my poem in Colors Magazine, Issue 77: The Sea
December 2, 2009
I remember you like a sea
an artifact of beauty
I could rationalize in bones,
the décolletage
of a fish
such a composition etched into me
like a second skull,
the Red Sea
calling
ancestors in a play
of shadow and
light upon water
that caused me to recede
I remember receding
into new anatomical depths,
the sands of our spines
bleeding into oceans;
once you may have met me
in Abyssinia,
the image of you always characterized
by distance,
re-memory
I bring you back in waves of wax
and gold, for our love
was always an unearthly idea
impossible for any image
we were trying
trying to
immortalize
rather than come and go
but even sensations of old
will stop moving, which is why
we have
used each other up
my own chest now
sinking at the thought, the dispersion
of grief into a poem,
ocean,
recollection of bones
for the sake of all archeologists
who revisit what has gone
only to return to themselves
just as ex-lovers and historians must
recall
in order to forget.
————————————–
My Dektet 2010 Poetry Debut
July 6, 2009
I am pleased to publically announce that my first full-length book of poems, entitled Ex Nihilo, will be published in early 2010 with Frontenac House Press.
As part of the Dektet 2010 series, my manuscript was chosen using a blind selection process by a jury of leading Canadian writers: bill bissett, George Elliot Clarke, and Alice Major. Ex-Nihilo is a collection attuned to the larger experience of moving on (ex-) from nihilistic attitudes (nihilo) as it also relates to the ability (in its original Latin etymology) to create “something out of nothing.”
Please visit the following link for comments on Ex Nihilo, amongst the other titles soon to be released:
http://frontenachouse.com/news/frontenac_house_unveils_dektet_2010/
lux aeterna
March 11, 2009
Fire
In Memoriam of A.D.
‘God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,’
not of philosophers and scholars.
Certainty, certainty, heartfelt, joy, peace.
God of Jesus Christ.
God of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
‘Thy God shall be my God.’
The world forgotten, and everything except God.
He can only be found by the ways taught in the Gospels.
Greatness of the human soul.
‘O righteous Father, the world had not known thee, but I have known thee.’
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.
I have cut myself off from him.
They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters.
‘My God wilt thou forsake me?’
Let me not be cut off from him for ever!
And this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.’
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
I have cut myself off from him, shunned him, denied him, crucified him.
Let me never be cut off from him!
He can only be kept by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Sweet and total renunciation.
Total submission to Jesus Christ and my director.
Everlasting joy in return for one day’s effort on earth.
I will not forget thy word. Amen.
– Blaise Pascal
my poem in Canadian Literature #196, “Diasporic Women’s Writing”
August 27, 2008
Cultural Mulatto: Any American born after 1967
June 25, 2008
featured writer at burning effigy press
June 25, 2008
I have a featured profile at Burning Effigy Press, with regards to my recent chapbook, Sea Change (2007). There is a short interview as well. Checkit.
Hipatitis (n): Terminal coolness
June 25, 2008
Winners from the The Washington Post’s yearly neologism contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.
The winners are:
1. Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have
gained.
3. Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
4. Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent.
6. Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown.
7. Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle (n.), olive-flavored mouthwash.
9. Flatulence (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are
run over by a steamroller.
10. Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.
11. Testicle (n.), a humorous question on an exam.
12. Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified bearing adopted by
proctologists.
13. Pokemon (n), a Rastafarian proctologist.
14. Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with
Yiddishisms.
15. Frisbeetarianism (n.), (back by popular demand):
The belief that, when you die, your Soul flies up onto the roof and
gets stuck there.
16. Circumvent (n.), an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by
Jewish men.
The Washington Post ’s Style Invitational also asked readers to take
any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or
changing one letter, and supply a new definition.
Here are this year’s winners:
1. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops
bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows
little sign of breaking down in the near future.
2. Foreploy (n): Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose
of getting laid.
3. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the
subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.
4. Giraffiti (n): Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
5. Sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the
person who doesn’t get it.
6. Inoculatte (v): To take coffee intravenously when you are running
late.
7. Hipatitis (n): Terminal coolness.
8. Osteopornosis (n): A degenerate disease. (This one got extra
credit.)
9. Karmageddon (n): it’s like, when everybody is sending off all these
really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s
like, a serious bummer.
10 Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day
consuming only things that are good for you.
11. Glibido (v): All talk and no action.
12. Dopeler effect (n): The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter
when they come at you rapidly.
13. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after
you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.
14. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into
your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
15. Caterpallor (n.): Th e colo r you turn after finding half a grub in
the fruit you’re eating.
And the pick of the literature:
16. Ignoranus (n): A person who’s both stupid and an asshole.
why i like black + white things
May 5, 2008
1. Because they make me feel like I live in the 1920s. Or the Harlem Renaissance, to be exact.
2. Because it forces you to pay attention to detail.
3. Because I happen to be mixed-race and am researching what that designation means in a literary context.
mulatto n.
etymology: Spanish mulato, from mulo (mule), Latin mulus
1: the first-generation offspring of a black person and a white person
2: a person of mixed white and black ancestry
Mixed-race figures continue to present challenges for critical scholarship. Literature and literary studies on mixed-race characters have attempted to understand what being “mixed” means in its social, cultural and political implications. Many times, these attempts hold on to negative “tragic mulatto” stereotypes, in which interracial becomes synonymous with confused, exiled. Literature is at the root of the continued production of this image, which has in turn served as a point of departure for writings on mixed-race.
Though “mixed-race” can refer to those who may have more than a single ancestral background, of which one does not have to be European, this thesis looks at the complex history of black/white relations in the American context, and the products of those relations who are usually “damned” regardless of the racial communities of which they attempt to be a part. Many mixed-race characters literally disappear in narratives, whether by virtue of passing for white or in their representations as lost, wandering figures. I am interested in teasing out how novels imagine mixed-race characters, from within the complex web of discourses informed by the science fiction of race, and why these imaginings tend to reiterate the tragic mulatto narrative… that is, the poor mulatto soul doomed to forever wander along the colour line.
I am currently pursuing the study of race and the (im)possibility of mixed-race designations
in literature spanning across the 19th and 20th centuries, in North America. I will be exploring
this field at the Graduate level. I’d also like to be a part of an anthology of mixed-race voices
in Canada.
P.S. “Mulatto” is no longer politically correct. Never forget that “mulatto” as a mixed black/white racial designation derives from a blood quantum version of race equating blackness to animalism, as was used during slavery. I use the term instead to invoke a sense of the constructed, mythic ties that make these figures a product of the historic American law of hypodescent (or “one drop rule”). I use the term often with quotation marks, so as to suggest a continuous questioning of the designation “mulatto.”
Oh, and,
4. B&W Photographs are just more flattering.
