Banana Tree
Lan resented that her children were smart. There were four of them. Each only a year apart. Nathalie and Nathan had been on honor roll since the 9th grade. Her first two had already gone. She saw Amy...
View ArticleContrary to Belief
The young man, wearing a black dress clasped tight against his ankles by the wind and silver stilettos that expose his unpainted toes to the same, complains as we walk of his uncertainly tucked junk,...
View ArticleDisney World
The hotel room is wrecked with empty bottles. It smells like sweat and cigarettes, and on the TV the college kids bump and grind through spring break. All night these flickering reality shows have been...
View ArticleLet’s Abolish Tenure
The American university is facing a dual crisis. First, students can’t pay off the debts they’re running up from their tuition. Second, they’re being taught by an underclass of radically over-educated...
View ArticleTwo Poems
Prayer And what from the roadside rabbit, shiver-breathed, waning, the coiled perfection of its innards unfurled, can be gathered? I was once shown a horn that had grown from the back of a woman’s...
View ArticlePulling a Geographic
NEIL GAIMAN, THE GRAVEYARD BOOK: It’s like the people who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with...
View ArticleDispatches From Officialdom
In high school, during chemistry class one day, the following staticky announcement came over the intercom: “Attention teachers, the book salesman is in the building. I repeat, the book salesman is in...
View ArticleThe Commuter Shuffle
There’s the minute or two to the end of my street. The minute down Damen to Chicago Avenue. The minutes spent waiting for the bus, followed by the seven or eight standing on it and the five on the...
View ArticleThe Insect Wife
01. One morning we wake up to termite wings. It is our honeymoon. Odd and fumbling, we laugh in disbelief; we drink more rum than water, calculating gallons as a way to pass the days. From styrofoam...
View ArticleTrotskyist Christmas
Paul calls one snowy evening to extend an invitation to me. I met him a few weeks ago, in front of the NYU library, where he was distributing copies of the newspaper Workers’ Vanguard. Ever since, he...
View ArticleBig Science
i. the departure 1942: My father was G.I. Taylor, the English physicist who worked on fluid dynamics. My grandfather was J. J. Thomson, who basically discovered the electron. And my great-grandfather...
View ArticleTwo Poems
EMILY AS WE DISCUSS THE BULLET WE FOUND IN THE BACKYARD Gasped like lungs trying to exist outside of a body, Emily & I took turns holding the unfired bullet, saying nothing at all, we passed it...
View ArticlePuerto Madero: Rock and Ruin on the Imagination Express
“The last few years have witnessed many great changes in the commercial life of the Argentine Republic, and none more remarkable then the growth of the American community both in numbers and...
View ArticleA Season without Seasons
This fall is never-ending. It has been sweater weather for months, and despite knowing this will not change I wait for a frigid wind to blow through. I’ve called home for winter coats and boots, had...
View ArticleStraight Colored Men
I can’t tell you what I wished you would be doing. I can’t redefine masculinity. I can’t redefine Black masculinity certainly. I am in the business of redefining Black womanness. You are in the...
View Article
