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Parenting
A Single Suitcase
We left before they told us to evacuate. I saw the smoke over the hills, knew the ferocity of the Santa Ana winds, and figured it wouldn’t be long before the fire would reach us. I packed a small suitcase.
July 2019
You
Early on I thought about wiping your memory. I might as well admit this to you now. I thought maybe if you stopped believing you were something else on the inside, then you wouldn’t be sad anymore. And you wouldn’t change. This was before your body really began to transform.
January 2019
The Making
We made eyes across the room. We made each other’s acquaintance, whatever that means. I made a move, you made a face. We made out anyway. We made bad pottery, we made bad jokes.
January 2019Hello, Goodbye
You want to write back, He died. You want your hurt to be the world’s hurt. This pain is what was born tonight. It’s a palpable, physical thing, an object of infinite dimension that can be looked at from many angles, held closely or at a distance, and always there is some new aspect of the sorrow.
January 2019
The Ghost Of A Boy
You can belong to yourself, but it’s lonely, and you can belong to others, but there’s loss built into that, in uncountable forms.
December 2018
Notes On Surrender
Over and over I have discovered that my children feel alienated in environments where, at their age, I felt an automatic sense of belonging.
December 2018
Selected Poems
When we found out our daughter had gone deaf, / I did not question God’s fairness
— from “Falling From The Sky”
October 2018Father Figure
As Lee immersed himself in these families’ daily lives, he witnessed tender interactions that ran counter to stereotypes of Black men as indifferent or absent fathers. Despite challenging financial and personal circumstances, the men Lee encountered were “loving, present, and responsible fathers,” he says, who worked hard to provide for and nurture their children.
September 2018
The Big Picture
I try to look at the big picture. / The sun, ardent tongue / licking us like a mother besotted /with her new cub, will wear itself out. / Everything is transitory.
April 2018
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