There are times when being in my body hurts so badly that I find myself wanting God. Well shit, I think. Because I don’t believe in God.

In the fall of 1989, I moved away from my childhood home in Mishawaka, Indiana, to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I moved from a small town with very few people of color to a very diverse, albeit segregated, inner city.

In 1989, I would have been typing on a computer made by Apple. An Apple Macintosh. I just looked up a photo of this computer on Google.

Heath Creel is the kind of artist who transcends categorization. The photos he takes with his point-and-shoot are pure poetry, while the poems he writes are as lucid and striking as the very best visual art.

While finishing grad school, I lived in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a small town hidden beneath Lookout Mountain. Inspired by the mountain’s proximity, I wrote short poems about it, allowing the solidity and strength of what I saw to take whatever form I needed for the day.