We have, all of us, predicted our deaths. By predicted I mean conjured or imagined, wished for or used as a weapon, a means of manipulation.
At the eastern edge of the City of David archaeological site in Jerusalem, a staircase drops into a cave where the naturally pulsing Gihon Spring burbles up from a bedrock crack. The water runs into …
In the year 2000, I was the chief copy editor of my household. We had just gotten a computer a few years before, and, as the eldest child of our immigrant family, it was my job to proofread my …
Two coins. Gold glints from each of Toni Morrison’s eyelids. One nugget. A small treasure rests inside the cave of her mouth. Gray gleams. Evidence of a metal-lid tin of Royal Crown Hair Dressing. …
The logical conclusion of Despentes’ argument that femininity is equivalent to the art of servility is that a society of women made to worship femininity would have the most servile women. This may …
The plastic surgeon, a short, blond-gray mustachioed man comes in to tell me he’s headed to the OR and will see me in there. He taps the rail of my bed twice, a gesture I take as doctorly …
It’s true: humans have a desire not just to tame nature, but to be its master, to live where and how we want and to not apologize for it. The second half of this equation, then, is villainizing …
What is it to call an animal or a plant a pest, anyway? To say it does not belong wherever it might find itself? We worry so much about words like endemic and exotic, forgetting that these beings …
When I was young, I carved my name into a two-pronged tree in our backyard that looked like a giant slingshot. It was my tree. I used to rest in its crook and look out over the lawn. I didn’t …
My first curiosity with the color purple was in church. The formidably wiry Lutheran pastor, Pastor O___, with his black bowlcut and his square jaw and set-upon shoulders, bemoaned John 19:5: “So …
So I’m eating cake under the stars in Accra and the night air is sweet as Christ on the tip of my tongue and I can hear the fishy heat—crisp as a town cracker digging into lemon caviar and, out …
Sometimes being best can be the worst. The prized antlers the wapiti so lovingly drapes with velvet and nourishes with aspen shoots can turn their caretakers into rumpus room decor, even though …
Arriving back in Los Angeles when the orange trees were in flowery bloom, their fragrance nearly knocked me over, flooding me with childhood memories. The poet Mahmoud Darwish said that, “cities …
When Toni and Lola have a good run with the oilmen, we all get to go up to Dallas for steaks and Neiman Marcus and drink thirty dollar cocktails made with real gold. Tina finished paying her …
It’s approaching midnight and this is not how I would have wanted it to happen: sitting by myself on my porch, drinking wine from the bag of a box and chain-smoking cigarettes...
and the tour guide said what a shame how awful the heroin in Kensington but we would not be focusing on that today because this was an African American Iconic Hero tour and she smiled beatifically at …
Late one night in April 2006, I heard an unexpected knock on my bedroom door. I lived at the time with a loose coalition of punks, anarchists, hippies, and nondenominational nonconformists in a …
Who called Mirrellez C. Elliott and told her that her son had died in police custody? How many minutes did it take for the police to drive De’Sohn from where he was arrested in New Haven to the …
Exclusively available in the print edition of Gulf Coast 33.1
Exclusively available in the print edition of Gulf Coast 33.1