One Piece

2014: you were a beast. A rollercoaster. A fatherfucking, piston-pumping, adrenaline racing, agonizing, triumphant ride of glory. I do these reviews to remember, express gratitude, review what happened, what went according to plan, what was a surprise, disappointment, and how to plan/allow/flow better. JANUARY -At the top of the year, my roommate said I had to move out because his mother was moving in. This was a huge relief. I knew he was lying but I was happy to go along with it because the last few months had been excruciating, awkward. I had to sit by and watch a downward spiral in his finances, and attitude. I welcomed the opportunity to leave the apartment and immediately began looking. It would take me until the first or second week of February to find a new place, with a lot cooler people: fellow artists. - I started dating a guy who I vibed with emotionally, intellectually, and physically. The relationship would run its course for the next 6 month and end mutually when I was g...

Notice the difference? A police officer is killed and everyone lines up, salutes, gives praise, vows to figure out how to never let this happen again, political parties unite, stop the violence, united front, the slain are highlighted in positive tones, on the other side of the country LAPD wears mourning strips on their badge, statements about 'assassination,' called 'killers' and murderers. The news notes the unfair tragedy at man discriminating and committing violence against one group, 'every person should feel like they were attacked' according to officials. VS. Unarmed black 7-year-old or 12-year-old or 17-year-old is killed by cops: they were a thug, blacks need to be better parents, look into his records to find anything condemning, blame parents, millions donated to cops, police union expresses no remorse or even concern for murdered kids, racist come out of the woodworks to find excuses, and the grand jury never indicts anyone. Oh and the killers end u...

*Eavesdropping on an uptown subway at 7am* A Black man in construction boots comes and sits down next to Black man in a red leather jacket. Construction (opening newspaper): damn, man.  Red Leather: Yeah. Construction: It's like...it could happen to me.  Red Leather: It could happen to any one of us.  Construction: Damn. Red Leather (suddenly irritated): We need to stop worrying about material things like what clothes and shoes we're wearing and start....(trails off) They sit in silence for a few moments. Man in leather jacket turns away from him. His eyes are red and glassy. He looks at me. I can't tell whether he's sleepy or weary.  I get off at the 72nd Street stop.

Yesterday in creative non-fiction class, we were given the prompt of 'I can breathe' and told to write for 10 minutes. Afterward when it was time to read our work aloud, students began talking about nature, the mountains, personifying air. I sat there, listened respectfully, nodded. When I was asked to share what I wrote for "I can breathe" I looked at my paper and thought 'hmmm...this isn't going to go over well. But okay,' I launched into my essay about white, privileged artists willfully ignoring the struggle right in front of them; creating apolitical disconnected aesthetically comfortable, intellectually smarmy, quirky, safe, escapist work in the midst of the privileged evil that supports them. I read about the 1000 yard stare me and other artists of color invoke when we're sitting through another story about neurotic, neutered, and privileged dilemmas; that 1000 yard stare into space that tries to hold in the violent worm thrashing in our throats...

I can breathe. Arguing with friends in person and on Facebook about Trayvon Martin. He was a thug. He must have done something wrong, look at that bruise on Zimmerman's head. I can breathe. Eric Garner was asthmatic and overweight. He died as a result of his own poor life choices, not the cop's chokehold.  as the reason for his death. I can. Beavercreek, Ohio. Wal-mart.  Shots inside a store and a black man falls to his death screaming the question of why his life was ending. Why he was taking his last breaths? Breathe. Michael Brown was a thug robbing a store. He was not, but it sounds good. Official. He was a monster, a demon. The cop was the victim, the attacker is the unarmed dead body. The attacker was the thug, the threat, the evil that can not speak for itself, so we will take up his voice on his behalf. Twelve-year-old Tamir Rice immediately shot and killed by police.  This is tricky. He's twelve. But his father's troubles with the law shine a light on his death...

Am I Black Enough ? Beyond the skin and collection of parts that I identify with, I look through the eyes and wonder if this is enough? Am I Black Enough? Political, active, forward-thinking, my mind churns out new theories, homilies, and analogies seeking to break through the reductio ad absurdum, the banal and bland bludgeoning. There is a blackness beyond black, beyond race or night. An inking oblivion where every color and characteristic disintegrates into the cosmic gloam. There is a black quintessence at the heart of each atom, in the breath of each pause, in the howls of the ragged sun. Blackness so dark that it is invisible and omniscient. Void of color and emotion, this force draws the Gods in, so that even they circumambulate around her heaving ebony breast in order to prostrate before her veiled face.   Am I Black Enough? Has care and comfort weakened the ferocious knife needed to excavate this darkness. To incise the base of my spine and disembowel it, hewn out on the r...

1. Premiere Stages Play Festival Deadline: Jan. 15th website: www.kean.edu/premierestages/play.asp Premiere Stages is committed to supporting emerging playwrights by developing and producing new plays. Through our Play Festival script competition, Premiere Stages offers developmental opportunities to four playwrights. We provide playwrights with an encouraging and focused environment in which they can develop their work through discussions, rehearsals, sit-down readings, staged readings, and fully-produced Equity productions. At Premiere Stages, we pride ourselves on a uniquely accelerated process, in which plays we find particularly promising are developed and fully produced within a year of submission. In many professional theatres the time span between meeting a writer, staging a reading and producing the play can be years. At Premiere Stages, immediately following the Spring Readings, two plays enter an intensive development phase. Playwrights work with a director, dramaturg, and d...