紫薯, a mother’s boiling incense, herbal ginger tea
山峰, summit of skies, an unwrapped shin almost fire-scalded red
tobacco, whistling grey pipe of meshed 廣州 air and 1970s pollution
my father dodging into villages with naked children,
small mounds of dirt baked with stolen potatoes,
...
I am often mistaken for a tiny biting inset. No one cares to know my taxonomic name. The term "midge" will suffice. Any little two-winged fly can be a midge. There are highland midges and phantom midges, midges with affectionate nicknames like "punkies" and "no-see-ums."
—from "13 Considerations of the Holy Bug," Volume 63, Issue 4 (Winter 2022)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
As a kid with a big imagination and a very short attention span, I would think up stories all the time but rarely write them down. So my earliest memory of a story I could commit to paper was an elaborate spin on an assignment for my 10th grade English class. Every time we were given a new list of vocabulary...
A small crushed garter snake lay belly up on the warm road. A baby maybe. I was cruising downhill in my manual wheelchair on a gently winding road in upstate New York when I encountered it—my very first roadkill. I passed it, then pushed back up a few yards to investigate.
—from "You Are Always Entering Your Future," Volume 63, Issue 4 (Winter 2022)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I cannot remember much about the angsty poetry I was writing as a teenager. But recently I was talking to my cousin and asking her what I did as part of the gang of kids (cousins, neighbors, friends) who grew up together. She reminded me I wrote some plays. Our extended family lived in an old adobe bungalow and there was a small...
cum on in / to my big show / dnt b shy / but dnt look down / wut do you make / of my image
—from "diagnosing," Volume 63, Issue 4 (Winter 2022)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
In second grade, I pasted pictures of flowers I cut out of a magazine into my notebook and wrote a poem for each one. I guess I’ve always been drawn to making series and projects rather than individual pieces and have always liked to engage with other media when writing.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
I think what we’re exposed to, what blows us up, at a relatively young age often impresses us the most because we’ve never encountered anything like it before. When...
In an attempt to escape another 5AM / got sick stayed sick hospital memory / pink coat phlebotomist posed with puncture / a butterfuly needle to draw 4 vacutainers of / hard to pull hard to flow blood jam / in an attempt to point pain
—from "denominator-mandate," Volume 63, Issue 4 (Winter 2022)
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
Paul Beatty, Audre Lorde, Nikki Wallschlaeger, Jamaica Kincaid, Lucille Clifton, Toni Cade Bambara, José Luís Peixoto, Zefyr Lisowski, Vanessa Angélica Villareal, Kayla Hamilton, Jorge Luis Borges, Percival Everett, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Charles Yu, Ntozake Shange, Liz Bowen, Gabrielle Octavia Rucker, Marcus Scott Williams, Shannon Finnegan, Ezra Benus, Karel Čapek, Ken Liu,...
