Lisa Teasley

A week before the summer solstice, the numerologist Tim Luna worries the date into perfect configuration for Armageddon. He sleeps in a large closet surrounded by stacks of newspaper and magazine clippings salvaged from his parent’s garage in the medical district, low-end flats of Beverly Hills. The closet scent has acid for a top note, gasoline and mildew in the heart, and cat scat at the base. His partner, a very skilled bodyworker who calls herself Kiva Hands, breaks down into tears when she first confronts the closet and tells Tim — when he asks — that she will never move in with him as long as he has it.

Lisa Teasley's short story, "WHY I COULD NEVER BE BOOGIE" is in the new anthology, FLASH FICTION AMERICA, pubdate February 14, 2023

While Jamaica Kincaid’s books arrived in my life as lyrical and deep psychological company, coming from a Black Caribbean perspective like my mother’s, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric spoke more piercingly to me as an American Black woman.