Virgil realizes that dreams matter to him most because, in them, he feels somewhat sure he is present. This isn’t epiphany. In the “novel,” out of which he would model his own first major work, a little brown girl stares into both a crowded bus and a cage folded into a dream and, simultaneously, out of this dream into a “world,” where she recognizes a caged gorilla, King Kong, an Ape? It didn’t matter what it was. What mattered was that that big, black animal was, curiously, eating buttons.
RONALDO V. WILSON is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Prize., Poems of the Black Object, winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry in 2010. His latest books are Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other, finalist for a Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and Lucy 72 (1913 Press, 2016). Co-founder of the Black Took Collective, Wilson is also a mixed media artist, dancer and performer. His Off the Dome: Rants, Raps, and Meditations, an online album, exists on The Conversant. His short films “Grey,” “White,” “Blue,” “Red,” “Green,” “Brown,” “Pink,” “Black,” can also be found online at the Center for Art and Thought. Wilson is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, serving on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program, and co-directing the Creative Writing Program. He splits his time between Santa Cruz, CA and Long Island, New York.