Straight No Chaser

Katrina Is Still Pregnant

strange used to talk about obsessions in poetry. obsessions, plural; like, concrete images that show up repeatedly throughout an author's work. fixating on one vehicle, no matter what the tenor. she never told us what hers were, but brittany, one of the two or three best writers in the class, immediately said hers was moths. one of the first poems she'd workshopped had a line in it about "a cacaphony of colored moths," which at the time had made me think about those candy-coated hershey's kissables, and after that, everything else she read for the rest of the semester, i kept thinking candy, candy, candy.

i have no obsessions.

or, wait, that's a lie. my stories are full of katrinas. and simpering girlmen. and honey. things that are "honeyed." skin, mostly, because i am trite like that, and because, at whatever point in my childhood i discovered that i was colored in-betweenly, unlike either of my parents, i preferred to think of myself as having been externally sweetened, rather than jumbled up by years of slippery racial-coital clash.

started thinking about my short story, today. about how it has to be killer, so as to stand in for everything i should have written this year, and didn't.