Essays
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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.
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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 . . .
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To My Third Father
I didn’t understand consent, the formal severance of me and my biological father. Like magic, my past dissipated.
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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.
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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.
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Reaching
Last summer, I tied my hair into braids and glued a mustache to my upper lip, and I wondered if you might recognize your own youth.
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Immigrant Experience as an Oedipal War of Words in Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects
Words that do not match their peers or adhere to linguistic rules and expectations are the driving trope for the discordance of the immigrant experience in this novel.
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A Lot of Other Women
One night, lazing on her grownup bed, Miri laughs about a girl in the year above.
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Parallel Practice: As Ever, Your Totem
The imaging tools beckoned to me, their still repose enticing in the periphery.
