When my white friendsturn to me, upsetat my indifferenceto their conversationabout Michael Brown,I point at the lone cue ballI’d been rolling aroundthe table. I spin it and saythis is one revolutionI can control.It’s how I compressthe conversationinto metaphor.It’s the only wayI can articulatemy understandingof race in America.I ask them to ante upquarters. When the cue…
I am an anagramof my father. In America,it is anapound. It is an archaicsystem of measurement.I have my father’s eyes.I am made of lettersI didn’t learnuntil I was five.A is for assimilation,which is an anagramfor cultural exorcism.If I say I’m gladI can speak English,I mean to sayEnglish is an anagramfor God’s tongue.I mean to say…
In nonfiction, our winner is Emily Strasser for her essay “Homeplace.” The nonfiction judge, Jabari Asim, writes: “In ‘Homeplace,’ Emily Strasser investigates family history and the remnants of a community transformed by our government’s covert development of nuclear weaponry. With careful scrutiny she sifts through long-simmering secrets, exposing the large and small costs of a…
My mother helped me write the first poem because I knew it wasn’t safe in there. Weary people, she began—the cigarette smoke drawing sadness in the air (as if I should do something with all the people). Walk the streets fell into the next line because it was all I could make happen….
A horseman was found horseless on the side of the road. We asked afterhis horse, but he had no recollection, of a horse or of his having been ahorseman. And so how were we so sure? How did we know this was aman who lacked the very thing that defined him? We knew because weourselves…
After her husband died she sent herself to other worldsBelfast and Paris and some other ununited states—to bein places—as she put it—that felt as strange as the strangenessof the other earth under the one we dream we are standing on. She took pictures of the beyond and sent them over.She wrote some things but not…
You didn’t want to ride bikes to Coney Island,so I went by myself, rode the straight shotof Bedford past Prospect Park, past BrooklynCollege, until I hit the waters of Sheepshead Bay,then turned right and rode toward the bungee-jumpride I could see hot pink against blue sky.A new high rise. Mermaids danced along Shore Parkwayholding solo…
Down where boxes are folded not onlyto contain the thanks of every newborn,but also the regressed-back-into-childhood, third from left, a Korean man-child with rosy cheeksthrows you a grimace as if he’s had it right up to here …He wants to bark sorely underpaid, packs sugar-bricks to build an army of the super-fed. He wants to…
tears for things As for empathy, it was breakfastthat taught me first the feelings of objects. Each wet Cheerio floated there despairing,it seemed, to be—bare raft—wrenched like that from its family. Foodwas just the beginning. I pitied the drooping head of the desk lamp, the light bulb its burning out. I endowedwith the pathos of…
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