circa 1970s My plaits and ribbons brightened white spaces for a long time Fat immigrant ribbons in every Color held my Thick Jamaican hair American black girls didn’t wear fat ribbons They had beads that made music when they walked. I wanted dancing...
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Rubinstein’s Chopin
This inch-thick, square box was familiar from my childhood: the sturdy, waxy cardboard, its paper cover glued onto the top of the album set like a fifth-grader’s découpage. I used to open these boxes like gifts, lifting off the lid to reveal the...
Fundraising for Planned Parenthood
I ski for them—the nurses and doctors who save women like me from back alley butchers and the ungainly pace of ignorance each slog uphill on skinny boards a penance for the grudge that grew along with the human in my belly,| who owes his life to a...
Dear Miss Metropolitan: An Interview with Carolyn Ferrell
In 1996, a teenage Black girl disappears from the streets of Queens. Then another. Then a third girl, of Puerto Rican descent, steps into the street and isn’t seen again. The disappearance of these three girls doesn’t stop the world or make...
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The Black Girl At Your Party
circa 1970s My plaits and ribbons brightened white spaces for a long time Fat immigrant ribbons in every Color held my Thick Jamaican hair American black girls didn’t wear fat ribbons They had beads that made music when they walked. I wanted dancing...