I found I was still able to evoke emotions and capture beauty. It was safe. It was comfortable, and I never had to look away. Rather than feeling lost, I felt that I wanted more and could do more. I began to see the clouds as art, as the way they might look or could look. I saw them as paintings, as layers, and eventually, some as abstracts.
“Addiction is all or nothing thinking,” my father told me, “like your battle with depression. You either pull yourself together or completely succumb to the sadness, never leaving your bed. All or nothing thinking, the hardest and most manipulating kind of reasoning.”
“Mama,” you’ll say. “Mama, Mama.” And I’ll be the one to blame. Taking a second fall that never pushes back against a tide of shits and mouthful of fucks. Nameless and easy to point out the pangs of absence and guilt. Useless and replaced with something even more robust and diligently cared for.
It lies in their souls. That Earthly promise of life beyond the flesh and ascent into the sky along an arch formed by rain. It is only the drowned—buried under the seafoam corpses of our ancestors—whose souls remain in the sea.
For years after Arturo’s death, Robert lived as a recluse, conspiring with David in the dark. David understood what it felt like to be modeled after his maker and his maker’s desires, only to become something far greater, lonelier, the romantic genius always looking over the precipice.
I am often asked why I don’t drink. Everyone asks me: people in Pakistan and people in countries that are not Pakistan. I like to joke that I do drink—water, lemonade, coffee, chai. If I didn’t drink, I would likely die. No one ever wants to know why I don’t drink carrot juice or why I don’t eat hard-boiled eggs, but it is of utmost importance for them to know why I don’t drink alcohol.
Putting aside the scurvy, wooden fingers, and telepathic seagulls, Our Flag Means Death is a show about outcasts for outcasts. It’s silly, sometimes irreverent, but brilliantly tender. It’s not just a rom-com or situational comedy; it’s a queer elegy—honoring those outcasts in history who chose to risk their lives for freedom and perhaps even love.
Is this how it ends? Does she have my face? Am I gonna die? Why is it that a simple thing like going to get food and trying to eat healthy spirals into something where I don’t feel safe? Cops could be involved.
In my worst nightmares, I’m standing outside the Candy Shop,
crying on the sidewalk in Brooklyn.
A moment in time—
where only I could remember
the night you refused to come out and talk.
I feel pulled towards the earth, not the concrete, but below, as above, there’s only pigs with wings squealing incessantly to raise your hands up though they’re still shittin’ on your sty, chortling at us foreign bodies stuck ruttin’ on stolen land, buried land, land that rears its ugly head and seeks its revenge in paroxysms of passion, land I always feel swelling below my trampling feet.
The volume alone/
slurred over tones of defeat/
should be enough for you to know/
we’re not as discrete as we seem
Hostage to circumstance/
try to affirm that I’m magic
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Claire Potter, author and Professor of History at The New School. Potter is the Co-Executive Editor of Public Seminar, she hosts the podcast Exiles on 12th Street, […]
A girl runs away from home, hoping to see her boyfriend. It’s the middle of the night. She gets in a car with a stranger. They share a beer and things get weird. She jumps […]
At the boundary between East Harlem and Carnegie Hill, my class and I were challenged with creating a food pharmacy that could fuse the needs of two communities, while keeping in mind the imposing problems of gentrification in respect to novelty creation.
An aspiring African American writer sells an urban TV pilot to a studio and is forced to rewrite the show alongside a team of studio-appointed white writers.
How convenient for civilization would it be?
Lonely bulb
Moonbeam beacon
Cascades
On the stage
Pitch black
