Virginia native Eliot Khalil Wilson holds a Ph.D. in critical theory and American drama from the University of Alabama. His work has won awards from the Academy of American Poets and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the author of two collections of poems, This Island of Dogs (The […]
I pounded nails through her creamy palms and impossibly arched feet. She never screamed, bled, or healed –my breasted, blonde pink Jesus— —not a doll at all—but a gendered totem. I had what you’d have to call a passion. Before the microwave, before the Whirlpool trash disposal, I’d stuff her down the gaping […]
step from clamorous hives of tenement houses and walk the grafted sycamore alameda, two slow, dark seasons of belief. They’ve come out for the night’s paseo, pulling their market carts, question-stooped, cobbled hand in hand, with bread for the pigeons still, and spit for the bust of Franco. They walk to the stork-priested […]
We slept on ripped quilts in the trailer’s shade or on pads in the cab between jobs. The boss called us backs—our animal use— and I was a back in the grey Navy town. We sweated in the long pants they made us wear but few of the men I worked with cared— […]
Any day but Sunday, they got the one-day bag of food— Cheerios, cans of fruit cocktail or amniotic peaches, field or navy beans, a tall white can with black letters that said, […]
From the fouled nests of Villejuif to the street below, then the walk, the steps down to the catacomb metro— I have waited with Moroccans squatting like tajines and Senegalese women asleep against their bundles, waited in this crowd like a soul for a ferry and how many […]
Eliot Khalil Wilson, author of The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go, talks about a poem he wishes he’d written, and a line of poetry he wishes he’d written.
Eliot Khalil Wilson, author of The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go, comments on his special writing time.