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

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.

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

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.

My brother and I were standing outside of the 30th street station in Philadelphia.

I forget how old we were but we were old enough that our mom let us take the train alone from Lancaster to

The boys are back together and everyone's in town except it's desolate and nobody gives a damn

you have probably peed with everyone you’ve ever loved, including the woman you do right now

My husband Paul and I are drinking beers and eating hot dogs at the baseball stadium in San Francisco. It’s even a little boring, and I have my back to the field for a while so can I face my friends

In 1949 we had viewed television for three years on a 12” screen. It inhabited a large wooden box with doors that pulled out and covered the picture tube when not in use. For the most part in those

When he drops you off at home you realize the soles of your feet are covered in tar.

It only took Kyle a few days to make his confession about the other woman. It took nine months for him to tell me he couldn’t ride a bike.

Sometimes I imagine I’ll get a long email from her, explaining why, when a family reunion stopped her from coming on the trip, she gave up on our friendship. Did I somehow offend her?

... at Stereo, you never had to ask “where’s the love,” because it was everywhere, in everyone, even the atmosphere...

“We found the calf box,” she tells your grandmother on the phone. “Not a scratch on it. Yeah, we found it in what used to be the living room.” 

The story has hit an obstacle or maybe a dead end. It’s not a dead end, exactly, but it is an overdrawn bank account.

He had a Camel Blue, a glass of sweet white wine, just like last time. It’s about 20 degrees cooler than it was then. I think I am wearing the same outfit; shitty, baggy, innocuous jeans.

As a pack, my Korean-Italian-American cousins and I were little foul-mouthed figurines made of compressed carbon and steam. On their own, they knew how to stand.

When I get home, back to this one bedroom I’ve bled, cried, and danced in, I Google what it means if you see a dead bird. I’m not superstitious, but I’ve seen at least five on my walk this evening.

Your greatest fear in life: to wind up like your mother. And yet, here you are, 34 and suddenly bisexual.

 Where was my pimp? My boss? My daddy? I wanted a man from a Lana Del Rey song. 

The term pterodactyl has fallen out of favor because it lacks specificity. Most fossil remains are discovered fractured, less than whole. At a certain point, all things begin to look the same if you take enough of their composition away.

I was nineteen, still felt like a kid, and Tom seemed to like me.