Essays
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Dinner Party at the End of the World
At the dinner party table, I looked toward my friend. She had also turned to her phone, where an endless compilation of rare Labubu unboxings played on the screen. I resisted the urge to tell her I hold a conspiracy…
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Synthetic Heaven
And when the high would hit, I would think to myself—This. This for as long as I can. More than summer and bicycles and flowers littered on the pavement like confetti, more than the way Sydney looks in the spring,…
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Books that Made Me Gay: “The Group” by Mary McCarthy
Provided that your girlfriend can drive on the freeway, you might spend Saturdays at the beach. Mine can and we do. After ritually sacrificing a tube of sunscreen, we unwrap soft deli sandwiches and I am bowled over by my…
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you won’t hear this
When mom would tell me the story of my birth, I always imagined the hospital room was dark, like the only light was coming in from the hallway or maybe a small nightlight plugged into a far corner of the…
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A Postcard From Dolly
One of those last weeks before school started again, Grandma took my brother and me down to Lubbock to visit our cousins. I don’t know what the boys did that week. I know my cousin and I spend the entire…
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God of My Father
You tell yourself this is an act of decolonization but really, you’re here because the health care system has failed. This kind of stepping outside of capitalism isn’t so much an act of radical liberation as it is a way…
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The Missing Word
The problem is not simply what Israelis know about 1948. Israel needs a new story about itself. The old one has become a trap. It knows how to tell Jewish stories of exile and return, but not Palestinian ones. It…
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Lux Nightmare Is Not A Porn Star
Just a year and a half prior to finding Shalit’s email in my inbox, I was the proprietor of my very own porn site, That Strange Girl, which I’d started right before my senior year of college. It was a…
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Looking for You at the Red Lobster on Tatooine
My love for Star Wars was only lukewarm in the years I watched it as a kid growing up in the 80s. There were Star Wars lunch boxes discarded in the corners of my cousin’s bedroom. Light Sabers in the…
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On the Question of My Typographical Intentions Running across a White Page or A Brief Undercurrent, if You Will, on Messaging within US-American Popular Culture: A Haibun
My maternal grandmother, born & raised in Mississippi, birthed at least two of my aunts & two of my uncles within the state, but I have never lived there myself, so my understandings of place are limited by what I…
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What Forced My Father to Buy Our First TV?
Give us a movie with a good fight, a wild spectacle of flying fists and stylized blood, and we were in heaven. Looking back, it wasn’t just about the action. It was a psychological displacement, a two-hour escape from a…
