Everyone picks the chairs up and puts them in a circle. Then they turn the music on and you start to walk along the perimeter.
My family’s eponymous foundation is a donor to Columbia University, in whose MFA program in Creative Writing I was enrolled, but due to some substance abuse problems last semester, I had to drop out . . .
Violette moved away from Calvin toward a group of rhododendrons.
Calvin felt calm.
He thought about God.
I sent a text to my father, telling him I saw three coyotes. My father is an admirer of the natural world. I sent another text about a nearby house that had been abandoned. I'd noticed the word “SATAN” scrawled across the front door with blue paint that morning.
Ted had started the holidays in Aspen. Well, in the jail in Aspen, awaiting trial for a murder he’d committed in Snowmass.
In the dark we weren’t afraid to show our ugly selves. We admitted we loathed giving up our seats to old people and the pregnant. Don’t you just hate reading? We both said at the same time.
We left after midnight. We entered the forest, dark and green all around us, hundreds of miles deep. Woven together in the little cocoon of our car, our world was as large as the headlight beams in the dark forest.
For four days in 1997 I was a beam of light. Fuck off if you don’t believe me: I lit shit up. Daniel Ladinsky says Hafiz says, “The oil in the lamp the sun burns come from forests you once were, from rich deposits you left [behind],” but he was probably speaking metaphorically.
They aren’t the most attractive boys at school—not smarter or more stylish and certainly no more articulate. Their appeal is a mystery to anyone who isn’t under their spell.
The problem was I’d forgotten about the change in altitude. The grief counselor had suggested a getaway, so I fled the Alleghenies for the Rockies and the guest bedroom of my best college friend on a quiet block in Denver.
I believe it now—I’d be a fool not to—but that doesn’t mean I agree with it.
It was a franchise, the Prez thing, but one as secret as the mob.
The blonde girl I liked made a scooping motion with her hands while saying things like ‘it’s not even that late’ and ‘come on, come on’ and ‘it’ll be soooo much fun’ and ‘let’s go you fucking piece of shit.’
My friend takes caffeine pills between classes and shakes in the bathroom, on the floor under the sinks.
Okay, so there’s that sound again, and you know it isn’t Tommy or Lindsey trying to scare you, because they’ve been asleep for over an hour and you’re certain the sound is coming from the basement
Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time playing Candy Crush Saga on the old iPhone Jan gave me while watching TV.
Nell did not consider herself a thief. All sixteen lovely pups were better off in her care. She kept them in a large house with a sprawling yard, surrounded by a sturdy fence.
The items on the list had come to her at random as she washed a dish or plucked a hair from her chin or put gas in the car.
Even his sacred biosphere (of anime, video games, Oedipal and teen porn, poststructuralist psychobabble, and grad school fellowships) can’t save him from the critical intervention of the collapsing world.
A 400-page collection of poems in fours sections: Nicki Minaj Songs, Bob Dylan Songs, Elliott Smith Songs, and 90s Riot Grrrls Songs.
FOUR NEW ESSAYS BY CHLOE CALDWELL! Plus the original essays that made you fall in love with Chloe!
Jason Phoebe Rusch is a queer writer from the Chicago suburbs. His full-length debut Dualities explores gender and patriarchy from the perspective of a man who was socialized and is currently still read as a woman. He is interested in complication and nuance and messy human failing, his own and that of others.
