I’m smoking, The burning trail choking Deep lungs groping For the nicotine fix It poisons my lips And keeps callers at a distance. My most faithful lover Your smell stays on my lips Long after our last kiss No matter how hard I try keep telling you goodbye You keep coming back And I keep […]
In Honor of Black History Month Twenty-eight years ago, I landed my first full-time college teaching position at Tuskegee University in Alabama. Originally known as Tuskegee Institute, the school was founded by Booker T. Washington in 1881 to provide vocational education for southern blacks in the years after Reconstruction. Washington, born a slave in 1856,
To Till a Field or Write a Poem? Booker T. Washington’s Legacy Read More »
A Clarence Page article from February 18, 2023 discusses the current MAGA reaction to the performance of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” at the Super Bowl pregame. Claiming that it is the Negro National Anthem and further divides our country disregards the facts. Here’s how it all began. In 1900 James Weldon Johnson—citizen of Jacksonville,
James Weldon Johnson and the Promise of America Read More »
In 1986, the year John D. MacDonald died, Carl Hiaasen published his first solo novel. The following year, Tim Dorsey took a reporting job with the Tampa Tribune, from which he retired in 1999 to write fiction full time. No one writing about modern-day Florida can avoid writing about crime, and no one writing about Florida
Tim Dorsey: Vengeance Is Mine, Saith Serge Storms Read More »
I am collecting pieces of myself Scattered over years, miles, and memories. Shards of self abandoned and forgotten In the name of growing up. I am collecting pieces of myself. Patching together the things once beloved and left to rust On the shelf of my youth. I am collecting pieces of myself; Calling home parts
His eyes are jelly holes The sheep his wool is fire Toppling up the slope Toward the wire. No Says the sheep’s master. He can only follow her. The sheep goes faster. In the wire they all rolled, Held, holding, all defiled. The poor girl, she foaled. My cradle. Oh my child.
Stray Fire – Vietnam, 1968 Read More »