https://fenceportal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/audio_bird_of_one_leah_umansky.mp3   1. My mother always told me that everything is scary the first time you do it. Sometimes, I have to remind myself:   self it’s okay to be scared be scared then, get over it     There are not so many givens anymore.     2.   I just celebrated another Hannukah […]

I am a rabid fan of “rotters,” or as more politely called on the BBC show In the Flesh, those with “Partially Deceased Syndrome.” In the Flesh is a show you must see, streaming everywhere—a deeply profound, witty, and ultimately deadly serious work of literary art and performance that takes on what life itself is […]

In Ghana, the air is thick with equatorial heat. Two seasons dominate the year: rainy and dry. I think of them as Wet Hot and Dust Hot. In Wet Hot, raindrops puncture the air so persistently that the holes they make in the grey sky seem permanent. Umbrellas are geometrically impractical, as the rain draws […]

◊ ◊ ◊ ◊   In the early 90’s, at a massive flea market at the edge of Louisville, Kentucky, a woman from Jamaica looks over the wares. Someone says, Where are you from? She says, Dixie Highway and nothing else, doesn’t look up, just keeps checking out the antiques. She slides into that next […]

EIGHT FISH UNDER WATER   A very tricky enemy. Pride is a foreground-background illusion. We swim in it, but its waves flatten perspective.   To make the shape of fish I must know fish. To know water as home, I make that shape as well. Hint of wave, imagined against a line, fin, a bell, […]

Achtung called it and that would be the last word referring to algae in Albany Bulb inclementing, exponential tenaments — also clams, barnacles, soft bodies that dents soma response to soma. Miles away a man known as my boss eats Louisiana Clams. Pounds of clams scattering light. Magnet filings, roving static, infinitesimal masses on a […]