A (partial) recording of my reading with Luisa Caycedo-Kimura at the Gloucester Writers Center on July 17th, 2025. Luisa read from her wonderful new book All Were Limones while I read from a manuscript in progress.
My set list (such as it is):
“across the table” (excerpt) [time: 2:37]
“What else can I say when this lady says it all so well? Just…I think of you.” [time: 3:50]
“midwifery” [time: 5:50]
“you’d get over it” [time: 7:36]
“Gloucester Harbor | 78 “ [time: 8:35]
My poem “oh God! please stop!!” now appears in South Florida Poetry Journal . Bonus: a recording of me reading the piece accompanies it. Trigger warning: historical, graphic racial violence.
Click on the link below and scroll down to my name.
“oh God! please stop!!”
from the back of the class, his cry careens
over the heads of the rest—their stricken faces, jaws slack
or furiously clenched, eyes dewy or attempting to shut out
the assailant in my words—but I refuse. continue explaining
the lynching by car of James Byrd Jr., briefly mentioned
in Rankine’s The White Card, open on their desks. the event
is presented as a turning point, character development for ‘Charles,’
a billionaire with Basquiat’s Defacement on his wall. a news story
whose horror shook him into seeing that racism still existed
in the enlightened, heady days of 1998. a details-oriented educator,
I clarify why ‘Charles’ was so troubled.
Byrd—49, disabled, Black—was walking home
when three white men—one he thought a friend,
had known his whole life—offered him a ride
in a grey Ford pickup. crushed between them,
they forced him to remote woods, kicked and punched
and baseball batted him in and out of consciousness,
spray painted his face blacker, pissed and shat on him,
retrieved a 24-foot-long chain from the truckbed,
noosed it about his ankles, and dragged him for 1.5 miles.
the FBI’s autopsy determined he was conscious―
trying to keep his upper-body off the road-rashing concrete―
until their carefree swerving swung him into a culvert,
which severed his right arm and head. undaunted,
they continued to drag his remainder for another 1.5 miles
to the cemetery of a Black church, where they mutilated
and distributed his corpse to be found in time
for the following morning’s Sunday service.
I tell my class this did not happen in a grainy, black and white photo
of the past. 81 pieces of Byrd were jigsaw-scattered through Jasper, Texas
on June 7th in 1998, two weeks before I graduated from high school,
that I was only two years older than they are now. I remind my stunned―
sobbing, silent—students that I am younger than their parents,
who may send me emails asking why I would subject their children
to these horrors from another time, who may—echoing ‘Charles,’
echoing their children, echoing James Byrd Jr—ask me to please stop.
but the truck didn’t, so I can’t.
Another poem is now appearing in The New Verse News. This time some biblical fanfiction— what the apostle Paul might say to a certain Christian denomination within the US.
“the first letter of Paul to the Church of [name withheld on advice of counsel] is about the ICE detention of Pastor Daniel Fuentes Espinal and uses direct quotes from people my publisher wouldn’t allow me to use. But I still have them. They’re still public on social media. You can do a search.
I have two new poems appearing in Cultural Daily.: “when asked what poets should do in response” & “when asked to read a poem for the Black History Month assembly, again,” both on the power of poetry (or lack thereof).
(The second poem is a sequel to my previous poem “when asked to read a poem for the Black History Month assembly” also published by CD.).
My six sentence work "apparently my last poem offended" has ben published in (go figure) Six Sentences.
What started as an interesting physical writing prompt during my Kenyon Workshop Residency, turned into this creative nonfiction piece.
Poetry, the movie Sinners, the Duvalier regime in Haiti, The Cleaning Lady tv show, and more wrapped into this small package.
“There Is No God-Damned Metaphor Here” now appears in New World Writing Quarterly.
I wrote a poem for a friend. They loved/hated it. So naturally I sent it into the world. “when asked why I'll never write you a sincere poem” was just published in The Lit Nerds.
My flash fiction story "Facility" was just published in OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters.
“‘there is a goodness that doesn’t need me...’” and “floating” are ekphrastic poems that have been published in Pirene’s Fountain: A Journal of Poetry .
Click on the link below to read the full issue.
“watching a production of Beauty and the Beast after attempting to be vulnerable” is a loosely ekphrastic work in a series of “watching” poems I accidently started writing. It is found within the 2025 edition of Rituals from Anomaly Poetry.
Click on the link below to access the entire anthology.
I have three poems appearing in Record of Dissent: Poems of Protest in an Authoritarian Age, a free digital chapbook from The Chaos Section Poetry Project. Record of Dissent features 44 poems of protest, resistance, survival, and hope in response to the rising authoritarianism of the Trump era in America.
My three poems are:
“misstra know-it-all” (p. 9),
“when asked for help writing a satire” (p. 38), and
“say what you mean” (p. 58)
My micro-creative nonfiction story “The Quiet Part” no appears in In Short : A Journal of Flash Nonfiction.
