Columns
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Three Poems
Afterwarmth Sunlight staring coolly from the windowsill. Electric hush.White pulsing disco bass skipping from the street, the soupedup radio. Escape across a wakenight. O swooping garrulous lightninglines, O ice and melt and rising tide, O lavender flakes skyscrapedagainst the sunset—what…
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What Is Freedom: Christina Sharpe
On July 5, 1852, at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, at a meeting organized by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Frederick Douglass delivered his now famous speech “What To the Slave is the Fourth of July?” In this the…
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Patching Up The Past
When Novak ran past shouting, “Incoming!” I tumbled out of my GI hammock and scrambled to a sandbagged culvert hooch, waiting out the attack with squad leader Lloyd Edge. At the all clear signal we emerged to shouts that a…
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Dibé be’ iiná Remembering Sequence
Dibé be’ iiná From a Diné perspective, goats and sheep are emblematic of womanhood. My great-aunt would winter with sheep deeper in the canyons, move with them, care for the flocks. When I was a girl, my grandmother herded our…
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Pomegranate Season in the Underworld
This is the difference I am trying to name. The pomegranate on the shelf and the pomegranate on the newspaper. The fruit polished for display, and the fruit cracked open in a living room. The version of a place that…
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Form as Historical Memory: On D. M. Aderibigbe’s “82nd Division”
Are elegies fundamentally love poems? Or are love poems always tinged with elegy, knowing they contain their own ending?
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The Godbrother
Candida founded the agency; she was a middle-aged powerhouse with a keen literary eye, taste, and a no-nonsense air. She’d ushered Joseph Heller through the 22 rejections of what was then called “Catch-18” before she found him a publisher. She…
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Precisely Flesh
Everyone I love is flesh, the kind that shatters in a bomb blast, that breathes a virus in and crumbles, that putrefies when there’s no room at the mobile morgue. At least four thousand one day in winter, overflowing.
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Logan Takes a Lit Test
I ask that my parrot remind me how to breathe. He complies. I take the cue from him as always. Thank you, he says, I say. Papa telling me when I was a child, inhale, inhale, inhale. The village doctor…
