Short Form Writing
Short Stories
Walking With My Dead Wife
The Columbia Review, Volume 99, Issue #1, Fall 2017, pp. 39-50.
“There’s no one hardest part; it’s all hard, a series of struggles that I never imagined or planned for, the successful navigation of which requires competencies I don’t possess and a disposition diametrically opposed to my own. A father, a husband: I was never either of those things with any ease. Now I am only one of them, and only barely, and even this meager achievement exhausts me.”
Hunger
Black Heart Magazine, 30 June 2015.
“His steps were faltering. He hadn’t eaten in days, maybe longer. Above him shadows were fleeing into the night, black taking the valley rapidly, devouring blades of grass, rock, and sheep. He walked slowly through the Bull Pines just outside the pasture, his shadow lost among the trees.”
You
Ishaan Literary Review, Issue #5, Spring 2015.
Reprinted in Ricochet Magazine, Issue #6, 2014, pp. 17-20.
“You look down an unremarkable road extending into a grey sky, one leg in a seventeen year-old compact that isn’t quite red anymore. You see the few options available to a married man with $1,200 in his chequing account, $6,000 in savings and $250 left on his credit card.”
What Remains
Rum Punch Press, Special Issue: “Castaway”, November 2015, pp. 14-19.
*Pushcart Prize Nominee*
“He’s on a local bus heading back toward the station, his left eye swelling, his lip in need of stitches it won’t get. He didn’t see the punches coming, didn’t even know who’d hit him until he came to on the floor and his uncle was standing over him, screaming, the corners of his mouth and mustache viscous with spit.”
February in the City
Gone Lawn, Issue #22, Summer, 2016.
“It’s February, and the world is layered, optically. First: a plane of snow that people who don’t know the ocean, or have forgotten it, will say looks like a sea of white. It’s a painful plane, the sun reflecting off it in granular bursts that sear the eye. Next come the buildings: red brick and whitewashed brick, the whitewash-gray and fading with age.”
Chromatophilia
Lost in Thought Magazine, Issue #7, September 2015, p. 28.
“Sun. Sky. Ocean. Plate glass. Steel. Form become formlessness, specks of dust floating, bleeding color in the nascent light, color flitting over blade of grass and leaf, falling on cloud and street sign, crawling over building.”
Vertigo
The Story Shack, 10 December 2014
The Legendary, Issue #46, September 2014
“Why are we outside? It’s cold. The rain’s soaked through my jacket.”
“What are you talking about, Stephen? The sun’s shining. It’s ninety degrees.”
My jacket is normally the color of olives, but it’s darker now, saturated.
My mother’s hair flies in the wind. “Go help your brother build a sand castle.”
Essays
I Am Not Your Negro: A Review
Marginalia, April 10, 2017.
“The lie called race makes Judases of us all, bleeding the human until all that remains is an abstraction with no claim to rights or life.
I Am Not Your Negro is, as James Baldwin remains, a blade that severs bone, a flash of metal that opens the marrow of America’s racial madness to the keening air, and for this we owe Raoul Peck a debt of gratitude. His movie throbs with the feral eloquence to which Baldwin famously gave voice, a lyric cadence strained to its limit by rage, sorrow, and perpetual hope.”
The Atrocity of Sunsets: Sixty Days in Guatemala
Marginalia, December 5, 2017.
“There are more greens in this world than the eye can see, and between Lake Izabal and the Gulf of Honduras they ascend the mountainsides unto the vaults of heaven above water that is gray and white and pristine, and it hurts to breathe there, because you cannot escape how small and fortunate and damned we all are: small before a world that swallows us whole; fortunate to behold it all and be cowed into some semblance of perspective; damned by our ability to destroy lives of which we are entirely unaware, through acts of commission and omission that no intensity of beauty can absolve.”
Fear of a Black Planet — On the Unbroken Tradition of White Supremacy in American Politics: A Review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power
Marginalia, September 28, 2017.
“When I was twenty years old, I was attacked by a group of people outside a nightclub. They kicked me in the head until many of the bones on the right side of my face were broken. That was when I learned what a bone sounds like as it snaps. If the same bone is kicked two or three more times, it makes a wet sound, like mud beneath a boot.”
A Blur of Wings: The Diaphanous and the Dissonant in Political Poetry. A Review of Myronn Hardy's Radioactive Starlings
Marginalia, April 13, 2018.
“Myronn Hardy’s Radioactive Starlings is aggressively opaque. Written in a multitude of poetic forms, it draws upon three continents, two religions, appropriates the voices of a half-dozen public intellectuals, and drops references to Albert Camus, Mahmoud Darwish, Miles Davis, and others. Yet whereas T.S. Eliot’s synthetic density was part of a project intended to unify cultural, mythological, and religious elements of human life within a vision of the whole, Hardy deals in dissonance and incongruity, moving to dissolve illusions of homogeneity and explode false monoliths in historical, political, and linguistic discourses. Starlings tears at the veils of hegemony woven to blind us, scrapes its wax from our ears.”