Two bald eagles soared overhead, circling each other as the afternoon sun started its decline, and we were on our backs, admiring the day, listening to the water clap against the hull of the Chubasco. The docks were still, and we looked at the row of sailboats bobbing in rhythm, slowed by the wall of tires and old wood that surrounded the marina. No one was in sight. The eagles flew to the wooded hillside across the bay, a fish caught in the talons of one.
“Do you think it’ll pick up? The wind?” Mary shifted her back with the hull’s subtle movement. Her brown hair, long as ever, splayed against the dirty white fiberglass.
“Eventually.” I stood and stretched. Eventually, this damned boat will be out of our hands.…
Dominque Carson is an award-winning community activist, journalist, researcher, and massage therapist. She’s written for NBC News, Ebony, Soultrain.com, and Singersroom.com, among other outlets, and has interviewed a wide range of artists, including Charlie Wilson, Patti Labelle, Tito Jackson, The Isley Brothers, and Regina Belle. Recently, she published a biography called Jon B: Are You Still Down? (which examines the life of R&B icon Jon B). She’s also working on a journaling project regarding the National Women’s History Museum, as well as her next book, The Invisible Betty Boop.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Carson about her various career paths; her love of music, writing, and helping others; and how she’s been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.…
Their rakes lay forgotten. Stephen runs, red knitted cap, red cheeks, the little girls chasing, one wearing a brace on her leg. They dash through cut-glass air to tumble in the cold flakes of brilliant color piled thick from the woods … too many … like trying to rake in all the stars and clear the night sky. But we tried, all of us, ’til our arms ached even into sleep. In those days we burned great smoldering heaps, and the air was scented with smoke until after first snow. Stephen is ever aloft in this photo, one leg kicked back, one leaping ahead, and nothing, not one thing, I promise myself, has changed in all these years.
My brother has a tattoo of a dark cloud on the inside of his left forearm, though if you ask him he will deny the fact that it is a cloud at all. When I look at it, all I see is swirled up ink.
“I don’t know, it just looks cool,” he’ll say to anyone who asks what it is or what it means, and I can’t help but think of Oscar Wilde with his theory of aestheticism. “Art for art’s sake,” he’d say, and my brother would probably agree, even though he probably also wouldn’t entirely know what he was agreeing with.
When visiting our grandmother he covers it up with sleeves, knowing that she’d likely curse him to hell if she ever caught sight of it, and I can imagine he probably fears she would actually have the power to carry that out.…
and mangoes on the counter silently ooze sweetness, anyone arrives through the door warmly, and sweat seals our skin together in cheek-kisses. A nimble infant, the bright sun hangs on us, while, in front yards, banana spiders spin pearly filaments, and catch the devil’s red at the thorny edges of themselves. In the storms of June, the waves break from the teal sea, like a seventh seal, and pass ominously through the patched- labyrinth of parks, and children revel in it, the mud and mangroves; But, they have seen the little perditions of the periwinkle: To endless displace each grain of sand, all for the waves’s moon-cadence, and the white froth that spills against the sand into the declensions of another language and is wiped clean.…
We are all that child, knees pulled to our chests against the darkness, hiding secrets. I’m not talking about subterfuge or concealing indiscretions or even the emotions we brush from our sleeves. I’m talking about the parts of ourselves we know but don’t know we know. I’m talking about latency, about personal tectonics. I think telling stories is one way to bring those plates towards collision. Philosophers and artists, those subjects of erudite deconstruction in the finest schools, they’re just working it all out too but in refined methods of logic and form. So too the grizzled raconteurs chewing their cigars to pulpy nubs in the back rooms of pubs, the coffee shop bloggers, bar napkin songwriters, three-times-a-day-dogwalkers, children elaborating plots, even that guy in front of the Sencha Tea Bar in Madison who just free flows for hours, all that rhyming angst oozing from his pores, covering him in a veneer of sweat, a polyurethaned poet – we’re all coaxing to the surface the tiny sliver beneath the skin, the sharp point of which jabs, jabs until, finally, we tweezer the damn thing out.…
