HOW BLACK? Roland Pemberton She said I was the whitest black person she'd ever met and she laughed when she said it A kind of nervous jagged laughter the rest of the room tried to gloss over Like a white glove over a black hand I wanted to show her a colour wheel Point at...

WHOLE MESSY THING This sadness is bigger than B vitamins, it is not interested in working around my schedule, or all your good ideas, it arrives anyway on wings of fog and stays awhile “Love Is a Messy Broken Thing, Part 6,” Jacks McNamara Depression, the word, is useless. There’s no music no romance, no...

LA VOIX HUMAINE It begins seductively, with the potential loss of her hands parting in a bath O Fernet, able to close again, close enough to his temples that his darker moments of depression illuminate, taking on a slow neon flush of knee- cap busting into freedom like we’d like it to for the story....

AGE OF WAITING Crows rasp and wrestle for a scrap of kill discarded at the curb: carcass dropped from the claws of a passing gull. Each beak pecks out its portion. In the shop, a knife is pressed against the cashier's throat. As customers look on, the burglar loads up on smokes and currency. It's...

COLOMBIANA   1. (noun.) The CGI favelas superimposed upon the intricate-lit sheen of Zoe Saldana’s left tricep as she nuzzles a handgun between praying hands, barrel kissing her brow as the tasteful taupe words haloed over her head decree Vengeance Is Beautiful.   2. (verb). The act of engaging in a rare form of pica,...

INTRODUCTION TO HOMELESSNESS _____"The point is that fashion is the armour to survive the reality of everyday life." _________________________________________- Bill Cunningham Bare feet in old running shoes, a tattered cape made of shopping bags skilfully knotted together so they overlap like shingles on a roof or oily feathers. Were you a tailor or sailmaker in...

URBAN KOANS (I) Bricked corridors, buildings bunched elbow-to-elbow in the blue-shift of coastal rain. Street-lamps duck and blush as we pass, fluoride-gazes eschewing all but their own perimeters of pavement, vision hung like a bell in some Pavlovian stoicism. In a corner café the woman beside me uses “logistic” too often to describe the process...

PHALANGE I used to—with a flashlight— inspect the bones in my hand a child’s fascination: what’s in? orange phalange glow but the bones in these hands of mine moved like worms in there and I was scared so I called Mum on a black bakelite telephone with a dial instead of buttons and I kept...

MUK-BANG You sign in to watch the K-Pop princess eat three steaks, a bucket of kimchi, ten carp pastries filled with custard and red bean paste. You sign in to see her hair, silky as bull semen, her skin, dewy as snail slime. She is size minus ten, but you sign in to see her...

ON WEARING THE LEGGINGS OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS Not are they born of the left-most panel – of fowl _____and fur emerging from a place of absence, from which __________we perceive a layer of brown earth. Nor from God blessing Eve, _____as Adam wipes the sleep from his drowsy eyes. Neither has it come, this exquisite...