In north central Oklahoma, otherwise gorgeous with luscious hills and curiously red dirt, litter abounds: Styrofoam Chick-fil-A cups, empty cigarette packs, and, beginning in 2020, discarded face masks. I’d started a green neighborhood initiative in the small Oklahoma town that my now-wife and I called home. The goal was not only to pick up trash, […]
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It’s a very practical form of self-harm, I say reasonably. Sensibly. My voice is measured, even chipper. It’s free, easy, quiet, and leaves no physical trace…what more can you ask for? I sound like a salesperson on commission. You hate me for it. My grin grows wider without mirth, like a fox baring its fangs. […]
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Back when I was urging my heart to flow into slow circles, Grace parked her old, blue convertible across the street and met me at the front door of my apartment building. We stood there, smiled, moved into some sort of embrace we hadn’t fully formed, and I followed her back down the steps. She […]
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1 Mythology My mother emails me a study on the correlation between rain and depression. I email back and promise to be alert, hand over heart. I stay wary of it. I kill every cloud I see. In winter a storm lets itself in anyways, petulant, sticking to the roof of my mouth for nights […]
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Ever since Hu and Javed and I started making music together, I’ve been trying to tease apart whether Noor’s sense of humor is obligatory-host-dad, ingratiated-Midwestern-sarcastic, or something else entirely. It can’t possibly be Pakistani, can it? Late yesterday afternoon he greeted me with a stonefaced stare: “You are not welcome here.” He didn’t crack a […]
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It was that time of the year in my city. Thunderstorm. Heavy rainfall. Violent winds. Blackout. While it brings inconvenience to most, for me, it happens to be the best time of the year. Nothing to distract me from reading. No Internet, no Netflix, no one to ask me for tea making favours and no […]
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The red and purple lights that seep into the windows from the carwash infuses the atmosphere with a tantalizing tone, one that I am all too familiar with at this point in my life. Like any other 17-year-old high school junior, I am wired. I am antsy. I am using this opportunity as a mission […]
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Tacos de cabeza Beef head tacos. The love of your life. Only available in the morning. You have been eating tacos de cabeza since you were in your mother’s belly. You were born with tiny head tacos’ grease on your nose. There is a puestecito near the mercado in Obregón, Sonora. They were a few […]
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When I was four years old and learning to read, my born-again Christian grandfather gifted me a children’s bible. I was unimpressed by this offering because I couldn’t read but the illustrations remain in my mind thirty-five years later, especially the ones involving the gory demise of Jesus at the end of the book. “Who […]
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I pace the house looking for the dog, the ghost of the dog, the ghost of someone. The mother and dynasty and mausoleum I carry inside me. Something. It feels here but not, a muted anticipation, a phantom limb, when you brush the wall in the dark to hit the light switch you’ve struck a […]
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Inspired by ‘The Cool Girl Monologue’ (Gone Girl, 2014; Directed by David Fincher). I should’ve known that it wouldn’t work out between us. We were too different, too incongruous. And no matter what transpired among us, there was always one lingering question: were we ever truly in love? You fell for someone who never existed; […]
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Dear Mummiji, Your ink black hair parted in the middle like an open book of mysteries. Your marble-sized red bindi resting above your third eye, giving way to your fading brows the same haphazard shape as mine. Your diamond nose ring, glinting mischievously in the dusty morning light of Mumbai. Your puckered lips, one darker […]
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Missing Loaf-Middles If mangoes and melons and baby sisters have odes of their own, apples deserve a poem. So do apricots, bananas, and younger brothers, those very special extensions of you that are not quite you and never quite yours. They deserve words, those poemable slices of freshly-baked bread snuck out and gobbled whole that […]
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CW for sexually graphic language 1. Please don’t take forever to cum after I’ve cum, because I will not pull tricks for your satisfaction. I haven’t cum inside you because I can’t–– meaning because I don’t want to— and I have excuses to prove it. The most that I’ll do is maybe look at your […]
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I wanted to like you. I like how you say my name, your tongue on the root of your mouth instead of the roof of it like everyone else does, vowels working off your jaw like pepper drops staining snow. I like how you look at me when you speak, your eyes always looking forward […]
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He took long showers, which was considered unusual for a boy. He never understood why and it never felt like a long time to him. He just liked taking his time. Also, he had a stubborn dandruff problem. But everyone else thought it was unmanly. No, they thought it was womanly. Women had long hair […]
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(tw: medicines, sickness) I hate my mother. Not the kind of flighty, tempestuous hate most teenage girls harbour for their mothers, but a different kind. Mostly, I hate her because I don’t know how to deserve a different kind of love. Women have nimble fingers. This makes plucking two leaves and a bud from an […]
