J’essaie de m’exprimer en français, ma deuxième langue, cette langue dont les mots m’échappent et les sons me fascinent. En tant qu’écrivaine, moi, j’ai peur de cette langue que je ne maitrise pas vraiment, pas encore. Les mots ne dansent pas devant moi, non, je les chasse sans cesse jusqu’à ce que je triomphe ou j’abandonne.
I want to start with a very simple idea: this world is not the way it was meant to be.
She does not know she is going to die today. She is too young to know what that means, anyhow, only that Tariq did not come home the last time he went to the Fence and no one will tell her where he has gone or why. Mama tells her not to go near the... Continue Reading →
It’s Travis Greene coming out of the speakers this morning, though his voice is nearly drowned out by the hum of conversations and shrieking toddlers sporting bunny ears and the scrape of metal folding chairs against the concrete floor in this repurposed warehouse-gymnasium-sanctuary. The pastor walks by and I can’t help asking, “Where’d you find... Continue Reading →
Once upon a time, I was a contented evangelical teenager. Well, not really – I never did get into the spirit of Dare2Share’s “Letters from Hell” sketch, and I felt vaguely guilty for thinking in private that Barack Obama and feminism weren't as bad as the other church people seemed to think. And then there... Continue Reading →
If you stood before us, would we recognize you? If you whispered in our ears, would we know your voice? If you came to our borders and asked for a visa, would we even let you in?
Today the aesthetic is salted caramel on my tongue and leaves that tease autumn on yellow-tinted edges; damp hair chilling the back of my neck to contradict the warm inner fuzz of a new sweatshirt; a bench painted in psychedelic colors while someone at the heart of the pedestrian mall behind me is playing a saxophone. A homeless man I have seen out here before is sitting on the edge of a cement retaining wall fifteen yards away. I know I will pass him when I get up to leave but I have nothing to give him.
Once we reached Maple Road on the way home from school in the seventh grade, I could close my eyes and feel each bump in the road and know exactly where we were at that moment, tracing the entire journey from the turn off of 44th to Maple, to Spruce, around the corner, two houses down, then the bump and rise of our driveway before Mom shifted into park and shut off the engine. "We're home." I knew. In that, our fifth year of living there, the Lynnwood house started to feel like home rather than the Edmonds duplex I'd spent over half of my life in. Now, as I do my own driving around Iowa City, I try to avoid the eyes-closed-road-bump test. But perhaps there are better metrics for determining when a place is starting to feel like home.
I have a confession to make: I used to think that white supremacy was passé. Yes, I knew that racism was still rampant in our country – I could probably even have held my own in a discussion on the effects of systemic racism on public education and incarceration rates. But I genuinely thought that... Continue Reading →
I made my first quilt when I was eight. I say I made; I did make quite a bit of it, but it was something of a training-wheels quilt, made with a lot of help from my mom and Sue, the family friend I've more or less adopted as grandma. I still remember the excitement of... Continue Reading →
Marginal Notes 