notes

Angel, Jesus, Moses, and Tarshawna made paper airplanes that said BILAL AIR and threw them, coordinated, towards Bilal's desk. B-lal, they chant around him. Denesha ripped her $5 bill in two and I helped patch it up with scotch tape. I cut off the tag from Wykinson's suit and tried to get the stain out. I threatened to throw Jonell's pen out the window if she didn't take out a pencil, and I stuck three pencils in the fuzz-flecked afro rising up from Lindel's head while he slept in reading class. 

Email From Grandpa Jamal

I've heard of wild horses but never wild donkeys.

The idea is good but the timing is not right. 

Nowadays the rabid dogs of Islam are knocking.

This crazy bunch they have disturbed

the atmosphere. My answer is you

wait. I like you to be closer. I'm 

happy you write. You're welcome

here in Kurdistan. But remember 

we have our traditions. They need

to be respected. Remember the

Islamic nuts. They want to take us 

back to year 500. They want to take

us back. To the time of ignorance.

And also desert traditions. 

They want to take us. And also 

are very cruel. And also you

are aware of it I am sure.

Soon your aunties visit. My answer is

you wait. You wait and we will see. 

I've never heard of wild donkeys.

You must be someplace interesting.
Let us wait and we will see. 

TWO BIG DONKEY WOMEN & 10,000 FAKE DAYS

They were big donkey women, the two of them. Not that they were donkey-like, just big on donkeys. If you wondered where the apples went, it was to the donkeys. Sunlight will strike a chord on lots of things. Mirrors and stained glass and moss hanging from the Live Oaks. In a shower with a window, the beams will reveal that steam is made of particles after all, tiny drops of water dust-like in their size, a few molecules, maybe, or maybe millions – who could know – hung together by cohesion, a force as mysterious as love or as the stock market. Cuteness can be quantified by eye:face ratio – the bigger the eyes, the cuter the creature. Otherwise, scientists have speculated, parents would abandon their young. It’s evolutionary. Like opposable thumbs and nipples and underarm hair. Somewhere far from here, a person I love is programming 10,000 fake days with a series of random algorithms to quantify traffic patterns in Ithaca. 10,000 days is about the time I’ve been alive. In each fake day, a cell will tell what conditions are like: good; average; bad. God would be a whiz at Excel. We’re all a bit like donkeys: lumbering, sun-loving, looking for someone to feed us.    

possible video essay script

Ears, I've always thought, are the strangest organ. Like fleshy satellite dishes, or halves of apricots, dried into wrinkled disks. As waxy like a newborn baby. It's possible I hate them because mine are freakishly small, like tiny tacked on afterthoughts. Listening is the most passive sensory experience. Its involuntary. Can't close your ears. [shut up and sleep with me shut up and sleep with me, why don't you come and sleep with me.] Songs rattle on and on. Conversations drone. Your morning alarm drills into sleep, as damaging as an oil rig at 6 in the morning. I've never been a good listener. Not to alarms, or rules, or people. I find it tiresome, the constant tirade of words we trade like a valuable commodity. There's a dog in South Carolina named Chaser who knows 1000 nouns. There's nothing sacred about words. I've found it's sometimes easier to communicate when I can't speak the language at all. A foreign language envelops you, like a cloud, or a shroud, but it can't penetrate. In this way it is truer and less deceiving.

Sugarbush

she smelled of garlic and the sun was so bright that it glinted off the drips of water falling from the eaves and off the mug in three spots and even off the polished wood of the table that sat heavy legged in the center of the room, big enough to make love on. I thought for no reason of an image i'd photoshopped in high school, of a man standing suspended above a lake, a great lake that stretched out like crumpled tin foil in dimming light. 

we all wore polar fleece and when we moved sparks flew between us, tiny pricks of light and heat and sound that reminded us we were existing, this was existence, we were perceiving through the orifices that dotted our bodies like windows at the top of a tall fleshy turret. we rolled, then, on the floor like puppies with this knowledge, giddy on the smell of our own skin, the itch of our feet, the feeling of teeth on our tongues. 

Rm. 446

everyday the desks crowd a little closer to the front, hunching towards the white board, crowding the room, at every angle, no straight lines, the spaces between each row shrinking until the kids are crammed in like the buildings in this neighborhood, where behind each housing project rises another, dominoes in the distance, waiting to be toppled.

Misinformation I’ve Heard Taught in My Classroom by Other Teachers

Humans have been only on the moon and mars.

If you don't leave mars at 4 o clock you will never get back to earth; remember everything is round; remember if you miss it you'll just be chilling in space with people who look like Shihab (Shihab being the only Indian kid in a room full of black kids and a black teacher, the white teacher, me, sitting in the back of the room, watching).

the gravity is almost the same on mars.

we have the ozone layer; they don’t.

There is, whatchu call, solar debris. it burns up before it even gets close to where a plane flies. You can be on mars and if a rock comes flying you can get hit by a rock. 

Whatever gas it has it will consume you. Your blood will boil, a lot of things will happen.