Search All Winners

A prophet is never recognized in his own country, especially when that country has fallen into the mouths of dragons. Bob waves to a woman in a BMW across the street. It’s his lawyer, Christine. “Is me, Bob!” She closes the tinted windows and weaves through traffic. There was a time when BMW stood for Bob Marley and the Wailers. He thinks of the foolishness of that now.

            He returns to the park, searching for the boy from the night before. He wants to shine his shoes again, to see the light in his eyes from Africa reflected there. In the daylight, the park is different from how he remembered it, but the boy’s tree still leans, and there’s a man selling peanuts and asham.

            “You see the little youth that sleep inna the park?"

            "Which one?"

            “The one with the play-play guitar."

            “Oh, me remember him. Him in juvenile detention! Is a bad youth.”

            “No. Me see him last night.”

            “Him kill a Chinie man in August town. Man-slaughter."

            It doesn’t make sense. Bob has a feeling that he has stepped into the middle of someone’s dream. The fall-down skin itches and there is a dull pain behind his eyes. An idea comes to him.

            “You know Bob Marley?”

            “Yeah?”

            “What if me tell you him come back?”

There was a space across which you and your shadow, pacing,

        broke,

and around you pockets of shadow, sucking, shutting.

        By now the talk had changed.

There was a liquid of wall and stove and space-behind-the-stove.

        And x where the mirror had been.

And x where the window had been.

       And x where my hand slid over the tabletop breaking a glass.

There were shadows in the shadows, and in there were cuts.

When I say my wives are cages, I don’t mean I’m a bird.

Collapsible shelves, they hide their usefulness when not

in use. All my wives contain terrariums: terrible and fetid

atmospheres in which their salamander selves linger atop

damp rocks. Their hands are damp as the tissues they ball

in their hands, though none of my wives could make a fist,

not even if I asked, no, not even if I commanded them to,

an amusing idea I must someday revisit. My wives are like

the Small Mammal House at the zoo, their rooms kept dark

so visitors may view their nocturnal truths, that anonymous

wakefulness we sleepers do not care to know. None of my

wives are like lanterns, nor do their ribs sing with canaries...

1. Boy, don’t let a shadow in you, I never want to see the devil in your eyes, a traceable line of your daddy’s.

2. If you dream about fish or a river, somebody’s pregnant, we need the water more than it needs us.

3. Dream about snakes, you haven’t been living right, wash your hands of it.

4. They’re shooting boys who look like you. You know my number, use it, keep all your blood.

5. Stay

6. Alive.

LATISHA: The cops ain’t looking for no girl so we don’t get caught. (Pause.) Until now. Now, we kinda worried. Kinda in trouble.

YVONNE: (To Latisha.) Why?

LATISHA: Yo! You can’t tell nobody. And I mean nobody.

YVONNE: (To Latisha.) No, no, I won’t.

LATISHA: I’m telling you I’ll jack you up for real.

YVONNE: (To Latisha.) I won’t tell.

LATISHA: (Pause.) We capped that teacher.

There’s a man inside this woman, and he’s alive. But he can’t speak—she can’t speak—the face is peeled back, the skull empty, and now the cap of bone is being plastered back in place, and now the skin is being stitched shut. The autopsy is over—she’s closed, she’s done—and he’s still in there, with her, in another country, with the smell of shit and blood that’s never going to go away, and he’s not himself at all, he’s her, he’s Gloria Luby—bloated, full of gas, fat and white and dead forever.