blm land
this belt of the nation feels equally
bible and rust and sun, where
mute billboards offer us
teeth cleaning for... more
I started watering the houseplants on a regular basis—this
after watching the dead multiply for the years I spent watering... more
Let’s create fake accounts and try to seduce each other.
I want him to know that we’re the same.
It’s not the enormity of the half-eaten doughnut.
Because I love in the manner of eating I am sure whatever I take from you will pass.
As a girl I played with dolls, sang
soprano, wore sparkly eyeshadow from
Claire’s. It never felt good to be called sir.
The man who bought Hitler’s bed did not have nightmares as a child.
Woke up alone today in my own bed
after a solid sleep for the first time
in over three weeks, feeling strange there,
almost... more
I carve horses out of watermelon. I swallow / fish eyes like gum drops. I pray under / neon chandeliers, string chrysanthemum / in my hair.
i think i was an onion in a former life / i think you chopped me / lord how high were we last night
Remember when every stray dog was a love story and the snow that night cleared the crust that had gummed my eyes shut? No, me neither, but fuck it. Let’s get lit one last time.
O, I don’t get wet for / the Hot Dads of US Weekly or the dad / bods of Star, but give me Frank Sinatra’s / voice crooning in a Hong Kong cab, and I’m hooked
I wish I had that glorified high school / experience— where some boys / are chugging expired strawberry liqueur / and everyone, I mean everyone, / is sprawling on the grasscarpet
When I exhaust all other forms of exploration, / this landscape will deny me at the border; / & I will turn my gaze toward a darkening / sky filled with stars I no longer recognize.
Sometimes I say novels ruined me in the way they ruin all young bookish girls, slowly and tenderly rotting out the light and making room for the sweet dark.
On Wednesday, I find my teeth / have sharpened over the night / It’s a strange thing to get used / to
Remember, there’s a light emitting from you and it's not just your cellphone. / The Internet is a scorched wasteland. / But you've walked through worse places / on your way to work.
All the waffles in Texas / are shaped like Texas. All / the waffles in Ohio / are shaped like waffles.
Above me, all the alien lovers are asleep, stuck together beneath their foreign moons.
It means nothing now but it meant enough then, enough to change a life, to alter the smooth rhythmic turning of the world.
He doesn’t have any friends and doesn’t want any.
That’s the only way Mays can pitch,
because he doesn’t play the game
of fraternity formed on summer ballfields.
"I didn't want to ever be outside of this moment. I knew at some point I would look at the picture I'd just taken and feel an overwhelming sense of loss. I thought as long as we could manage to stay inside this particular hotel room, to avoid our phones and every person with whom we'd ever come into contact, we would continue to feel whole. We were revolutionaries, goddamnit. These were our accumulation of beautiful moments. Before the world fractured us. I don't expect you to understand how I became Brad Pitt in that moment, how we all just flew along down the highway. Bandits. Ex-patriots. In love with this countryside, if not this country. Paper Moon. The Last Picture Show. All of this shot in black and white. Only the final scene in color."
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.
