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AGAIN website
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Author's website (featuring all my books)
BellaOnline Short Stories

Cover model: One of my new MySpace friends is the cover model for my book AGAIN. Her name's Nahisha, so go check out her page.

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Erotic Stories

    Rock Star    Hot Afternoon    Deep in the Bayou

Stories:

  Read Soft Song

  Read A Promise of Rain

Featured at sffworld.com:
Nona
Horror on Royal Street
The Last Journey

Novel in Progress

Below is an excerpt of a novel I'm currently writing. The story is set in 19th century Chicago, several years before the Great Fire. Livia Delacourt is new to the art of investigations, working alongside the likes of the famous Allan Pinkerton of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. It is almost unheard of for a woman to be a detective; it is even more so when that woman is black.

During a particularly racially charged winter, Livia finds herself going undercover to investigate the murder of the infamous Delphine LaLaurie, a woman who routinely tortured her slaves in a sequestered attic and who left them to perish when her New Orleans home caught fire. Thought to have died years ago, LaLaurie is spotted one wintry day on a Chicago street by a former slave, Andre Lawrence, who was tortured by her as a child. Now an adult with a new identity and accumulated wealth, Lawrence is determined to kill the woman who nearly destroyed him. Only someone else beats him to it. Yet, through circumstances, he becomes a suspect, and his arrest aggravates an already tense city dealing with political and racial divisions as well as a devastating civil war.

Livia is the only one who believes in Lawrence's innocence and reluctantly seeks the help of a man she would rather have no dealings with - Damian Abrams, the owner of an exclusive Chicago brothel that caters to the monied scions of the richest families in the city. Along with Damian's Asian partner, the enigmatic Long Wu, they discover a trail of bodies as they seek to uncover who murdered the infamous Delphine LaLaurie, at the same time hoping to divert a powderkeg that threatens to rip the city apart.

From the illustrious homes along Michigan Avenue to the dank streets known as Whiskey Row and Satan's Mile, the backdrop of early Chicago sets a stage for what I hope to become a series featuring a very charismatic character.

Read the excerpt.

Poems:

THIS MAN Supine at his altar the adherent genuflects, adoration stirring in vast thighs, need blazing in ample breasts. While upward in fixed rapture her eyes look toward the mast, the idolatry of her worship her sustenance, first and last. And he stands reverently, bestows benevolent grace, feeding her unctuous desire, gently strokes her upturned face. Deist, deity - their roles a symbiosis unplanned, worshipper, this night christened woman; godhead, for tonight this man.

HER She reminds you of ribtips, greens, fried catfish, a bucket of chicken wings, a sweaty can of Budweiser sitting on worn Formica, waiting to be grabbed. She laughs without subtlety, and her ample hips brook no space as they sway unself-consciously around ever-diminishing areas. You look at her and think of too long hours at the beauty parlor, at the nail salon, of raucous card games around a rickety TV table, surrounded by chairs with peeling vinyl covers. Hers is a life too fast, too hard, too slow, too easy, settling for earth over air, and you say to yourself, ‘she’d never fit in with the cheese and wine set,’ realizing as you do that she’s more comfortable in her skin than you’ll ever be, and that the ‘wine and cheese set’ have a problem with you, too.

HOT, SUMMER DAYS These things she remembers clearly: the taste of sweat beads on a tall, cold glass of iced tea while sitting under the looming shade of the old willow; the attar of fragrant dogwoods mixing with the scent of her own sweat, earthy, langorous and sweet; not caring about anything, but the conversation going on between the magpie and the crickets and whether there would be rain to moisten the soil; cooling breezes that tangled her hair, and molded her dress to her sweat-moist body; and the way he smiled at her as he told her that there was nothing sweeter than seeing, smelling, tasting her on a hot, summer day. TEMPTATION Oh, how am I to pass this day and not give in to the compelling sway of all that would pass my lips and make their home my abundant hips? Though try I do to ignore their call and just be strong and toss them all, each chocolate-covered, each fat-swathed bite, teases my tongue and brings such delight That my mouth bids them all to stay awhile and let the decadence of each defile the righteousness of my inner will that damns my appetite to just be still. But my stomach hails them and says "come in" and speaks to me, "what is life without sin"? And again I succumb to temptation's pleasure whose pounds and inches I am loathe to measure.

BEAUTY REGIMEN Waiting to be pressed, relaxed nouveau waved, braided, weaved, or processed, the women sit in stages of hair disrepair, hoping to be beautified into magazine glamor, praying to ameliorate or just plain obliterate the strains of neglect and wear to their bodies and souls. Like someone once said: "It's all in the hair, 'cause a sista can be down and out, abused and used, one paycheck away from the streets, but if her hair looks good, she's got it going on!" So like patient souls in line to be baptized into the Church of Pulchritude, the sistas read the good word as expounded by the scriptures of Essence or Black Hair, exclaiming the virtues of the glorified adherents of righteous style. And they sit cremed, towelled, dripping wet, hair crackling to the tune of the sizzling comb, or faces half entombed by heat-blasting sarcophi, as they exchange the latest on Luke and Laura, Erica Kane, or Vicky and Dorian -- heads bobbing to the music blasting from V103, laughing and just being, inhaling the melange of chemicals and mixtures that hold the secrets of Black Beauty. And for six hours, at least they escape the world outside ELEGY FOR THE CHILDREN There once were children here, bright suns casting light in dim shadows, tickling sad souls into fits of laughter, putting tints of rainbow where shades of gray had rested. Innocence renewed blotted out the sins of the elders, and mirrors held before us no longer reflected surrender to life's burdens. But somehow the gray has swallowed the rainbows, and clouds have chased the suns away. Where has innocence gone? For we can no longer look in mirrors and smile. There once were children here, but they went away and left us with our sad souls remembering long-ago times when children used to play without fear.

My 3D art (Bryce 3D and Poser):

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