I’m afraid the guy who cuts
My hair someday will snap, talk
Baseball, slide the razor down my face, pull
My locks as we discuss the demise of the LA Times
And use the scissors on my eyes
Because he swears he sees a dotted line.
Last week I stood in line
At the deli, watched the butcher cut
Salami and sausage, his [...]

We didn’t believe when we first heard, because you know how church folks can gossip. Like the time the elders were convinced Sister Janice’s daughter had been turned into a lesbian when she began playing rugby in college. For weeks, we heard the grown folks whisper about how no girl should be playing football—it just [...]

My parents announced their divorce the same summer the vines contracted Phylloxera, a root louse, and began to shed their rich green leaves, revealing the sea of gnarled brown stumps below. For weeks, the groundskeeper had taken soil samples, leaves, bits of debris from all the vineyards and slowly, methodically produced a timeline of [...]

The cannon bewitches the body…the school compels the soul.”
-Ambiguous Adventure

Some ten years ago, while my mother and I lived in Dakar, Senegal in an overlarge white concrete building between the grandiose villa of a corrupt politician with three wives and a squatter settlement covered in weeds and rocks, I first came across a copy of [...]