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I If they ask where these words are from, tell them to search for its roots in the same places you will seek my countrypeople. Find us at the crossover hours into each new year, or moment, or day, pleading with it to be kind, pleading with the earth to cease its hunger for the […]
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Blueberries for Sal – Robert McCloskey – 1948 In preschool we had a raised table full of old paper egg cartons. Plastic eggs that opened and closed, revealing baby dinosaurs in primary colors. I carried multiples in my shirt, pulled up with my little girl belly button showing. That was the year I pinned my […]
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When I’m lying in my bed with the comforter smushed against my body instead of his skin I dream of the times I was bad. This must not be mistaken for reveling in my bad behavior, it’s not something I consciously do. The dreams come like bugs crawling on my skin. They bite. I scratch […]
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In Bermuda, there are hibiscus plants blooming roadside under the uninterrupted sun; their petals are soft, blood-red bijous, pinpricks of bloodletting yielding forth from a small forest of dark green leaves; their harmless pistils strikingly clear; their stigmas and styles sitting a short distance ahead of their golden stamens. It is a miniscule, unassuming detail […]
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I fuck Darren. Submerging in his wrap-around body; gnawing at his sneaker limberness; surrendering into the smell of his Ralph Lauren perfume; clinging to him like a koala cub, as he thrusts himself into me, my head on his shoulder beside his 29-oz.-steel-can-neck, my left hand slipping down his bare head, my fingers pausing in […]
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I am chasing glasses and licking lions, trying to tell someone without a tongue that this is a mistake; I was not supposed to be here, I had been banished from this fantasy two Marches ago, and had since dutifully grown to hate it. Hadn’t I done my part, and couldn’t I now be left […]
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One sends you a flower when your grandmother dies. A single yellow rose. For companionship. Red is for passion which wouldn’t have been appropriate. One invites you into her dorm room to eat cereal when you think you are bisexual. You imagine kissing her, small-town lips in this big city night. One wears a dress […]
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I am thinking about the way 姥姥 dices cucumber. Her skin is thick from bleeding and healing, bleeding and healing, a sinusoidal function acting independent of the moon. She does not fear the knife’s edge and I am thinking, now, about the dark of her hands against mine. Between the two of us, we are […]
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You get a sense for your first job from a very young age, when you’re given extra work to do in third grade; as others play with a Simpsons chess set in the back, you learn cursive early alongside fifth grade math. You never learn to play chess. Instead, Juggle these three balls. Big Things […]
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I am dreaming of the hospital again except this time, men are allowed on our unit and everybody is wearing crowns and pretending they’re halos. If you think you’re holy, you are. The world doesn’t have to make sense. A nurse turns her nose up at me and I watch her veins grow until she’s […]
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I only clean the house when I’m about to rent it on Airbnb. When I come back the apartment is still neat, smelling faintly of a stranger. It only takes three days for the apartment to smell like cigarettes again. The luggage will not be unpacked. Occasional pilfering will reduce its contents, but the bag […]
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This is what will happen in the next three days, after I arrive. The key you leave for me in the mailbox won’t work at first. I will take it as a bad sign. I will start collecting bad signs which will form a wall preventing you from loving me. You will begin looking at […]
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Somewhere on the blue felted seat of the S7 line I had lost it. The little orange duck. It was a wind-up toy my father had bought me on a business trip just a few weeks ago. It fit perfectly in the palm of my hand, and when I turned the key nestled behind the […]
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Water When my mother tried to take me to swimming classes all I did was hold back tears and let them go under the water where it was warm and blurry. The tears burned, or maybe that was chlorine. I hated feeling the cold on my knees when I was tucked up against the wall, […]
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If I could smoke fear away I’d roll that motherfucker up. -Kendrick Lamar More than a year and a half after my last sip of alcohol, I still get nightmares about drinking again. And they are nightmares, despite the scene being only in my little kitchen, me standing at the sink, swirling my icy glass […]
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I am a Sarah Lawrence girl who loves Sarah Lawrence girls. Many of us do– we love to love each other. Staring over sociology books, all of us in love with whoever we find looking back. We keep secrets under a cherry blossom tree that’s no longer there. We huddle under the sculpture rumored to […]
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Purple and sun-worn, supple and tired, you hold me on the couch in my parents’ living room. Where I cry into the space between your breasts and mine. Half-asleep, I pat your chest to shape a pillow. You belly laugh yellow into the overcast. We drive across the midwest, eat steaks marked by signs that […]
