otherness

For me, literacy was discovered in the Windy City’s cruel, winter howl—the intertwining of English, Spanish, and Polish a language all its own. Growing up in the Chicago Polish neighborhood…

I wouldn’t walk away from my mother’s dead body. After my sisters and I had washed her breasts, belly, arms, and smoothed scented cream over her soft, soft papery skin,…

Tell me we’ll never get used to it. Richard Siken, 2005   The boy didn’t know what to do with sounds that entered his head and became something else. His…

My daughter chose her school just like she chose her name at three days old. Her little fingers grasped at several folded pieces of paper in a shiny porcelain bowl.…

I sit on the chain link fence with bell hooks and watch the rising sun above the barren earth dominated by the white of the snowy winter. I am reminded…

It began insidiously. I was a comparative literature major. Fellow students and professors alike assumed I studied English and Chinese, rather than English and French. They were puzzled when I…