Crêpes and Kisses

Excerpt from chapter 1 “In or Out” from my forthcoming book, Kitchen Complex.   We stood side-by-side at the stove, each with one of the crêpe pans and my whimsical first attempt at dough. Since we had only buckwheat flour, I had avoided traipsing into his territory of etherial –and laborious– white crêpes. This is […]

Notes of Hope

Enough is enough: She was owned by stuff which didn’t work, Was past its best, Had dried up, Or was just plain useless.   Like her husband.   It was Armageddon.  As in: ‘I’m a-geddin’ outa here’. In boots made for walkin’. Which is just what they did Making tracks.   Felt like she was […]

Victory Roll

This was me; climbing up into the upper parts of a French barn and disturbing a swarm of wild bees.

A dozen or so stings on each arm, and two days dizzy with remedies from the pharmacy. But how did the bees feel about it?

A Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-aged Man

One of the many things he was not much good at, was shaving. His jowl: despite academic attention to the shaving industry’s advertising, and his own ceremonial attention to the ritual itself, now reminded him of A WW1 battlescape. Blasted trees, brimming craters and shell holes filled with blood. Not that he remembered the Great […]

We Belong

Hallo, my future friend I’ll tell you, my story, if you care to listen If you promise, to trust me, with yours I’m a child of two villages, two cities, I’m a child of two countries, two continents, A child of this planet, that we share Where we all belong in equal measure Where we […]

The Familiar Stranger

My phone beeped as I left the University’s library that windy evening in May. I walked with my hands sheltered in warm gloves and the rest of my body covered in a dark green coat that I had bought in Gikomba market months before. The long, lazy sunsets were a joy, I formed stories in […]

A Love Letter to Sofia

Dear Sofia, Your gentle touch disarms me And makes me sing of your self-effacing beauty Of your great wealth and wisdom, of your pain and your persevering spirit Of the passion in the voices of your artists.   Tell me your secrets, buried deep beneath the cobbled streets Share with me your memories, resting upon […]

Let’s Pretend

“Be at my place at eight thirty.” I’d told her when we left work at three that Saturday afternoon. The sounds of Toni Braxton ‘He wasn’t man enough’ became louder and louder and soon, a black Nissan Pathfinder pulled out at my packing lot. Aisha turned off the car, took her Gucci handbag, and looked […]

Betwixt

Excerpt from “Betwixt,” the eighth essay in a series of fourteen in my forthcoming book Going Nowhere: A Sonnet in Essays Betwixt “threshold (n.) Old English þrescold, þærscwold, þerxold, etc., “door-sill, point of entering,” a word of uncertain origin … The first element probably is related to Old English þrescan, either in its current sense […]

The Garden Portal

I wrote to Aimee, “it’s a very long time since I’ve taken so many notes on anything.”