I was too shocked to scream
at the roosters to stop crowing, their throats
robust and practiced in a language I find myself
disarming at all costs. In my first few years
of
I was with a Serbian who said, “Tonight is about your pleasure,” so I was doing great.
Previously on...
Chapter 1a: Converging
Chapter 1b: Crisis
Chapter 1c: Fighting the Fog
Chapter 2a: Two People
my family and I moved
from Japan to America
and found solace
in hunting mushrooms
the kind we sought
are called matsu-take,
the highest grade
selling for a grand per kilo
I do
It is December 21, 2020, the night of the Great Conjunction. For the first time since the 1600s, Jupiter and Saturn will be the closest to each other they’ve ever been. NASA says you’ll be able to
Teenaged girls raised in the sixties, what harm could come from going with a sought after, popular guy?
Then a spring day burns through with such clarity Melissa asks me to help her interview dog walkers at the dog park. Not the day nurse. Not the other aid. Me—our first outing since the
Before I was me, I was somebody else, the same as we all are. A human is constantly shedding skin like a snake. It’s just a metaphor.
I learned all the tricks in middle school; I learned how to
— after Frank Ocean, “Nikes”
You would have laughed
at the sight of us: bodies twisted,
one foot in the air to show off
a new pair of Nikes; iPhones ringing
with warning about deep
To the left of the counter stands a dead rat on its hind legs, taxidermied, with one front paw extended and one middle finger raised. An insult that looks like benediction. A pair of antlers sit atop
How many white girls of twelve and thirteen became the dreamed-about woman back home when I listened to Every Little Kiss by Bruce Hornsby and the Range?
I’ve been trying to find this quote by Chris Kraus from Aliens & Anorexia I think, but the quote is nowhere in my notebooks, even though I remember writing it down obsessively.
Previously on...
Chapter 1a: Converging
Chapter 1b: Crisis
Chapter 1c: Fighting the Fog
Flakes
In the 1970s, every grocery in my Midwestern town sells tall quarts of buttermilk. My mom uses it for pancakes, and I also drink it with salt and pepper. Once I serve it to myself so salty
In the morning, we don’t move. I’m satisfied. I’m easy to love. I’m not freezing and still drunk.
Darling, stop being stupid,
she says with all the tenderness she can muster,
which is not a lot, when I bring up my ex.
At the dining table, in the gaudy rust of sunset,
she alternates between
Many languages did not and some still do not include the color word blue. Color words tend to enter languages in the order of black and white (or dark and light), and next red, and next green and yellow, colors that often share one and only one word, and finally blue.
Throughout our first year in that house you woke feeling this ghost’s breath on your face, and at night, sometimes, you’d jump up frantic, swearing you’d felt its grave-clasp on your ankle or arm.
Lions and tigers and bears, oh my—when the three of us were together I wondered if I should be the tiger. But I did not feel tigerish by any metaphor. I was not sleek.
The night before Easter he ties his belt around my neck and gives it to me to hold.
Come late spring, my dad turned into a man I didn’t recognize. Normally a quiet man who spent his free hours taking a nap on the couch, he morphed into a talkative baseball fanatic. The Philadelphia
We were allowed to be alone in the stadium, an object which is infinite. Prove it.
I can’t remember if we took the bus. More likely your dad dropped us in traffic and the civic door thunked on our
Somewhere in the archives of Baseball America, there’s a story by an Italian journalist named Giovanna de la something or other, and she attempts to verify, through old box scores and personal
Just ahead is the familiar field, a diamond with rounded corners. I walk up with head down, anticipating that time will drag its feet while I sit and wish I could be attending to other things. But
He was black, handsome, and nonthreatening, so white people loved him.
