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Crime
She Walked Out The Door
For some people life is effortless, like running as a child with no sense of the world turning beneath our feet. It is not that way for you. You will always be aware of the weight of your footsteps and the force of will required to move forward. Anger keeps you together, a mortar that begins to harden.
August 2012Sunbeams
February 2011Laws bind us. But it is important to remember the law is only what is popular. Not what’s right or wrong.
Throwing Away The Key
Michelle Alexander On How Prisons Have Become The New Jim Crow
Yes, during the original Jim Crow era Whites Only signs hung over drinking fountains, and black people were forced to sit at the back of the bus. There was no denying the existence of the caste system. But today people in prison are largely invisible to the rest of us. We have more than 2 million inmates warehoused, but if you’re not one of them, or a family member of one of them, you scarcely notice. Most prisons are located far from urban centers and major freeways. You literally don’t see them, and when inmates return home, they’re typically returned to the segregated ghetto neighborhoods from which they came, leaving the middle class unaware of how vast this discriminatory system has become in a very short time.
February 2011Shoeless
The gal looked young in the body and old in the face standing alongside I-80 with a flowered suitcase held over her head to block the sun. Stop! Darrell said when we drove by her, but Jake didn’t take his foot off the gas. She’s not such a looker, gentle Glenn whispered. He was by me in the back seat. They all look the same when they’re talking to your johnson, Darrell told him. He rolled his window down and hung his head out to stare at her disappearing shape.
June 2010You Always Call On A Sunday
You are not ashamed. You are stunned: By this new thing that he left behind, that spread through you like blood in those hours he was with you. By how easy it is to die.
March 2010Narrow Escapes
A noodle shop in central Burma, The Phil Donahue Show, the Tet Offensive
January 2010Mitzvah On Saturday Morning
You’re on 14th Street headed west / to buy a new seat for your bicycle. / In Casper, Wyoming, a hospice nurse / backs her car out of your parents’ / driveway.
October 2009Somewhere In His Eyes
Somewhere in his eyes I see the five-year-old that he once was. I see him in the back of a kindergarten class, pacing, unable to sit down. I see him at home, leaning on the arm of a chair as his daddy blows marijuana smoke into his nostrils. Later he staggers around the room, making the grown-ups laugh.
November 2008Sunbeams
April 2008I was walking down Fifth Avenue today, and I found a wallet. I was going to keep it, rather than return it, but I thought: Well, if I lost $150, how would I feel? And I realized I would want to be taught a lesson.
Stealing
Five packs of Red Vines, Uncle Wiggily’s Garden Patch, Jackie Robinson
April 2008