notes from a never-was.

January 21, 2022

i stand by my mailbox and wait.

“Do you know what it’s like to have a brain like this?” she screamed, stood up suddenly. Shins hard against the coffee table, destabilizing drinks, dirty dishes, bills, receipts, and an electric nest of bobby pins. “Thinking? Always thinking, with the knowledge that there is no clear intelligence at work? This brain can’t build bridges,…
January 19, 2022

i’ll have what i’m having.

I’m a consummate flavor of the month. Say what they will about me, I have a way of arousing curiosity. Chalk it up to how I keep my mouth shut and tendency to stare into the distance, perpetrating something resembling a soul, when all that it comes down to is wondering what that street corner…
January 17, 2022

welcome to creole nights.

Open season, another lonely night on the calendar. February 7, 1999, and three days earlier, Amadou Diallo had been shot. Twenty-two years, all summarized in a single moment: reaching for his wallet, violently thrust into the next life with the help of nineteen slugs from four officers of NYPD’s Street Crimes Unit. Dead on…
June 13, 2020

Be Prepared to Not Be Remembered.

If I’m not talking about you, then feel free to move along. This isn’t a sermon. This isn’t coming from a smug place of superiority – I just had to remember to insert the word “of” in the previous sentence, I’m just that incapable, currently, of properly placing words to match this momentum.…