Anne always drove too fast. It was after midnight now and the road home was hazy with fog. There were no street lights here in the “old” side of town, just cracked, glowing paint, and the occasional rusted railing reminding you where the cliffs were. Anne had been staying later and later at the shop since she started working there, preferring its armchairs and views of downtown to the quiet and dark of her own apartment. Anne yawned, keeping her eyes dead ahead where her high beams bounced off of the fog, her eyes burned with concentration and tiredness. A burst of dark brown fur rushed into view and Anne slammed on the breaks.
The deer stared at Anne, nostrils flared and eyes shining in the darkness.…
...continue reading
– Onry
Author’s Note: “Livin’ in the Light” is a video of a song I wrote about my experience singing in Portland during quarantine and at civil rights protests as one of the only Black male opera singers in the Pacific Northwest.…
...continue reading
Long before desire benched the boy
I was and took the field, we escaped
baking in our old brick oven
those summer nights, when Pops
ran a cord to the porch window,
so we could sit listening to katydid shrieks
compete with buzzing ballpark fans peppered
by vendors’ hawking cold beer and peanuts,
as fireflies signaled heater, deuce.…
...continue reading
The ambient light goes out and laughter followed it. On the end table, the alarm clock glows at a quarter past three. His bedroom is pitch black without the television. He rolls over and looks at the darkness. The covers are thrown off him so he can get up. He pushes out the bed, finding his houseshoes by feet, and fists the handgun.
Garbage pick-up is today at daybreak. And after three weeks of procrastination, that sucker is full and it needs taken out. The trashcan does not have any more room for another lazy week. So he closes the backdoor behind him, triggering the floodlights. He walks through and beyond the garage to look up to find the night sky noticeably vacant. It is as if the moon and stars withdrew.…
...continue reading
You can’t have sex today. It is the first thing you think when you wake up. It is heavy in the linings of your lungs as you stretch in your twin-sized bed closer towards him. Morning has been pouring into the room for hours and it is getting almost too late to stay in bed, but you stay. You are tired.
There’s no reason to keep him around if you can’t have sex with him, if he means nothing. But you argue, trace the bones down towards his wrist, and correct yourself. He means something; you just wish it was less. You curl into what the twin-sized bed has allowed you to call comfortable and his hand rubs up and down your thigh innocent enough for you to stay.…
...continue reading
On my grandma’s last birthday, I brought her a scoop of vanilla ice cream. She told me to come back the next day with more ice cream, as I had forgotten her real birthday and celebrated a day too early. I knew for a fact that her birthday that year was on Christmas Day, as it had been every year since 1926. I blamed this episode on her worsening dementia. Regardless, I decided to try again the next day, with a hopeful scoop of ice cream and an even more hopeful attempt at convincing my geriatric grandmother that it was, in fact, her birthday. Four days later and many more naive scoops of ice cream later, I realized my grandmother’s dementia might have made her a genius.…
...continue reading
is the title of the book my father
intends to write when he grows up.
It is a hoax, of course;
there will be no other stories
just three hundred and fifty pages
of encounters with the TSA
since 2001
and other, better men.
This is what I tell you
in a coffee shop on Wardour St.
It is one of several things I take for granted
that we already have in common.
You tell me your birthday,
Miami International Airport,
you are as much your father’s son as I am
all daughter.
– Zara Shams…
...continue reading