GIA Reader (2000-present)
GIA Reader (2000-present)
There is more to fear than poverty.
God, for instance, is a tricky concept always dangling
at the end of a prostitute’s tear-drop soaked in smooth
on the back of her pimp’s hand and repeated in a trick’s prayer
before sex is exchanged
for currency … currency …
currency is the negative energy that has me outside!
The place where my mother met my father, West Oakland’s Esther’s Orbit Lounge, is long shuttered now. The cultural and social institutions that sprang up along Seventh Street made the moment feel like “Harlem of the West.” There is a storied existence in Oakland. It is buried over by unaffordable luxury apartments and gutted out of once black-owned row houses and Victorian homes. When I chose to be a writer, I didn’t know I was choosing to be an anthropologist, archaeologist, and hero.
Read More...Have you ever begun to just notice something and then suddenly you see it everywhere. Then you wonder, have I been out of it, or did this just become a thing?”
Read More...To be wealthy was not to have, to be wealthy was to give.
— Malcolm Margolin, The Ohlone Way
The Native people of the East Bay Area are mostly overlooked by its modern dwellers. When people speak of Oakland as a place, most people likely think of a dense urban area — perhaps they think of the Oakland Raiders, with the team colors of silver and black. The Raider Nation. But do they consider the tribal nations that lived in Oakland before it was Oakland? Probably not.
Read More...I am
In love
With you
I am in love with you in a platonic sense
Like the kind of love
I pour into breakfasts with mom
The night a fire started between the ceiling of our apartment and the upstairs neighbor’s floor, I walked with my person to dinner. We dropped seventy dollars, but after a difficult week working in education and the arts nonprofit world, going out felt recuperative. Worth it. Dropping seventy dollars on dinner wasn’t something we did often, but it was possible, the sort of thing a person can do when you’ve lived in the same house for fifteen years while rents rise around you like water.
Read More...Today, Regina’s Door in Oakland serves as a healing artistic space for survivors of sex trafficking, as well as a launching pad for theatrical productions featuring the stories and performances of survivors. Its start came in 2014, when Regina Evans decided she needed to do something to help her community. “We have young girls being brutalized every day. In Oakland trafficking is very hidden, but if you go down International Boulevard, you also see very young girls — twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, and you know they’re being raped,” she said.
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