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 police station at One Union Avenue?

For a while I thought maybe something was wrong with me, like you sort of hope there is when you're a teenager.

Mom says a white deer means blood is coming. When I sleep, the forest floor is a lake of red, no matter if the deer are white or brown. A gunshot sounds.

By the base of his steps, there was a flower pot with a sad, half-dead plant. She lifted the thing. Felt the small force of its weight against her. Stupid, she knew. But she was a container brimming over. And she needed to let something go.

He wasn’t a particularly good Dad (though we weren’t great kids, either, loud and ravenous, always asking for pizza or pocket change), but the holiday didn’t call for distinctions of merit.

Your husband watches like a phantom through the window, his face silvered in smoke. His eyes, once brimming with affection, have slanted into whispers. You want his puckered face to catch a clod of dirt.

Papa blew way over the limit on the field test, but he swore it was a set-up. He kept a loaded assault rifle next to the front door, and a handgun under the seat of his truck.

We were on the roof of Nikita’s house, drinking beers. This is in the Central Valley. The roof was black and, so, hot. It wasn’t summer yet, but almost.

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 the Black couple and the Black couple only...

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...

A flood takes no notice of the borders we construct between inside and out. Like Cassandra sitting in the kitchen sink at her window, the Willoweed family and servant Old Ives can do nothing but observe.

When I was 12, dad took me to the darkroom to help him develop film. He wanted to show me the enlarger, the dangerous developer liquid, and why red light won’t react with silver salt.

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.

On 9/11, with the radio transcribing the ongoing events and his white coworkers in the plant nursery going mad as though the place was burning down, all my dad could do was laugh. As far as he knew, the Omaha nursery was fine. The roof was still above their heads. The ground was unmoving. The sky still blue, and most importantly there was work to be done.

A drowning person will not splash and wave, will not shout or call out for help. Contrary to the ways in which it is dramatically performed on television and in film, drowning is nearly always physically unexpressed, measurably silent.

The Stonewood mall in the late-1980s had been a site of several aspirational misfires to fit in, be seen.

how easy it is to erase rusting yellows? / how easy to let blues blue into zombi? / how easy / is ease?

Do we all migrare: pass into a new condition? / Are we all natives—nativus: born in bondage— / walking toward no-border?

Science wants me / to murder every loaf of bread in cold blood while / the pastries watch, so scared of me, they unbake themselves.

a man covers his face with a rag / on video capture at five in the afternoon, / a woman cuts a round into a saguaro / on video capture at five in the afternoon, / a girl twists her ankle on a rock / on video capture at five in the afternoon

For months, small gold crowns have fallen from the sky.

i open my hands & eat the bird inside the ball of light, the song of the bird of the devil burns a hole in my body & out of it a streak of feathers

“atmospheric river” they say, as if we are children, / as if air was water, as if all was just one phase change away

Source text: Fascinating Womanhood by Helen Andelin, originally self-published in 1963. These erasures were composed upon pages of the mass-market paperback,…

Alright fine: let’s play Chubby Bunny / naked in the sprinklers, I said.

Some call this cloud work, some call / this clever crows riding the updrafts.

Long before Tara met Eggs, she shelled out her funds / to get spat on in the woods, fed ipecac, and peyote. / From her perspective, the way out of cessation and substance / is through, so when the witch uncorks an amber bottle, / and passes it saying every last drop, she drinks.

At the end of our fourth date, Amy and I have our first kiss. SEVENTEEN’s “Left / & Right” autoplays on YouTube in the background.

In their entry on love, Berlant writes that we tend to (mistakenly) use the objects our desire attaches to in order to assume an identity— “you know who…

For Berlant, part of the problem of politics is that marginalized people have to accommodate the feelings of their majority counterparts in order to successfully…