If You Were On Fire, I Would Sing Happy Birthday
Late autumn, November-the-somethingth, how you’re supposed
to know what to do when someone says, play dead—but you don’t,
you asked for a story, but were given a body failing another
Prophesying Fire: The Legacy of James Baldwin
When James Baldwin’s famous account of America’s race crisis, The Fire Next Time
, was first published in 1963, the critic Frederick Wilcox Dupee penned a review
[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/
The Window Shoppers
Strolling the malls, in the bauble-bright late Fifties,
My schoolmates’ parents could be nonchalant.
Not mine. Already earners in the Thirties,
They’d known the rancid tang of actual want
And window-browsing made
Racism 101
“Have you heard of Nikki Giovanni?” I ask, and the woman volunteering at the
sponsorship table at a local event laughs. She is African-American, and she
laughs, “Do I know Nikki Giovanni? Do
The Man of Double Deed
There was a man of double deed,
Who sowed his garden full of seed;
When the seed began to grow,
‘Twas like a garden full of snow;
When the snow began to melt,