No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story. Celebrating Diversity Since 2015
Maria saw the bean pods hanging from the lone tree and felt the rough texture of loose fibers tightening around her throat. She coughed. The image of young men swinging from the further pines haunted her view; young black men floating in starched suits, some with rope and others with barbed wire set alight like hanging torches.
I love the beginning of James Agee’s A Death in the Family. It was right around the time I had heard (from where I can’t remember) that good writing uses almost no adverbs or adjectives, and here this guy was describing his corner of Knoxville as “fairly solidly lower middle class.”
Everyone has at least a few good ideas in their lives. Even my cat, Boo Boo, has some good ideas.
So Jeremiah quit, uncertain of his prospects, and unable to say what the future held in store. All he knew was that he could no longer continue as a student. If Walter Benjamin couldn’t make it as an academic, he decided, university life was not for him either. He returned to his library books and found a job as a barista in the café across the street from his apartment in downtown Oakland.
I waited in three lines to see Michael Stewart. The first line was for the metal detector outside the Guggenheim Museum. The second line, inside the Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda, was for my reserved ticket. The third was to get into the gallery to see Basquiat’s “Defacement,” his portrait of Michael Stewart being “defaced” by police violence.
But there is something else that stings me. Burns. You were my friend first. You were supposed to be my friend too. I study Wes’s face. His purple heart hardened with cruelty into a midnight shade. He’s right where he wants to be, right next to Reed. And he does not see me.