The Prose Poem has published another of my ekphrastic works, “victuals and victim do not share a Latin root.”
It is after Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller’s Slave Ship, wax, 1954.
Listen me explain why these three ekphrastic poems were cut out of a manuscript in progress:
“life is bigger than you” - an erasure of REM’s “Losing My Religion”
“a new hope” - based on Chase Kahwinhut Earles’ Dominion, hand-built and kiln fired porcelain, 1976.
“if we're being honest” - on Master of Figline’s Saint Francis of Assisi 1335, egg tempera and gold leaf on panel.
But I end with a reading of “Job confronts Maggie Smith at a conference,” which is after Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” and the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible.
My ekphrastic poem “So Bound is Creation by the Cry of Trumpets” was just published in Stone Circle Review.
It is after the 2022 dip pen and India ink creation of James Dye by the same name.
My ekphrastic poem "if Havah had a daughter" is appearing in the latest issue of Mom Egg Review. It is based on William-Adolphe Bouguereauex's painting Temptation and imaginings on the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible.
I’m honored to have another poem appearing Presence . This time it is my ekphrastic poem “Job confronts Maggie Smith at a conference,” which is after Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” and the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible.
She told me to eat, pray, live, laugh, and love. To be #Blessed. To appropriate dances like no one was watching the Black girls on TikTok. To vision board the fridge and every wall, with inspirational quotes giving no credit to the Black women on Instagram. Stolen, like their hair, lips, ass, and tan.
As Paul Mooney said, “Everybody wants to be a nigger, but nobody wants to be a nigger.”
My creative nonfiction piece “White Woman Freedom” was published in Identity Theory.
My ekphrastic poem “Breach” is after the Alison Saar sculpture by the same name and was recently published in The Prose Poem.
Click image for more details
My poem “Okonkwo returns to Umuofia” was on display as part of the Menino Arts Center’s exhibit Images Then Words (January 9 – February 14, 2025), which featured the work of 53 Word Artists responding to 61 pieces by 47 Image Artists. Images juried & curated by Sasja Lucas. Words curated by Holly Guran. View the virtual 3D gallery here.
“Okonkwo returns to Umuofia” is a doubly ekphrastic work, responding both to Sasja Lucas’ The Wrestling Match (pictured below) and Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart.
Sasja Lucas
The Wrestling Match
120mm film photography
8 x 10 in (h x w)
Okonkwo returns to Umuofia
seven years was a long time to be away from one’s clan,
but he would return to his fatherland and fan his fame—
a bush-fire beneath the stiff harmattan wind. he had a plan:
reclaim his land, rebuild his compound, regain his titles and place
among the egwugwu. but Okonkwo was not prepared
for what he found. his motherland was good to him in exile,
kind. but Mbanta was not filled with warriors. they were weak.
how else could they fall from the grand, old ways—the bonds
of kinship—and allow an abominable religion to fester
like an un-lanced boil or an untreated bout of iba? his Umuofia
was feared by her neighbors, known for her power in war
and in magic. her priests and medicine men possessing
the most potent rites and fetishes, the shrine of agadi-nwayi
among them. thus Okonkwo could not believe Obierika’s reports
of home. but by the second market week back, he began to see
the truth. how his brothers strut across the village square
in white shirts and dusky trousers, abandoning the loincloth
and wrappers worn since the founder of the clan engaged a spirit
of the wild for seven days and nights. how his kinsmen drink
palm wine tapped in Umuru from glass bottles, their gourds
and skulls gathering dust on their obi walls. how titled men
allow themselves to be dragged by kotma to the white man’s court,
to be beaten by his perverted justice. how even some elders dance
to the rhythm of the white man’s religion, deaf to the ekwe
and ogene talking across villages, across the clan’s history.
how supposed men stride—hatted heads held high—to and from
their abomination, their church, in the Evil Forest, believing
their Jesu Kristi will save them from the wrath of Ekwensu and Ani,
Amadiora and Chukwu. it was easier when the converts were only
efulefu—sheaths taken into battle, machetes forgotten at home,
the excrement of the clan lapped up by this mad-dog faith. but now
even Ogbuefis have severed their anklets, become as agbala, to join
the Christians’ meager feast of their god-man’s murdered body.
something must be done. but surrounded by so many such as these…
as cold water poured on a roaring fire, he stifles a sorrow, a grief
he has not known since the last days of the son whose name will not
be remembered in the clan and the one who will. his fist aches,
reflexively clenching around the machete resting inside his obi door.
he will shake out his smoked raffia shirt, examine his feathered headgear
and shield to satisfaction. he turns for home as if on springs, heels
hardly touching the ground. as the elders say,
whenever you see a toad jumping in broad daylight,
know that something is after its life.
