Chris Leo

I was born in 1974 in Belleville, the provincial capital of the region known for that century as the Pasta Triangle, in the Garden State ("...like an immense barrel, filled with good things to eat, and open at both ends with Pennsylvanians grabbing from one end and the New Yorkers from the other") of New Jersey. And like that Jersey stuck between the cancering behemoths; like that Jersey neither American Heartland proper nor New York City ever; like that Belleville neither Newark black nor Montclair wasp (and ditto for all Irish-Italo-Americans); standing 5"9' like the tallest Bolivian from the highest mount and the shortest Dutchman from the lowest swamp; like being born the middle son of the only conscionable lawyer who would tithe a Paraguayan GDP while hiding an equivalent from the IRS (hypothetically); like being raised in the biggest house of an inner-suburban town blighted by white flight; my lot's been cast circumstantially as mediator provocateur. Pushed not to the outside periphery, but to all edges of the inside -- and stuck in such a middle, I couldn't help but figure most of it out. A lot of obvious simple things many overlook on their quest for grand notions, like how having nowhere to fall means there's nowhere to fall; like how intimacy is fantastic, one should try it all the time; like how straight men call the entrails of animals dinner yet navigate around the human form with prudence (with women) and chastity (with other men); like whether words/swords/sordid/or order, if one never tires stretching the truth the drawn out ends eventually meet up again.