveled in a Ouija. But the only black spirits we conjured were our own shadows which flickered against the wall like a private screening. Both of us church boys sweltered in June...
I have found you where I shouldn’t—in the wrong bodies, at the wrong time, and once on a subway platform with my feet stuck to a pool of dried soda taking gum from a near-stranger’s mouth. That night you were spearmint and the 6 train. I...
The stillness you prize. Won’t prize you back. Two beefsteaks. Ripening on a windowsill. A purple tray. Piled with coal. From the field. Of solemn brothers calling. Your name in unison you learn. Men are irrelevant but. Persistent symmetries are...
In January 2005, three-year-old Ronnie Paris III slipped into a coma when he fell asleep on a neighbor’s couch while his parents, Ronnie Paris Jr. and Nysheerah Paris, studied Bible verses with friends from church. The thin and unconscious...
You know that part of town where the miners once lived? Sooty frame houses, porches whose floorboards spring up? Rusty screen doors that close with a thrum, then a series of clicks, then a...
Walking into the smell of old wounds, something about my grandmother’s bedroom always kept me from there—the perfume once animal golden now rancid & dark as whiskey. Lace- medallioned, doilies marking time turned to loss
