At twelve a woman whispered in my ear and told me caterpillars don’t always become butterflies. It’s dependent upon their environment and food, sometimes they become moths. The first crime performed against me decided my fate.
Category Archives: A Writer’s Life
Love in the Afternoon, Restoration
For the first time, I read a poem of mine (written in real time at the workshop) for an audience. Love in courage, I share my piece:
The end of the work day
How do you go home after working from home?
Role Call
Roll Call
by Margery Hannah
I am only a person
tall and plain, tongue maimed long
ago when cow bells were ringing.
I was in love with those big
eye chocolates
reminding me of me.
A Note on Dark Matter
I was just thinking about dark matter, how powerful it is, how it is the beginning of us all, the mother, the Eve, thee eve. Dark matter is undetectable, yet robustly influential on the universe and evolution, and black holes let nothing escape–not light, not stars, not galaxies. At the latter’s edge, time appears to stop and at its core, matter shrinks to infinite density and the known laws of physics break down. And I thought my mother was an overbearing and powerful mystery. You. Don’t. Know. Her.
A Long Way Home
Humility breeds optimism, so we had assurance in loads. Still, it pained me to go. The heartland, like the heart, is sick and deceitful; it cannot be trusted. The heart is what kept us in Wichita for two long years and had I continued to follow it, the girls and I would still be some fifteen hundred miles behind, away from the world’s best city.
On Pride, Not Prejudice
I’m a cocky son of a bitch. Instead of heeding to the eternal wisdom of God, humbling myself under His mighty hand so at the proper time He might exalt me (1 Peter 5:6), I’ve been busy luxuriating on a delusional high horse. I’ve got the heart of integrity and the blood of the enslavedContinue reading “On Pride, Not Prejudice”
Harlem Shuffle
And the time came to let go of my white people on a residential rooftop view and waterfront backyard with a baseball field on the side. With all its man-buns, diverse restaurants, bars, Polish culture and consignment shops, Greenpoint couldn’t compete with uptown Manhattan, where a renaissance of black excellence ascends history at more counts than Basie. Long held my heart has Harlem Word.
Go For Yours
In A Revolutionary Life, John Lee Anderson wrote Che Guevara had a sense of security only trust fund beneficiaries understand. Recently, I came across decade-old letters and emails I’d sent the administrator of my now dissolved family trust that made me both cringe at my audacity and smile at my courage. Funding requests for an automobile, back mortgage payments, gifts for my brothers, relocation, graduate school summer tuition, a kitchen remodel for mom’s home with a surprise truck on the side, and an appeal for funding to pay my housing for three years while earning an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature (a notably unprofitable degree I would complete a year early) littered my outbox and clear plastic file box. I imagined myself an attorney presenting my case for financial support on the latter matter, and with the beneficiaries—my two elder brothers, mother and I—evenly at odds on whether the trust should support my next academic endeavor in New York, I argued in the most upstanding manner I knew how, with a series of questions meant to illicit facts.
Home Beyond Lodabar: From NYC to Wichita, Kansas and Back
How are the imaginations of New York City children fostered without the ability to look up and see stars? Perhaps the New York City skyline sufficiently espouses the greatness of man, placing a seed in the mind of its youth that all things are possible; maybe it is the sheer beauty of the lights sustainingContinue reading “Home Beyond Lodabar: From NYC to Wichita, Kansas and Back”