It’s a sticky July Monday in 1972 when Norma Jean Negri hears about the elephant from a traveling circus who’d just been struck by lightning and died. The elephant’s name had been Norma Jean too.
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March 27th, 2017 (AKA Night One)
Mr. Chuze calls it a science project but we know there’s more Art to it than Science. He wants us to create a poster showing how genes pass on phenotypic traits, to make it bright & colorful & ready for mass consumption.
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In the darkening days of fall, Tiffany listens to the Isley Brothers on repeat, not a rhythm but a mood. She sits waiting in her Harlem classroom, where soon twenty sets of ten little fingers will grip her shoulders.
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manguitos
puerto rico’s the land of my grandfather. whenever he talks about his childhood, the island treasures into golden sunsets & moons, into pandulce plazas & beaches where women who eat the sun walk around. no other place, he says, bleeds & blooms the sun.
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In sixth grade, D spent all of one recess asking me to say dirty words, because she liked the sound of dirty words but didn’t want to go to hell for saying them.
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He takes a sick day. He isn’t feeling well, he explains to his wife in a text. You’re sick? she responds. He looks at the words on his phone. He keys an emoji, a shrug. I feel untogether, he writes.
Read MoreWe meet at a restaurant with dusty wine bottles from places we still cannot pronounce stacked high up the walls. A carafe of pinot grigio between us. We grown now.
Read MoreElizabeth White is white like her name. First time in our Bengali-medium, central-Calcutta school American woman is teaching. She is volunteer only. Come here, teach English one month and go. They’re trying many-many things for making students speak English. Posters here-there in the corridor: No English, No Future.
Read MoreJust before the worst blizzard since ’86, knowing full well it was coming, I walked to South Station and took the Number Four bus two hours through the pre-blizzard traffic to the address Pete had given me…
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