Review by Bunny Goodjohn – “‘Ding Dong Bell’ is a phrase Shakespeare used in several plays. In the original lyrics the cat was left to drown.” (8) DING DONG THE BELL PUSSY IN THE WELL is a collaboration that…
Review by Kerry Neville – Lisa C. Taylor’s Growing A New Tail contends with moments of rupture, when the past is upended and the future reinvented. These eighteen stories are short, lyrical meditations. Backstories are important but offered with realistic…
Review by Bunny Goodjohn – “‘As the air grew darker a sudden sense of doom crept into the conversation, all the danger surrounding the children….Yes, danger traps were everywhere” (11). CROWD OF SORROWS, the latest work of fiction from Nahid…
You, little movie theatre in Harlem, two blocks from my home, Do you remember how you took Mama and me in on weekends? Like magic on that big screen, you kept Mama sober. A huge tub of popcorn on our…
for Beckett Rose before they took you from your bed inside me, before they made that exploratory sleuce through exoderm, endoderm, abdomen before your pale soft skin and hair like a tawny cat’s were presented to me disconcertingly already-clean and…
The women of my grandmother’s line are cloaked in polished oak. Their nipples bare, silk of budding blooms. I know my father by the cacti growing atop my lungs. The areolas pullulating from my desert chest sprout needles that prick…
My Nephew’s teeth are straight like swans in a row better than ducks pretty target for foe I worry about his beauty is his grace what they seek to destroy? does he have Emmett’s eyes? Trayvon’s smile? No child’s nightmare…
My mother died last May. She lived to sew her own designs dressed her only daughter like a baby doll contrived in custom made pink and lace, a traumatic misplace for a non-femme. My mother died last May. At home,…
My daughter has blossomed into a beautiful butterfly, She has learned to stop and smell the roses while avoiding bee stings, but She cannot avoid the pain that life brings. She still cries for little lost things, like Math books,…
Sometimes I raise my hand to brush the curl from the left side of my face but it is only a new squiggle of blood floating in the vitreous of my remaining eye. Sometimes I remember you saying Mama, I…