Dive Bar Theophany
Natalie Rowland
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
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.