July (2025) Update from MEH
My monthly (?) missive on all things MEH
Random Thoughts & Writing Prompts
“Sometimes someone has to die in order for you to tell your story.”
Last week I attended a generative residency through Kenyon Review in creative nonfiction. I met good people and wrote work that may eventually see the light of day.
One afternoon we were given a prompt to write a about the thing we have avoided writing about. The prompt was more rigorously structured to aid in this emotional unpacking, but that was the crux: write the thing we know we need to write about, but have been avoiding.
As we workshopped drafts delving the depths of the unmentionable, someone dropped the line at the top. “Sometimes someone has to die in order for you to tell your story.”
We discussed this literally—denying ourselves permission to write because we feel blocked by the presence of a living person. However, the metaphoric meaning lingered just below the surface. How often another type of “death” is needed to speak truth to ourselves or others. Allowing the death, or actively killing, how we see an institution, a situation, a memory, a person, ourselves. Exploring the good that could come from letting go, laying to rest, something unproductive, no matter how tightly we’ve held to the power of that past reality or relationship.
Eventually this discussion led to a joke about what the Hallmark card for all this would look like—what images and words on the cover, the pithy contents inside. But then someone asked who the recipient of the card would be: the other person/thing or ourselves? Writers are deep like that.
It’s got me thinking but illusions that I’m holding on to about certain institutions, people, myself, and the cards I may have to write.
An old poem for the 4th of July
self-evident
as a kid from Boston, the Revolutionary War
was my favorite subject in fourth grade.
a Tea Party I could respect. class trips vainly
searching for musket balls in Lexington treetops.
reading of decapitation by cannonball on Breed’s Hill.
even the sights in Southie— unsafe for me to visit—
were a source of tribal pride. like rooting for the Patriots.
we were told to don our colonial imagination caps
and tell our story of emancipation from the British.
where would we be? the Old South Meeting House?
the Old North Church? what would we see as we rose
to American greatness? our teacher should hear freedom
ringing in the streets through our words. I dropped my head
to begin— oversized pencil in hand— until I remembered.
seeing my inaction, she crouched and began to re-explain.
I patiently waited for her to finish, eyes on her lips,
then asked if she wanted me to pretend to be white,
or to picture myself for sale on the steps of Faneuil Hall,
or stacked in one-half of the Harbor ships heading to
and from the West Indies, explaining my parents’ patois.
after the vocal static— the hems and haws of white noise—
she suggested Crispus Attucks: the hometown boy, the Black
hero of the Boston Massacre. my siblings had taught me
the “one-drop rule,” and when to nod my head politely,
so I pretended he was not half Wampanoag, that Framingham
was not his master’s home, and imagined myself being
the first unarmed Black man shot on these urban streets.
(Originally published in The Tahoma Literary Review)
Poetry Collections I’ve Recently Finished/Currently Reading
Correspondence with My Greeks ~ Scott Cairns
Acts of Resistance to New England Slavery by Africans Themselves in New England ~ Danielle Legros Georges
The Size of the Horizon, Or, I Explained Everything to the Trees ~ Mitchell Nobis
Latest News and Publications
Recent Publications
After being long-listed for the 2024 African Diaspora Award, five poems— “Adoration of the Magi,” “Bust of Akhenaten,” “homegoing,” “The Moorish Chief,” & “Quilt”— appear in Black Butterfly: Voices of the African Diaspora
“when asked for help writing a satire,” “misstra know-it-all,” & “say what you mean” were published in Record of Dissent: Poems of Protest in an Authoritarian Age, a free digital chapbook from The Chaos Section Poetry Project.
“watching a production of Beauty and the Beast after attempting to be vulnerable” was published in the latest Rituals anthology.
“‘there is a goodness that doesn’t need me...’” & “floating” are ekphrastic
poems published in Pirene’s Fountain: A Journal of Poetry .“when asked why I’ll never write you a sincere poem” was published in The Lit Nerds.
And because I keep forcing my prose on the world, my micro/flash fiction piece "Facility" was published in OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters.
I have recent prose and poetry acceptances and work forthcoming in Pangyrus, The Radical Teacher, South Florida Poetry Journal, Star 82 Review, Terrain.org, Tidings, among others.
Upcoming Readings and Events
For July (so far…)
Thursday, July 10, 2025, 6:00 PM - 7:00 PM ~ The Bookstore of Gloucester: I will be reading with Linda Carney-Goodrich.
Thursday, July 17, 2025, 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM ~ Gloucester Writers Center: I'll be reading with Luisa Caycedo-Kimura
[More information and any updates are posted on my website]