I was standing in the driveway, just home from work, watching the snow fall. I was still numb from the news about my dad. The flakes were big and gentle, floating on the breeze and slowly yielding to gravity. The tension I’d been carrying in my neck and shoulders began to melt. It was the first time since 1943 snow fell without my dad somewhere on the planet.
Seventy eight minutes of a familiar soft, aquatic ambiance filled my headphones after waking up in a hospital bed.
Those life-altering doctor’s office calls that everyone dreads after getting routine blood work done? I was twenty six years old and so naive that it never actually sank in. I hadn’t even been to see a doctor since my pediatrician as a kid.
Ladder
by Joseph Bardin
In Memoriam, Bernadeane
This is where we did not want to be. For ten years Bernie’s lived with breast cancer, and we could always say but she is doing well, living her life, but now her back pain gets so bad she can’t get out of bed and when she can it is with a walker. And we can no longer look at it as separate from the cancer, since lesions have appeared on her spine.
I mute the sound on the ballgame and start listening to Accept When by Caroline Davis and Wendy Eisenberg. With my turntable in the repair shop, I have to settle for listening to the album on my laptop. I sink into the couch and the music flows. A light rain starts to fall outside the window and drops are visible at the game, though not enough to pause the action.
The Collective and Eternal Sunshine: A Tour Diary
by Zachary Pace
1. intro (end of the world)
I woke with a shock. I couldn’t remember where I was. I knew I had to get up and go, but the place escaped me. My heartbeat and my stream of consciousness both reeled at warp speed. Wound in the white bedding behind the blackout curtains, I had no idea of the time of day or day of the week.
Afro-Centered Futurisms: A vibrant and approachable book by award-winning authors of black speculative fiction
an essay by Eugen Bacon
It started with a read: Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century by Isiah Lavender III and Lisa Yaszek (eds), published by Ohio State University Press. I put down this book and contemplated it.
Time Is What Keeps the Light from Reaching Us
by Aaron Carico
I fill this room with the echo of many voices. The sun comes and floods this empty room, I call it my room.
I listen to your voice, David. Onscreen, you’re wearing a Ronald Reagan mask made of latex, like the ones from Point Break, and you’re looking at photos of Mark Morrisroe, one of him splayed on a bed, hard cock against his thigh, a twink pinup. “Mortality no longer feels like some abstraction I can push away to the age of eighty or ninety or whatever. There’s no longer a luxury of pushing the idea of mortality away.” You’re walking around Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing. It’s fall 1989. Morrisroe died that July. You unfasten the mask, take it off, and you read the scrim of text that covers your own photos of Peter Hujar’s corpse. Your words shield your lover’s dead body. Peter had died almost exactly two years before. Your voice is propulsive, a juggernaut. It vibrates with fury.
“He pitches as though he’s double parked.”
-Pitcher Bob Gibson as described by announcer Vin Scully
***
Singer and guitarist Black Joe Lewis opens the show with the briefest of introductions:
“We’ve been playing like this for a while. Hope you like it. We’re not going to stop for a while.”
Moments later, he is torching the joint, soaring through an extended instrumental break, not fast or flashy, but somehow making it feel as if he’s propelled us to the middle of the set, skipping the warm up songs that bands and audiences use to acclimate, suss each other out. Lewis and his band, the Honeybears, get to the flow so quickly I lose track of conventional markers such as time and lyrics and song structures. Are they purposefully steering away from those elements in order to generate a different kind of energy? Or are they simply ready to roll, like Bob Gibson?