Essays
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Imagining Irmgard
I see her on the sidewalk, voyaging through town. Even in modest-sized Quickborn, she is out of place, a doddering oldster around whom the rest of the world speeds like a time-lapse film. But her progress is steady, and an…
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Intimate Enemies
What’s important isn’t that El Tricolor wins, but that they give us occasion to revel in the stands. Strictly speaking, the crowd is there to celebrate itself. In emblematic fashion, the chant we use to encourage our own is sí…
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Pinayrish American
I was obsessed with their costumes; I wanted a sash embroidered with Celtic knots and a flared velvet circle skirt. (This is likely when my lifelong obsessions with highly specific uniforms began.) I wanted a headful of bouncy curls and…
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Constitutional Remedy
I won’t look right at him, but I will have noted that he’s wearing a sweater over another shirt, like always. That his hairline has receded even farther in the six or so years since I’ve seen him; the depth…
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Books That Made Me Gay: “Spoiled Milk” by Avery Curran
The text opens with a charming dramatis personae introducing us to six living schoolgirls and one schoolgirl newly deceased. The dead girl is Violet Kirsch. On the night of her eighteenth birthday, Violet, this lithe and agile, dynamic girl, toppled…
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The Blood of My Women
Now that I am older, I realize how much shame has dictated my own life, from as far back as I can remember, permeating through every action I have taken or been encouraged to take, every memory that has persisted…
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The Age of Nightmares
My son’s voice came through on the monitor. I waited a second, eyes closed, not losing hope he’d fall back asleep, even though that hardly ever happens. He’s two years old; they say it’s the age of nightmares. Almost every…
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Always Watching from the Roof
Below the red roofs, a new strip of pale earth cuts across the hill where last year olive trees still stood. The fence has crawled lower, closer to our side, and from up here it looks like a fresh wound…
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Books That Made Me Gay: “The Vanishers” by Heidi Julavits
Or maybe not. We can never know how clearly we are being seen by another, nor how clearly we have seen them. Undoubtedly, we contaminate one another. Autumn dawns and there is a party, a party game.
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There Is Only a God in Grief
I always talked about how much stronger it made me, how many skeletons in my closet I’m able to keep quiet. What I never talked about were the conversations I used to have with his god. Or is it God?…
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To My Date at Wonder Bar
“I don’t know how to capture my curiosity about forms of relationality that defy familiar, ossified shapes when I don’t even have the language for fluidity. How can I name the intimacies on which I don’t want to slap the…
