posts by aphemia
Foliage by
What are fake flowers for? To list on winter balconies, whitely rendered carpels run-up with frost. To boast of an immediate lapse into a false humus, lying anthers beaded with green plastic. The luminescence.
515 days by
taking seriously the admonition WORDPLAY NOT GUNPLAY posted onto telephone poles by waifish undergraduates the town disarmed and vocabulary…
On Earth as it is in Heaven by
I. The corner outside the Bottega is a scatter of trifold hats and pirate vests, french maids and false pimps, plumes of vaporized breath and laughter from the crowd waiting for the door to open. Shirlane approaches a college student in a caveman costume.
Hey kid: Basically, what you’re looking at is a long slog through a world of mute statistics: percentages of the impoverished, per capita ownership of some given thing, the slide of certain demographies into the achievement gap.
If there is time I will tell you the story of N’dola, which is really the story of Nugunga, the boy who told the world he was looking for the source of the Kwango River, but he really was seeking to know if people were the same everywhere: always looking out for themselves.
Saints down in the third quarter. by
Lord, Lord. Boy’s got hands like feet. He throws all right, but can’t keep a hold on it. The ball just stripped away from him, when he shoulda known. Whole superdome gone quiet now.
Walking home from Harlan’s and seeing the cop who will arrest me. by
Yes, like you could even imagine it. It seems impossible now even to me, standing on the corner of this trash-strewn avenue with a wax paper bag in my hand, drunk to the sky, my day-jeans stained with tar and paint.
A sudden snap, and the wicked unravelling of ends and means makes it clear that the wars within the wars are the only wars that matter. Stories whip about in the darkness, or plod like spent lives through a nameless desert.
Man, is this place ever full of things that are bent; and not the roads, but the edges of roads, where the switchgrass sheathed in dust sieves the wind into heat.
On seeing Femi Kuti, Philadelphia by
In all this mess of medication and millenial challenge it’s a question worth asking: when is a throwback not a throwback?