"You buy the chestnuts because you want me to enjoy this trip but then never to come back"
Read moreInterview on the American Short Fiction blog →
I'm grateful to Nate Brown for inviting me to reflect on Baltimore for the American Short Fiction blog. This piece is part of their "Things American" feature. Other Baltimore writers who have contributed include: Jane Delury, Michael Downs, Derick Ebert, Kenneth Morrison, Lia Purpura, Deborah Rudacille, D. Watkins, and Khaliah Williams.
For my part, I decided to interview my mother, Patricia Petrosino, a former teacher/administrator in Baltimore City Public Schools. Scroll down for her wonderful / terrifying description of Baltimore's meat wholesale district in the 1970s!
Essay on the Iowa Review Blog →
I wish to put my blackness into some kind of order. My blackness, my builtness, my blackness, a bill. I want you to know how I feel it: cold key under the tongue. Mean fishhook of homesickness that catches my heart when I walk under southern pines. And how I recognized the watery warp of the floor in my great-grandma’s house, when I dreamed it. This is what her complaining ghost said: Write about me.
Read moreTwo new poems in Tupelo Quarterly →
My exes shall rise up from their Mazdas
& adorn themselves in denim
New Review on SCOUT Poetry
Kiki Petrosino’s baroque line and her focused somatic history of literal and figurative darknesses make the three sections of Hymn for the Black Terrific satisfyingly coherent.
Read moreNew Poem on Pangyrus →
My poem, "Pastoral," has appeared on Pangyrus, a new arts journal. Click below the poem for a brief explanation of its origins.