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where she sits on the front steps of the nyc townhouse i will own someday and spouts nonsense, says do your science homework, sweetie. says what matters more, what you say to yourself when you lose or what you say to yourself when you win? repeats c’est la vie. c’estlaviec’estlaviec’estlavie until my ears bleed so […]
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Sometimes I wish there was some kind of unit with which to measure change. At one point, I tried to measure change in habits – in the things that carved my days into shape, in the catchphrases I used, and so on. This method worked for about a week until I realised that it didn’t […]
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They say insanity is defined by doing the same thing and expecting different results. An ex once left this line in my voicemail box. This was back when we still referred to them as mailboxes. Most of my first boyfriends were poets because, well, I was also a poet. To be honest, I don’t think […]
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How easy it is to forget. You’re in the therapist’s waiting room, the hospital, the throes of a panic attack—and then you’re not. The nurse calls you in and the doctor sees you out; the darkness lifts and the sun begins to shine. These are just things that happen in passing, and reality has no […]
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Time and its contradictions. Wasted time. Its dreaded passing. How can I use or save it more efficiently? Time preservationist. The soft rotted time of forest floors. Photographs and boxes of mementos. Everything is time-sensitive. I am time sensitive. One night during the first few weeks of my current relationship our watches sat side by […]
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i. your american mother will unintentionally white-wash you. when orientation for kindergarten begins, her first instinct will be to put a little ‘x’ in the box marked ‘white’ for your ethnicity because her translucent skin burns in the sun, and she forgets that yours tans. when your father weaves stories of el chupcacabra and la […]
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I am supposed to be drunk. I am supposed to be a frat boy/super fly/machismo extraordinaire. I am supposed to be flirty, confident, and sexy especially after four shots of tequila. I no longer want to perform this pantomime of bodily aggression. I no longer want the world to be a stage on which I […]
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The first of these is the NAIL FILE, the very one Grandmother Virginia took across the ocean with her from Puerto Rico to New York, to her aunt in the candy shop with striped windows. Virginia wouldn’t finish high school until she was in her fifties, but she knew how to raise the file two […]
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SET THE STAGE: the Drowning Children + me in a habitat of natural childhood: THE J PAUL GETTY MUSEUM, where models stand pinned in glitzy dead butterflies, wings spread, a graveyard of history. We are young, and the net age between us and the statues could cradle our grandparents in its palms. We are young, […]
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things i wish i could tell my father i. stop haunting my dreams. i don’t want you there because it feels so comfortable when you’re around and i hate being comfortable around something you did. ii. why did you do that to my sisters but never me? why was i so different? iii. all my […]
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My Own Private Idaho: Tuesday night at the New Beverly Cinema. Five-dollar double feature, don’t remember the second one. Gummy seats, sticky floor and nobody there but us (and the) creeps. You, in love with the girl who stood you up: The thrift shop dress and vintage nickname. Me, last minute sub, extra ticket— Footwork […]
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The West Oakland train stop; defunct and tagged standing sentry between a collapsed overpass and a neighborhood gone to shit. You hopped the chain-link easily and breezed across the hill and dale of broken concrete, the stubborn flora crowding up and in between; moving earth like tiny fault lines, smashing plates together, splicing ground to […]
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The post-Halloween wind comes in, bearing its chill and a raspy cigarette-torn voice. I feel its brush against the branches of our uselessly thin trees, hear its rough attempt at a tune. It has been years now since your death and you have remained silent. Only my own melodramatic mind can believe this voice is […]
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Trigger warning: child sexual abuse, homophobia Age 12: Their parents give them a promise ring inscribed with “True Love Waits,” to be worn on the ring finger until replaced by a marriage band. They wear it daily for a couple of years before forgetting about it in the back of a drawer only to find it […]
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The pink floor lamp was flickering behind my ear, the dirt was making terrains for summer ants on the plastic strips that we got from Ikea to cover the life-size window behind your couch, also from Ikea. There were stains of old, dried acrylics visible on various parts of your beat up couch from the […]
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This is a story Hector told about someone he went to boot camp with: there was a guy Hector went to boot camp with who was an idiot. One time when they were lining up for inspection, this guy got yelled at because he had put his pants on backwards. He zipped them up and […]
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VAGABOND CITY 