Outside is the rain half the world waits for as much as we hate it at times; it gives us whatever we can gather from the energy that is frozen and makes up the world I swore I’d never live in. But like everything else it passes on its way to teaching me which way to turn. In the meantime, left with nothing but dreams and memory, I’m practicing for the death we all know is coming, that none of us know how to face. I keep trying the prayers and other means as if each could be a plot twist in the novel I keep wishing I could write. All I want to end with is the person who points down the street.
Directions
Further Reading
As If
by Alice B. Fogel
When I realized I’d drifted deep into those riveted, river-resistant lily pads big as masks, I was reminded of how when you’re trapped in insistence that it doesn’t matter that surely means it does. My oars slicing down on them through the water thick with sticky greens and ropy stems made the sound […]
Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine
Reviewed by Sophia Kaufman
At the end of Ziwe Fumudoh’s Instagram Live shows this summer—in which she quizzed her guests on civil rights leaders, asked them whether they’d ever worn blackface, what they qualitatively like about Black people, how many Black friends they have, and whether they would commit to reparations, among other rapid-fire prompts often tailored to her […]
Roost Profusion
by Karen George
O, to live in a greenhouse palace, a conservatory, stone walls broken with glass—massive multi-paned windows, ceiling dome open to dewy zephyrs—surrounded by conifers, mosses, ferns, angiosperms.
