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Bloody Knuckles

September 8, 2020

The waiting room was small, not much more than a large cubicle with a coffee machine, a couple of televisions, and maybe twenty other parents, all of us equally nervous and trying not to show it. A better artist than me might’ve been able to capture it with his brush, the anxiety like a physical object that each one of us carried. I had been there nearly an hour when Karen called. I walked toward one of the room’s corners, as much privacy as I could find, and whispered hello.

How He Changed over Time

September 8, 2020

He used to play the violin, but then, as his fingers thickened and lost some of their agility, he became frustrated by trying to play, and then bored by it. 

Form A

September 8, 2020

I need to try a syntax of each in place
of accounting: each-syntax as language 
within reach of one’s own body, 

Century at Lampedusa

September 8, 2020

In rubber rafts on the open field of the Adriatic, open field of the Mediterranean. 
In a diesel-powered ship setting out from Hamburg in 1939. 

Of  Freedom and Liberty

September 8, 2020

As Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in his 1762 treatise, The Social Contract, humans are free but are everywhere in chains: literal chains, made of forged steel; or perhaps metaphorical ones, made of gold and silver, illusion, ignorance, indifference, whatever binds and traps us.

Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century

September 8, 2020

Citizenship is not inherently political, and yet it is impossible to escape its politicization. In this century, citizenship—the status, the idea, the very word itself—has been politicized to extremes, commodified and weaponized in unprecedented ways. It has become a third rail of conversations and campaigns. And to the degree that it is wrapped up with notions of patriotism, it is often used as a litmus test for legitimacy. All of which is to say that citizenship—its privileges, its responsibilities, even its attainability—is a topic whose complexities can disappear against a vitriolic backdrop.

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