In Praise of Hands

I miss hands. I miss their flimsy, awkward quality –

the way one looks when offered while still searching

for a reason. I miss being young, lining up after the

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You are standing on an indifferent platform in Preston Station and a little black spaniel is making unbreaking eye-contact with you as he pisses on your leg.

Aileen Weintraub is one of those incredibly funny writers who also has that superpower to make you cry against your will. You may have read her pieces about pregnancy, motherhood, aging, and more –

On the first day of my streaming career, I asked Gabe to come over to adjust the lighting design of my “set.”

In the middle of
the street is everyone
you know.

Maybe you didn’t recognize me, me with longer hair, growing tits, a new name.

She was going up to Poughkeepsie to see a girl she had met on the internet who, promisingly, shared her passion for Gary Larson comics.

Two men smoking cigarettes on Bleecker could mean anything
to each other.

Fifteen years before my autism diagnosis - the year I chopped off all my hair with jagged scissors - I hid a not inconsequential baggie of hash in my dorm room closet. I was, as always, trying to

When you died in March, five months before I bought my first plant, I learned what sobbing is.

All the time I don’t know what I’ve lost. 

She opens her mouth to speak, then shuts it, starts to laugh. ‘I guess we're both freaks.’

I.

In third grade, we spend every lunch writing comic books together. We invent a cinematic universe of imagined worlds to rival Marvel's. I've known her since I was six, and I've known my sister

Is this how a woman
Disappears, water-tap and soil

There is one boat out every day.
We are never packed in time to take it.

My six-year-old son stretches his arms to their limit as he describes his latest nightmare.

She flips a stool on the bar like a lamb
 

Charming shyness paired with a love of dancing the Charleston in heels in the street past midnight. I kissed her bloodied knees.

There’s so much advice
in the world, such as: if you’re feeling
very low, put on a suit

I made a call
and I lived. 
It was the longest
life of my life.

2 is the grade I was in when I thought I loved Lucy. 2 is the number of times Lucy was arrested for meth in a single day. 2 is the number of Xanies she must have taken the night she showed up to my welcome home party, because she was fucking sloppy.

I think Westerners, and Americans especially, struggle with “autofiction” since their conceptions of self are so fixed.

Do you remember the names of everyone you swallow

One of your axolotls has eaten the other
and every week you clean its twenty-litre tank
of cannibal excrement.

Here’s the plan: we’ll become high-class prostitutes. “Courtesans,” I say, “like ancient Greece.”