For there is so much she needs to pass on to this child, that our lives are brief, even long ones like hers, and the one thing we should do is take care of each other. That’s all. But honey, it’s so h...
For our excess we lost everything.
But when he sat on the bed beside me, then leaned over and kissed my forehead, my cheek, my lips, his hand pressed to my rib cage, the other stroking my hair back, it was like I was an empty well and...
But now his body feels like some dumb beast he merely exists inside, and every now and then it lets him know it needs to do something: To eat. To piss or shit. To move or just lie down and rest.
But beneath them all, at the very bottom of the stack, is a worn and slightly tattered magazine called African Mamas Sucking Hog. I flip through it real quick; a bunch of young black girls dressed lik...
And that's what I wanted: obliteration. Decimation. Just an instant smear of me right out of all this rising and falling and nothing changing that feels like living.
And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and I...
Joy was something she willed herself to show us, something she raised from deep inside herself as a promise for what could be. Now her life seemed to have opened up into it as if it had been waiting f...
It seemed almost inconceivable that in his short marriage to Althea she had, in her quiet way, left him feeling not only worthy, but exceptional, a man not only capable of being a real poet, but a hus...
I got a degree in sociology, didn't read much fiction in college, and I was a pretty political, left-wing type of guy. I wanted to do some kind of work in social change and make things better for the...
My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, and it would taste like a four-star dinner.
Years later I would hear my father say the divorce had left him dating his children. That still meant picking us up every Sunday for a matinee and, if he had the money, an early dinner somewhere.
My dad and mom divorced when I was around ten, and I didn't live with him after that, though he was close by and we saw each other weekly. I wasn't really aware that he was a writer I didn't start rea...
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