The Big, Mangy One
I am transfixed with the probability of earthquakes.
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Essays
Waypoint Transition
I want to know more of what it is like to feel lost and not always have someone there to tell me how to find my way. Or, to tell me my way.
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Honey
That cafe smelled like fresh-baked bread and cookies, and the baristas were all women with warm, soft hands who called everyone — the Senator, the mothers, the babies, the businessmen — Honey. So many baristas would have called you Honey, David. And swayed along with you when they played Perfume Genius during the slow hours. The day after someone […]
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From the Archive: Why Writing Matters in the Age of Despair
No word is wasted. No story is told in vain.
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From the Archive: The Sunday Rumpus Essay: The Butch and the Bathroom
Then there is the bathroom issue. My beloved is like me, like you, like anyone. Sometimes a person has to go.
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Cure for Last Night’s Leftovers
Let’s be clear: There is no hangover cure. Anyone who claims to have never had a hangover is either a) a liar, b) a teetotaler, or c) a responsible drinker. I’m none of those things, most days, despite effort, and the number of times I’ve searched for “how to cure a hangover” in the harsh light of a weekend morning is embarrassing the older I get, so manage your expectations.
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Sons and Daughters
Boys were boys and girls were girls and gender norms were there for a reason. We didn’t realize the reason was to keep women down. Maybe we just didn’t care.
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Opioids in Sobriety
Using opioids while maintaining my sobriety became a skill that I continued to develop over the following couple of years. The irony—finally becoming capable of moderating my drug use—was not lost on me.
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Complete the Sentence
We baked a fresh bowl for dinner?, I wonder. Do you think the pen will sink or grow? Do you think a pen will sink or throw? Sure. This could be a very delightful exercise (for poets), I think to myself.
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From the Archive: The Dark All Around Us
There is still light in the dark. This is the paradox that Little Bear has to accept in order to fall asleep.
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The Three-Month Curse
For seven years I’d met the perfect man in fall, dated him for three months, then wailed as Fate plucked out my heart and devoured it, whole and beating. (Only to grow back and be eaten again twelve months later.) This was some Prometheus-level bullshit.
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The Flowers You Left Us
Looking at the two stems housed in a water glass on my kitchen table, it strikes me that “in the ground” means opposite things for flowers and people. As long as a flower remains in the ground, it lives. “Poppies are incredible,” my friend Monika, a floral designer, tells me. “Even after they’re cut they […]
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Play for Camera
I want to tell her that Hunter is Hunter and Daisy is Daisy and both should be allowed to breathe. I want to tell her I know the instinct to split yourself in half, too, that I know the violence required to hold your true self in shadow, that I have another name I only dare whisper.
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The Divine Aquatic
After all these years, I know now that what felt like rebirth to me had felt like—had been—near-death for them.
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You Keep Everything Outside
“So it’s a surprise to you—and not entirely a pleasant one—when you fall in love with someone who has a penis. You thought you’d set up defenses against the possibility, but here he is, and here you are, loving him.”
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From the Archive: Unbound
It’s always been ground glass, scraping against my insides. I imagine a light held to the place where I open would illuminate a mess of torn flesh, throbbing red-wet.
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On Being Tough
The path down to the riflery range was steep and winding, littered with roots.
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Bad Brain Blues: Disclosing an Invisible Disability
As the camera zooms out to show CARTOON BROOKE’s full body, the funk music kicks back in.
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A Childhood Story
My father didn’t like my movie choices. He said they weren’t realistic. He’d been in the Air Force and was deployed in Vietnam. He’d brought back his own war stories.
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Joe at the Aquarium
I pushed him so he glided through the fish, the eels, the boxed-in worlds of blues.
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The Aesthetics of Safety
I find beauty in being protected from danger.
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Becoming American in the Age of Trump
How does one come to feel American in the eyes of others?
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Turning the Lights On
I feel guilt in the not good enough I carry alongside the not bad enough.
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Picasso Shares His Screen
The faces of the students appeared one by one, both there and not.
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The Statue
The mother, too, is a monument. I am haunted by mine.
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Girl, Falling
This made sense to me. Body + stressor = reaction.
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Into Thin Air (The Women on Flight 305)
The only thing different about Dan Cooper was his bomb.
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