James Allen Hall is the author of Now You’re the Enemy (University of Arkansas Press, 2008), which has received awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center, he […]
After my mother won independence in 1836, she dysfunctioned as her own nation, passed laws, erected monuments to men who would never again be slaves to order and pain. Remember the Alamo? That was my mother. Then in 1845 that always-pleasing church-mouse voted for annexation. My mother had too many selves and the desire to […]
In the fifth grade, when we came finally to the Civil War, the teacher kept saying, We lost, we lost, his eyes a shadowy grief under his favorite painting, a laminated Dawe reproduction subtitled A fact which occurred in America: a black man wrestling a buffalo to the ground. The ground becomes his grave, I […]
The father does not knock on the locked door gently, as if loving a small hurt thing. The father does not say please over and over, until his voice becomes unraw with the not-said. The mother inside the room does not hold a gun to her chest. The mother did not make the father into […]
My mother feeds the multitudes of abandoned cats that live in the field behind our office. Every sundown she untangles fur, feline lineages. She names each one. And though they are legion, she does not forget. She administers heartworm medicine to one hundred feral cats. She cradles them. Imagine her frenzy, then, the day the […]
My mother, fourteen, makes a girl eat an entire can of Alpo. At forty, she leaves her husband for a man who wears women’s underwear. Every Friday night of my childhood, she’s criminal. The door creaks open for the same cop, his broad smile. Bank of America calls for Marsha Hall. I’m not in right […]
This is how I’ve changed my life: I’ve fallen in love with the Archaic Torso, clothed him in modern garb made from sheer synthetic fibers, the torso obscured and buttoned up, fettered and lean, framed in a reserved three-piece ensemble, shining in the light. This is how I’ll worship you: from your knees to your […]
Dustin couldn’t stand to be alone, we were twins. Or not twins. But people mistook us because the Fates are lazy, full of the whimsy that drives an experimental nature— they marked one like the other. As when I walked away to use the bathroom, my brother fixed to my shirttail until I promised he […]