First Proof
At thirteen, I felt my body slopping. Though I sat in the middle of the nurse’s height-weight chart, though I’d memorized the textbook diagram with its cake-like cross-section of flesh (epidermis, dermis, hypodermis stippled yellow with fat), my problem went deeper than biology.
At thirteen, I felt my body slopping. Though I sat in the middle of the nurse’s height-weight chart, though I’d memorized the textbook diagram with its cake-like cross-section of flesh (epidermis, dermis, hypodermis stippled yellow with fat), my problem went deeper than biology.
Increasingly, poems reach me physically, testing my physical and emotional boundaries—looking for places they might get inside, frequencies at which I might hear, poking at sensuous dead zones.
The tour’s route never varies. Twice a day the caretaker of the Morgan Foundation must retrace his steps with a new eclectic band of strangers in tow.
I am in the shower washing off the day’s yard work. Mid-scrub I realize I missed a Black Lives Matter Cleveland rally in support of defunding the police. Relief pours over me.
Yi Sang (1910–1937) was a poet and a short story writer during the Japanese occupation of Korea. Despite his brief literary career, he left behind perhaps the most influential body of work in modern Korean literature.
A collaborative piece on the elements.
The first time I saw Jane I was working at the bike shop, a veritable cacophony of grease and gunk I only survived by occupying my hands. Bikes had a purpose that had nothing to do with me—every part fit together properly so my mind could remain free and unviolated. Her left knee was scrapped, with pieces of pavement lodged in the wound. The sight disrupted my hard-earned equilibrium. I tried not to look, but it was too late. I had already imagined retrieving the bits of bloody gravel from her abrasion and rolling them like candy on my tongue.
It must have been during those months when an accident slightly threw off my routine. And maybe it was in those months when I finally found—though I wasn’t looking for it—a brief respite. One day I was at Giovanna’s and she read me a few lines of the subcomandante’s, poetic lines that told the story of a viceroy of India who dreams that his kingdom is destroyed.
Lake Pred was no lake but a precondition, / predecessor assault that kept coming, / preterite arrest we couldn’t quit.
At the appointed time, the team members left their rooms and followed Phillip’s directions. They walked down the hallway and up the stairs to a room at the end of the corridor.
I have just read a diary entry from fifteen years ago, in which I wrote that I had just read some diary entries from many more years before that, written at a time when I was staying by myself in a small town near Caen, in Normandy.
“What’s a dinner party without a bit of schadenfreude?”
My favorites are the ones you see, but I have a lot you don’t see unless I’m naked. And I’m not going to get naked now. I’m too embarrassed with you.
No one lives every day as the person they want to be. It is rare that a full hour should pass in such a feeling.
On the cannibalization of black pain and how we free ourselves from it.
