writers

  • First Freestyle of 2014

    My bed is full of ashes ghosts and fingers that creep like vines. I, limbless perambulate the contours of a dream that approaches a nightmare. I am home and horizontal.

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  • You’re on the porch with the broom sweeping the same spot, getting the same sound-dry straw against dry leaf caught in the loose-dirt crevice of the cement tiles. No phone, no footfalls, no welcome variation. It’s 3:15. Your ears strain, stretching down the block, searching through schoolchild chatter for that one voice that will give…

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  • I recently made one of my semi-sporadic trips to the library and got two books: 2011 Pushcart Prize XXXV and Published & Perished. In the Pushcart Prize book, I read a short story, Mr. Tall by Tony Earley, that has me stumped. Now, I don’t easily get stumped by reading material but I finished the…

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  • The quote below is excerpted from an interview Kalamu ya Salaam did with Amiri Baraka. ya Salaam: It’s one thing to have that sense, and it’s another thing to have the technical facility to put that sensibility on the page. Baraka: Practice. Practice. Practice. I think that’s the only thing you can do. Like my grandmother said,…

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  • I admit it. I bought this book because I like Edwidge Danticat’s books and was very interested in reading her choices. So far I have read two of the essays in the book: Generation Why? by Zadie Smith and Beds by Toi Derricote. Generation Y was devastating in its critique of the Facebook phenomenon and…

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  • So long had life together been that now the second of January fell again on Tuesday, making her astonished brow lift like a windshield wiper in the rain,   so that her misty sadness cleared, and showed   a cloudless distance waiting up the road. So long had life together been that once the snow…

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  • Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that gray vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History. First, there was the heaving oil, heavy as chaos; then, likea light at the end of a tunnel, the lantern of a caravel, and that was…

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  • (To Che, not in memoriam) Your skin linked to the bone was lost in the earth. The tear, the poem and the memory are carving on the fire the song of death with golden machine-guns from wherever you are. And here, each night your books are searched for the just motive of all action and…

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  • 1. in the shower naked he bends to suck milk life urge engulfs we tumble into stream barely able to separate closed in by the enamel fist 2. before the mirror he comes up as i look at myself cups them and squeezes they jump up hard nipples in dance-ritual he’s to my back enters…

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  • Thanks – Yusef Komunyakaa

    Thanks for the tree between me & a sniper’s bullet. I don’t know what made the grass sway seconds before the Viet Cong raises his soundless rifle. Some voice always followed, telling me which foot to put down first. Thanks for deflecting the ricochet against that anarchy of dusk. I was back in San Francisco…

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