Just before seven a.m., I hear the garbage truck. I’ve already taken the black bin to the curb. The old hockey bag spread inside the front entry for the past month didn’t fit, despite the fact I’d been dismembering it for weeks, disposing of it in serial-killer pieces. A strap, a zipper, a flap of soiled canvas. All that’s left is the plastic frame and the wheels. Braless, I pick up the bag, and sprint barefoot down the driveway. The garbage man pulls up. His truck is a side loader. He releases …

It’s been quiet in the car for a few minutes. With the windows down, I’m breathing in the newly-minted greenery that’s emerged from hiding overnight. “So there’s one thing I don’t understand,” you pipe up from your booster seat. “If there needs to be a sperm and an egg in the uterus, how does the sperm get into the uterus?” Last week, it was enough for you to know the recipe for a baby is a sperm, an egg and a place for it to grow. The leaves were buds and we’d go off-trail on our forest …

Somewhere there are photos, color slides taken in the late 1960’s of me sitting on top of a large rock. Buck teeth, hair held back from my face with a kerchief, and scrawny legs. My parents have just purchased a piece of land. It is a nice lot, seven-eighths of an acre in Truro, Massachusetts, near the tip of Cape Cod.  * Every July during my childhood we’d visit this land to pick blueberries. We could pick them near the dunes, but these were our blueberries. The lot began at the top …

Wichita Fridge Day-old fried cheese curds. Three Vortex IPAs. Pickles. More pickles. Low-sodium soy sauce (brand: Dillons), jumbo ketchup, two packs of brown eggs (organic but not free range). Whole milk, low-fat milk, whole cream, half cream. Deviled eggs, butter, one full wasabi tube. Greens going bad. Portland Fridge Trader Joe’s carrot juice. Farmers' market greens. Goat cheese we can’t afford. Beer, beer, beer. Three different hot sauces, full-sodium soy sauce. Bread so dense you …

Would not a proper memory of one’s father presuppose a proper father? I’d think so. In the memory I have there is nothing about either it or the father that qualifies as proper. Or usual. As it happens, it is my first-ever memory, one powerful enough to have lodged itself deep into the crevices of my baby brain and body, one to be carried through all the days, years and decades to follow. The thing is, until five decades on, I didn’t know for sure whether or not it was my father. …

          Under the artificial but highly industrialized canopy that was the D-train running directly over our heads, we stood outside for our first heart-to-heart conversation. It was summer in New York City, distinct in humidity and activity from summers anywhere else in the world, and the workshop process for your Black queer theater group with its five playwrights under fellowship had begun. Monumental was the fact that we were Black writers commissioned for actual pay, read: real money; …