Thalassophobia: The Black Boy and the Sea
I am now twenty-seven, and I still do not know how to swim.
Essays
168 posts
Voices On Addiction: The Hypnotist
Dad quit smoking via a hypnotist shortly before my sister Margaret was born. When I was eight or nine, he liked telling me the story of the hypnosis, sitting together on the green sofa in the living room, parallelograms of sunlight on the brown carpet.
Constraints: A Hometown Ode
. . . the sheets hold a diagonal crease: the memory of the line, an imprint as obvious and useless as the adult our childhood selves once planned to be.
SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW: A Search for Transcendence & Annihilation in New Zealand’s Hippie Paradise
“I once ate a mushroom in New Zealand,” I tell people, “though I had no idea if it was edible.”
Gentlemen, Start Your Engines
In 2022, I attended the 106th running of the Indianapolis 500, and watched cars hurtle past at 220 mph—fast enough to cover a football field in nine tenths of a second. Over 325,000 fans cheered louder than the engines themselves.
Pecking Order
I didn’t feel guilty, not exactly, but I did feel a twang of remorse as we left her by herself.
Into the Body
These days, I walk down to the river running through the town I’ve made mine. The water’s on the rise.
Braced and Bedazzled
“This is solid, mostly titanium,” the surgeon says while I’m still groggy in recovery. “You can’t pull it apart if you tried.,” and, almost as an afterthought, “Don’t try.”
The Dislexic Poit
I always received glowing remarks on my alliteration or understanding of poetic devices, but they were hidden beneath what felt like hundreds of tiny red strikes across misspellings—although my phonetic versions of the words were sometimes genius, and always understandable.