Parallel Practice: Haunting in Theory/Haunting in Practice
Salt is used for food, not purification. Candles should be burned for ambiance, not to manipulate energies.
Essays
165 posts
Still Working on It
You shouldn’t beat them with your hand, because they will hate you and bite it, so you use mass media instead.
Carry Me With You
The world needs you in it, and you will come to savor every minute of your life.
Sugar Factory
Though I can’t prove Haines wrote “On the Sly” about or even in Toronto—though the timing seems to line up with her and Shaw meeting here in the late 90s—somehow everything about this city seems packed into that line about the sugar factory.
Letter to My Dad
I wonder if the adoption agency thought they were clever, or if they thought both adoptive parents and adoptee having brown hair was enough to signal we belonged to each other.
Empty Houses Ring
emerging into one junk-filled yard where every space is laden with boards and tires and tubes and appliances and a van undriveable loaded like a mind in tatters . . .
To My Third Father
I didn’t understand consent, the formal severance of me and my biological father. Like magic, my past dissipated.
Mayonnaise
I don’t know which herbs, spices, or ice cream flavors you like because 23&Me won’t tell me, and neither will you.
Three Flash Essays by Lane Michael Stanley
Teeth line the leaves of the agave, protecting fleshy, leathery spined crescents that open like a bowl to the sky. Perhaps I would have a higher tolerance for flowers as vaginal metaphors if their petals had teeth.
