On N. Luzerne St. the cool air cycles through the block like a whirlwind rattling your windows awakening you. You’ve got a bed sheet hanging over the window in an attempt to block the early morning sunlight, and a washrag stuffed down into the cracked wood just below the window sill to try to slow the wintry air from entering your bedroom. This is a bedroom that you share with your two younger brothers. The…
“We need to stop just pulling people from the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’ve been falling in.” -Desmond Tutu The river of addiction never stops flowing. Hundreds of thousands fall into it and are swept out at sea. There are hundreds of nets, platforms and resources set up at the mouth of the river to catch people before they are swept out at sea. However at the part of…
“Gold authenticity can only be tested under maximum fire. The same holds true with regard to manhood.” -Moutasem Algharati Gold was the goal. Since I was a child I’ve been in love with gold, I would see the chains and the rings on the hip hop artists that I listened to and I longed to have my own. Gold was that unattainable thing that was just out of reach that I could chase. While silver…
You Can’t Stand With Your Feet In Two Different Oceans, When The Tide Goes Out, It’ll Split You…. For those of you that are unfamiliar with the scene, rapper Nipsey Hussle was shot and killed this week outside of a store he owned in the same hood where he grew up at. Nipsey was doing it right, he came from the ghetto of South Central, LA, became a gangbanger, but eventually found his way out…
My body was found by two young men cutting behind a church at dawn the morning after Easter. They were on their way to work when they found my body, cold and blue sprawled out on the back steps of a church in downtown Bel Air. I had had a drug induced heart attack, and hypothermia and had been left there for dead. I saw the guy that found my body about a year later…