I argued all afternoon today with my Christian friend about The Rapture. She sat with her infant on her lap and gushed about being taken.
Taken where? Away and up. Her hearty baby sucked on a spoon; she said she knew it would happen soon. I wondered why, then, I couldn’t come.
She told me because it’s in the Bible— that God takes only faithful Christians, their souls unsoiled, to live with Him. She looked at the baby and echoed his babble.
I tried to imagine them vanishing before my eyes—would they simply dematerialize, or be lifted up by beams of light, and carried off through spaceship doors?
Later, I saw the shadow of a plane— like a whale’s enormous underbelly— swiftly graze across a hilly field, and a thought kept forming: a refrain—
that larger things above us can only be seen through shadows, left for us to decipher, below— divinity found in hushes—
the rests between the notes—answers we keep waiting for to land.…
tell me about the first time you asked a lover to help into a straight-jacket— tell me if you let them pull your hair or if you writhed like a garbage bag of birds. i want to know all your favorite spots on the body to feel pain— i like the teeth & how they ring like a ceiling of bells when they’re hit. i like knuckles because they trick me into believing there are walls possible in me. you once slipped out of a giant’s mouth without him knowing but came back to do it again & again. teach me captivity. teach me spectacle. i want to draw a crowd. i want to hide keys in my throat & hold my breath so long underwater that the onlooker will know i am part octopus.…
“Toubab! Toubab!” A band
of small children break the morning silence. They are following us at a respectful
distance, just in case the ‘white people’ would suddenly turn on them.
More than 20 years have passed, yet these memories remain as vivid
as if they occurred yesterday. A journey to Senegal, the cradle of the West
African drum scene, changed my musical appreciation—and my life—forever. I
still get goose bumps when I mentally relive the journey’s high point, our final
night in the nation’s capital, Dakar. But more about that in a moment.
It was the culmination of my youthful exploration of West African
drum and dance culture, a truly life-changing period of immersion into some of
the greatest music on Earth. You couldn’t make it up, a tale of bribery,
malaria, and ecstatic musical virtuoso.…
What happened to Tyler
made me paranoid that it would happen to me, too. I chose to stay away from
girls who I felt “sought too much attention”. You know the type –
girls with clearly marked daddy issues gaged into their ears from their dyed pink
hair to their visible tattoos to their acting careers to their penchant for
talking in front of a mic in front of strangers every night to their long
Facebook rants. Anyone who sought too much validation was marked with a giant
red X to me. They were walking warning symbols. I would be smarter than Tyler.
I would learn from his mistake of dating an aspiring writer who used him for
material. I would never be accused.
Furthermore I always
wanted to make sure anyone I slept with would be into it.…
I stand before a pitch of hillside, evening bled dark, a pathway of insideness swarming from that belly of mountain, it is a soccer team emerging, crowd shouting and the Spanish lesson emphasizes the pronunciation of jugadores. Not like doors, the mouth too round: ladders and dogs will get there – Something you thump your tongue against, something that sits against your teeth and rolls to your throat – the shape of the tongue is a monster of sharpness that must prick at the roof where there are no windows. Only widows,
which my son tried to understand yesterday, confusing divorce with death but sensing that the consequence is to be alone and we veered to what comes next. Heaven— who told him that?—or maybe you, living, remarry, or live alone in shade under apple trees with a German Shepherd thirty minutes from downtown.…
White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination – Jess Row
Through an unflinching look at the literary canon since the Civil Rights era, Jess Row’s collection of essays, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination, examines the influence of whiteness on white writers’ imagination and America’s historical antipathy toward race.
As
Row deconstructs the fiction of white writers- notables like Raymond Carver,
Annie Dillard, Richard Ford and Marilynne Robinson, among others- he points out
a pattern of omission, of narratives curiously devoid of racial question, or
tension, which Row defines as nothing short of “wishful thinking as a way of
life, a way of seeing, a way of making art” (10).
Written
primarily for white readers (of which I am one), I found Row very successful
making the connection between white writers’ literary deracination and the
literal ‘white flight’ from neighborhoods as blacks moved north during the
Great Migration, seeking refuge from lynch mob terrorism and Jim Crow (9-10).…
I pry up the bright coin of its lid. Behold — the destroyer of shirts, the speckler of grand pianos. True, I have turned the furniture to ghosts, and I have spread out The New York Times like a sidewalk along our walls. None of it matters. I have always believed too deeply in the steadiness of hands. I should know by now that ruin has a way of finding us, that only my toe print on the bedroom floor can prove that we resisted.
