Walking in the footsteps of my enslaved African ancestors led me to The Dismal Swamp . . .
Walking in the footsteps of my enslaved African ancestors led me to The Dismal Swamp . . .
I drop Vika off at preschool and treat myself to a cup of macchiato, a weekly ritual I have created for myself.
Retrieving the mail, you notice new posters nailed to telephone poles out front.
Just a curtain separates each patient, our shared uncertainty.
The couch at my house is big, but you still sit near me anyway.
To my brother, who told me the entire plot of Alien when I was ten years old: You were my first monster-maker.
Mom loved carousel music boxes. Had a showcase collection of them.
At a crosswalk on Santa Monica Boulevard, a thin, hip, stiff man in his seventies.
My lap desk snuggles my thighs. Outside my patio door, winter snuggles the deck.
I killed a spider by mistake. A weightless thing dropped onto the page I was writing.
The office door doesn’t have my name stenciled on the glass.
you’re watching in awe as the white trail streaks across a brilliant blue sky, thinking how that teacher astronaut will soon be in space . . .
“What do you usually go by?” she asked. I’m not so sure.
I once swallowed a yellow-striped bee. A yellow-jacket.
I remember it as a snapshot. We were in the kitchen.
Dad was pacing, saying the cops were going to show up and take him away.
Bucharest, 1994. The soup is cabbage and a bone she has boiled three times, the marrow long gone.
Roy had worn too much cologne.
I blew it. My final interview question for The Job.
I’ve never been to Lake Lanier, that infamous body of water in North Georgia named after some racist Confederate soldier.