I began drawing nudes as a way to make sense of bodies. Of my body. This has never been comfortable. Every exploration of a figure, every rough sketch, every erasing of a line to correct an angle, every moment of satisfaction in getting a shadow right has felt a little like the awkward fumbling of [...]
How To Protest
What I need you to understand is the way the early morning light reaching across the water teased the surfaces of their brown skin, dancing among the cells and nerve-endings warm and glistening, as they stood waist deep in the gulf, bodies clothed in t-shirts with the sleeves cut off, fishing hats, and glory. What I [...]
This Here Place
I am trying to be written. I am draft after draft, words and whole lines scratched out, and sometimes I am my own arguing in the margins, hasty question marks writ large, ink trailing. I am trying to be told. What is my life? What am I for? Everything I have done to this point [...]
Naked
I can't think of a word more fraught with complicated and nuanced meanings - can't imagine an experience more entangled with pain and pleasure than the experience of nakedness. Naked as an experience transgresses what we imagine to be boundaries between the physical and the emotional. It betrays how such boundaries are artificial, and soul [...]
Love in the Perfect Tense
One of the hardest, most complex parts of having not been loved well in the past is the way it forms - the way it leaves a mark - on one's ability to know in the present if one is being treated with dignity and respect. It seems so backward to me, because I also [...]
Indefinitely
"I am afraid," I say. It's a Monday evening late, and we're tucked into seats at a small wooden table in the balcony of a place he knows in Midtown, huddled over our dwindling bottle of wine, which I think we're downing together partly as an act of mercy, and partly as "honesty insurance." I [...]
Morning Prayer
There are roads I know like I know the path my feet take from the pew to the table, maps my body returns to like the This do in remembrance carved into the wood. I drive, I lean left and lean right, winding through trees I have known long enough to remember their stories, circles beneath the bark [...]
Learning the Clay
"That wheel is too slow. It makes you work too hard - you use all your strength to control the clay." I sit up out of my hunched position, and look at the mound of wet clay on the center of the pottery wheel. I stretch my arms, hands covered in slip. For twenty minutes, [...]
A slight rumbling
"Shannon?" She is whispering in the dark from the top bunk, and I am frozen in place on the bottom one. It's a bit after 4am. "I'm awake," I whisper back. "Did you hear that?" I did hear that, first one pistol shot, followed by six or seven more in rapid succession, somewhere close, between [...]
Give us this day
It’s late morning late-June, and the house is quiet except for the rushing of traffic on I-10 which never seems to stop. Against its white noise, I hear the unfamiliar voice of the white-winged dove roosting on the back fence of our Fowler Street house. I watch her with mild curiosity through the kitchen window [...]
