Every night I use to think, I have to get up, because it always like this. Wait, listen, hold my own breathing till I hear him. I would breathe in his rhythm, try and take in the air he done let out his mouth, back then when it was still sweet and warm, like years…
And so the autumn of broken glass devolves into images: yellow smoke, exhausted and panting, hangs over mounds of leaves, a spiral of elegant wasps. Through the brittle and shining trees the wind comes wringing its hands and blowing its cold breath down our collars, wet with its childish tears. Once in St. Augustine sumptuous…
Yolanda Barnes comes from California. She majored in journalism and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Southern California. While she was a student she wrote for the Black student newspaper, Alluswe, and freelanced for the Los Angeles Times. After graduating, she worked at the Hartford Courant. (An outstanding athlete, she also taught, for…
Deborah Joy Corey's narrators take control as soon as they get behind the wheel of her stories. They pull you into their pickup trucks, or vintage white Cadillacs, or baby blue DeSotos and slam the door. And there you are looking at their world through cracked and dusty windshields, living their lives, drivin' the Vitamin…
I • THE VAST SLEEP OF THINGS 1 Carthage Is Burning If only this sleep could be wind, I told myself, a dark stirring of it out of Egypt, the wind which rots all sails and cannot rot and is beyond age-not the scirocco with its one obsession; not the chinook thawing the ice on…
We could tell it was him by the knock on the door. He would pound it shaking the whole thing, causing the dogs in the backyard to bark and snarl and leap against the picket fence-a muddy-colored gate, really. I stayed near the back of the kitchen, hands pressed on my knees, all ashy and…
Cara has crooked feet because we're poor. They are twisted up like an old lady's and bunions haunt her big toes. She's getting the wraps off today and she's truly believing her feet are going to be beautiful. Mama spoons some dry pancake mix into her mouth and says, "Don't get your hopes too high….
Under the shade of the mulberry trees, he leans through the DeSoto's rear window arranging samples of carpet and tile, moulding and cove base, furniture brochures and carpet tack with its blue nails as gnarled as shark teeth, and then he stacks the odd suitcases of carpet squares, front-to- back, back-to-front, their plastic handles clicking…
The few years I've spent working with apprentice writers have given me reason to cherish surprises almost above all else. I don't know if conformism is a stronger force in the literature of our time than any other's, but certainly it is insidiously powerful; looking about yourself (in the academy or in the marketplace) you're…
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