Afro-Centered Futurisms: A vibrant and approachable book by award-winning authors of black speculative fiction
an essay by Eugen Bacon
It started with a read: Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century by Isiah Lavender III and Lisa Yaszek (eds), published by Ohio State University Press. I put down this book and contemplated it.
Time Is What Keeps the Light from Reaching Us
by Aaron Carico
I fill this room with the echo of many voices. The sun comes and floods this empty room, I call it my room.
I listen to your voice, David. Onscreen, you’re wearing a Ronald Reagan mask made of latex, like the ones from Point Break, and you’re looking at photos of Mark Morrisroe, one of him splayed on a bed, hard cock against his thigh, a twink pinup. “Mortality no longer feels like some abstraction I can push away to the age of eighty or ninety or whatever. There’s no longer a luxury of pushing the idea of mortality away.” You’re walking around Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing. It’s fall 1989. Morrisroe died that July. You unfasten the mask, take it off, and you read the scrim of text that covers your own photos of Peter Hujar’s corpse. Your words shield your lover’s dead body. Peter had died almost exactly two years before. Your voice is propulsive, a juggernaut. It vibrates with fury.
“He pitches as though he’s double parked.”
-Pitcher Bob Gibson as described by announcer Vin Scully
***
Singer and guitarist Black Joe Lewis opens the show with the briefest of introductions:
“We’ve been playing like this for a while. Hope you like it. We’re not going to stop for a while.”
Moments later, he is torching the joint, soaring through an extended instrumental break, not fast or flashy, but somehow making it feel as if he’s propelled us to the middle of the set, skipping the warm up songs that bands and audiences use to acclimate, suss each other out. Lewis and his band, the Honeybears, get to the flow so quickly I lose track of conventional markers such as time and lyrics and song structures. Are they purposefully steering away from those elements in order to generate a different kind of energy? Or are they simply ready to roll, like Bob Gibson?
I Came Out to the Dirt
by William Swift
“Dear Grandad,” I told the dirt, “I am gay.” I sat in the yard, making up songs to my favorite tree. I didn’t understand death. What I did understand was that my grandparents had all died young. Therefore, I did not have any. Death, for me, was an abstract loss marking something others had and I had never possessed. I was not raised with religion; instead, I believed what I had heard somewhere along the way: when we die our bodies become dirt.
Complete Failure
by Joel Dane
When I couldn’t find a job in California, I decided to walk across the country. From the Santa Monica Pier to Coney Island. Things were going really well for me.
I imagine one of my ankles turning on the ice-plant, and beach sand clinging to my white tube socks. I imagine cigarette butts and seagulls but no people. No swimmers, no sunbathers, no car blasting I Left My Wallet In El Segundo.
Family History Of X
by Lori Jakiela
When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, my doctor, Dr. Johnson, who looked like the late great comedian Norm MacDonald and told late-great-comedian jokes and liked to draw stick-figure breasts on a whiteboard to show surgical options, asked, “Do you have a family history?”
Dr. Johnson had already drawn a pair of disembodied breasts before he asked this. The breasts and nipples were squared off, like they’d been built with Legos.
Aesthetics of the Abyss
by Angus Stewart
To seek, use, and elaborate the aesthetic dimension of a text is neither shallow nor inadvisable. Why bother with the truth when the book in your hands is so beautiful? Why join the headlong rush toward a mere imitation of objectivity? The world is always uncooperative, but the aesthetic is yours to play with.
Below, I will engage in such a game.
Items From My Parents
by Lydia G. Fash
Inventory-Items-Rev2.xlsx
7 Deadly Sins Wall sculptures Design Toscano, antique snowshoes, antique washing white ceramic basin & pitcher, wall hanging dream catcher made by Jill, carved cuckoo clock from Switzerland–not working, hardwood benches–2, pottery (made by Lydia?), antique leather football helmet. The spreadsheet of 702 things to give away is getting longer and longer as my parents work through the parts of their house where they have squirreled away items for thirty-three years. Each room becomes a heading for a jumble of the past. Each object awaits a new destination—the retirement apartment, a family member, a thrift store, or the planned auction. Each cell represents something to be claimed—and all of the emotions that go with it.