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You Have to Suffer
Alek Wek in stills from Janet Jackson's "Got ’Til It’s Gone” “Got ‘Til It’s Gone” opens with a pan over Black men and women in oversized collars and modest dresses. The beat drops as the camera enters...
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For a Good Time, Call
I am too old for an imaginary friend. But I am too young for most other things. In the middle of 1999, I turn thirteen. My best friend Maria and I don’t have the internet yet to occupy ourselves with...
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The Hole in the Fence
Image: JosephB via Flickr. One day, my son befriends the nun. It starts with voices in the yard. Through the glass kitchen doors where I stand chopping onions, I hear Sebastian’s voice and then a...
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Named After the Animal
Illustration by Kat Morgan “There’s a name for the animal / love makes of us—named, I think, / like rain, for the sound it makes.” –Nicole Sealey, “Object Permanence” I planned on moving these boxes...
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Vanessa
Photograph by Victoria Pickering, Flickr “Because all I did was read a story, then retell it on this page.” —Diannely Antigua, “Immigration Story” “Hola, todos.” Gloria,...
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Mixed Blessings
“When we consume bread, it becomes us. It becomes our eyes and our hands,” Elizabeth DeRuff said, addressing the large circle of people around her. “Agriculture is where the self meets the landscape.”...
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In Ruins
Tourists at cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, circa 1939. “The archive … is the border of time that surrounds our presence, which overhangs it, and which indicates its otherness;...
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Buried Deep
Green-Wood Cemetery. Photo: Michela Simoncini A decade or so ago, when I was in my mid-twenties, a mystic advised me on how to rid myself of my then-boyfriend’s ex. If I wrote her name on a slip of...
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Shedding Light
Dusk Series, "Striped Triptych," 2015. We say that dusk “falls,” but on the Nova Scotia seaboard, gazing at the sea and a far horizon, dusk appears to sweep horizontally across water and sky. In fact...
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If They’re Losing, Who’s Winning?
Photo: Miki Jourdan As the news of overflowing morgues and dwindling PPE began to give way to the timeworn tableaus of federal boots reigning blows on Black necks, my mind turned, as it often does, to...
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For Crying Out Loud
I hadn’t thought much about public wailing before my uncle’s funeral. His sudden death from a heart attack shocked our community, because for many people Uncle F’s life seemed immune to tragedy. He...
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On the Road
Image: John Getchel. In early June, I bought a car, filled the trunk with camping gear, and headed north on the I-15 for a drive that, I reasoned, could very well last forever—or as long as the gas...
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Lost in a (Mis)Gendered Appalachia
Nina Simone's childhood home, Tryon, North Carolina. Empty and nondescript, Nina Simone’s childhood home stands—just barely—on a secluded corner in tiny Tryon, North Carolina. The house is a stalwart...
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Year of the Rat
Simona Blat I’ve heard it said that the hour of the rat is midnight—the hour that I am still on a Zoom chat with my friend, A, sharing the ways I find myself, and she finds herself, changing. A is...
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Community and Show-Tunes in Crisis
Photograph by Steam Pipe Trunk Distribution Venue, Flickr “We live in these little personal boxes and we break free only to find ourselves in a bigger box. I can break free for the rest of my life and...
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Mind the Gap
Elizabeth Bishop and Alice Methfessel in the early 1970s. Courtesy Archives and Special Collections, Vassar College Library. About a month after Dori and I first meet, fourteen months before we’ll get...
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Next!
Image credit: Barclay Bram. I want to tell you about a feeling I would have in my stomach before modeling castings. A frenetic energy, a fluttering that carried me each step as I would approach...
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How Rick Owens Taught Me to Wear Love
In fashion, as in love, a feeling takes a human shape, and then a story starts. This one is about a man with a hand like a door handle. Every time I grab it, I fall. Into love and delightful new...
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Dressed Up
“Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.” —Joan Didion I am an anxious person. At my own convenience, I anticipate disaster and push myself to all...
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How Enslaved People Helped Shape Fashion History
Image credit: John Rose, The Old Plantation, possibly 1785–1795, watercolor on laid paper, 29.7 cm × 45.4 cm. Credit: Wikimedia Creative Commons. I have spent my entire academic career analyzing...
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