No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story. Celebrating Diversity Since 2015
Gong Fa hated Captain Flavel the way she hated most white men, especially rich ones. But over the last few months, Flavel had become something else: a dying man. A rich, stubborn, selfish one, but still a dying one.
I loved the alley bar noise in the Mission district. Sunday mornings our downstairs neighbor played gospel so loud all three roommates left the house. On my mirrored closet I wrote a two-line poem in eyeliner by Alicia Portnoy translated from the Spanish: I am talking to you about poetry / and you say / when do we eat. / The worst of it is / I’m hungry too.
“You’re an intellectual and a revisionist.”
“You take that back!”
“Lower your voices! The neighbors.”
“The neighbors? The neighbors are with us.”
“Not anymore.”
The advice from Henry James to writers, “Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost,” seems quaint and misguided today. Who remembers every Tweet?
I want to wash this skull with Lysol
And write how much each wet lobe weighs—
Mom picked up a plant from the sale cart. It looked as miserable as the ones already populating her shabby garden, "Dead Man’s Corner", as Dad called it.