A Funeral Within My Soul
Think of how I dodged death before,/ but death is a persistent player/ never losing in hide-and-seek.
Perigee
No ESmoking
My tías, a heavy, wet cloud around her, sobbing but holding abuela up. The dust of the road to the cemetery kicks up around their ankles. The wooden houses bow behind them, with respect. That’s what I would see, if I were there.
On Ending Our Unofficial Hiatus, & Affirming Our Humanity
Today, we resume Flash Fridays after a nearly four month hiatus. We reject our previous shame, and affirm our humanity as witnesses.
AFTER WE WATCH ROAD FOOD I CONSIDER PLACE
There are so many lives I have not let myself live, restless, paradoxical, tripping instead into the imaginations of others. Corrupted. Cruel. I wonder about the life stolen from me. Would I love what I love if I loved it from Palestine?
There Are Women and There Are Djinn
My great-grandfather was a scholar who taught the Quran to djinn, never accepting payment, so as not to bind himself to them. I want to believe this. That my great-grandfather was a person so powerful, he believed what he saw. A person so certain of his faith and his strength, he did something scary because he had to.
When I Am 19, a Woman I’ve Called about a Job Starts Telling Me about Her White Trash Neighbors
Momma explained how in other lives there are other kinds of nuisances, which is the difference between my mother and me: She did not want to be a bird of prey. She has made the best of it, learned to boil the blood down to a kind of sugar.
Elena Dudum on Witnessing Palestine
Israeli soldiers are rarely held accountable for their crimes. I stare at the photo of the young girl. Her name was Sadil. She looks like my niece. She looks like me. She looks like all of us.
“Freedom from Relevancy”: Walter Ancarrow interviewed by Samantha Neugebauer
Etymologies, Ancarrow's first collection of poetry, is a sort of reference work. It reminds me of David Bowie's comment: "Don't you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything." Etymologies is not long, but it might be about everything; in particular, it might, in looking at the origins of the words we use to describe ourselves, be about our own origins—or our inability to know them.
Some Girls Become Fixtures, Some Just Get Fixed
I remember, je me rappelle, how the maintenance man crouched and dealt with my clogged apartment arteries, pulling out strands of my hair like artifacts. Girls and their figments, imprints, always leaving something behind to memorialize themselves, the violence.
On Beauty and Surveillance: A Review of Concentrate by Courtney Faye Taylor
When Courtney Faye Taylor begins her stunning debut collection, Concentrate—sat between her aunties thighs, getting her hair pressed—I am immediately transported back to my own childhood. Adolescence is a time of innocence and curiosity, as well as a lesson in contrasts: the sting of beauty upkeep and the confidence of a fresh hair-do, the validation of attention and the safety of invisibility. From the book’s opening section, Taylor makes it clear that Concentrate will stretch the expanse of what a poetry collection is allowed to do.