I've been working ever since I was twelve.

"'I was eleven or twelve. I remember when the taxicab driver brought that telegram.'

"'I need details,' I said hoping to coax him into a deeper story, something better than my imagination. 'Was it a weekend? Were you coming home from school? Were you watching cartoons? Was your mother at work?'

"'I think I was at work.' He laughed. 'I've been working ever since I was twelve. I had a job changing tires.'

"'You were pretty much taking care of the family while he was gone?'

"'Yeah, my great-uncle got me a job changing tires.'"

~~ from To Float in the Space Between by Terrance Hayes

write a novel in the voice of Mark Twain's Jim

"[Saul] Bellow went on to say something I like to propose to folks put off by political poems: 'I could write a better book from Lolita's point of view.' (Oh, if only Bellow had written that book!) Write a poem from [the Black tennis star's] point of view. Write a poem, write a novel in the voice of Mark Twain's Jim. Or in the voice of one of Charles Bukowski's girlfriends."

~~ from To Float in the Space Between by Terrance Hayes

A Reminder by Sam Redlark

I'm scheduled to receive A Reminder by Sam Redlark later this week. It's the first chapbook from serious-lit press and online journal.

To Float in the Space Between

"My coming-of-age story begins unheroically with me on a college bunk reading [Etheridge Knight's] 'The Idea of Ancestry' in a literature textbook.' It may be that poets coming of age staring across space as the speaker does in that poem. I read the poet's biography: a black man from Mississippi, a prisoner who became a poet. I didn't know anything then about 'constructed speakers' in poems; I believed the 'I' of the poem was Etheridge Knight. I recognized him."

~~ from To Float in the Space Between by Terrance Hayes

#fridayreads redux

Shipped paperback copies of Auggie's Revenge and Fight for Your Long Day remain available at reasonable prices. There are also affordable copies of Auggie's Revenge at Apple Books, on eBay, and for Kindle as well as at Bookshop and Smashwords.

this outhouse of a city

"I went outside, sat on the steps, and fired up a Marlboro from the pack I'd bought from the machine near the front door. I was through for the day. I'd had my fill of defeat. But the late spring afternoon was sublime. I watched two sleek ravens on the asphalt a few feet away as they tore apart the flattened carcass of a dead squirrel. The thoroughfares were glutted with cars and trucks and buses going who knows where. It came to me at that moment that one day I'd have to skip town myself. Where I'd go. I didn't know, but it would have to be far away. It wasn't working out for me in this outhouse of a city, and my gut told me it never would."

~~ from God Bless America by Mark SaFranko