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

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