GROUNDING IN GLASS FRAGMENTS During the first summer of Covid-19, at the height of the movement for police reform when “defund” still seemed a viable word, my pregnant partner and I took a trip to Georgia’s coast and stayed at an Airbnb in Brunswick where in February Ahmaud Arbery had been murdered in the streets […]

Marin Headlands Military Batteries, Northern California Until the body feels something different, it cannot act differently.—Deane Juhan The wall is four and a half feet thick. I meant to begin: Speaking of violence . . . And I would write about these tunnels. A tunnel allows a silence to be broken.  I’ve entered these as […]

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 […]