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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For a moment after my mother closed the bathroom door, I stood on the other side, listening. Water was rushing into the tub. I pictured my mother stepping out of her pink house slippers, her blue skirt, taking off her gold jewelry and laying them by the soap dish. After the faucet turned off, I […]
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There’s a look Dallas gets on his face when he’s about to lose his shit. His lip curls, his eyeballs shake inside their sockets, and it makes you wonder: is this really a four-year-old boy and not some Antichrist birthed from a jackal and hidden amongst human children with the aim of mankind’s eventual destruction? […]
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My mother emails me, unsubtly, a study on the correlation between rain and depression, so I promise to be alert, hand on heart. I stay wary of it, killing every cloud I see. In winter a storm lets itself in anyways: wailing, petulant. It sticks to the roof of my mouth for nights on 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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Perhaps you’ve seen me in Central Park, a tall, white-haired woman in an emerald green polo shirt with a rectangular logo and the kind of khaki shorts made popular during the Raj. My official uniform and photo ID confirm my skill as a volunteer tour guide. I greet visitors from around the world. Most are […]
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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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I bought a fishing boat and sprinkled twelve life jackets around the deck. On the day of the tour, I wore a durian-patterned shirt with the Singapore Tourism Board logo on the breast pocket. Aaron, a bearded teenager with poop emoji earrings, shoved fifty dollars at me without asking for my license. “I study ancient […]
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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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pistachio milk a refrigerator in which to store the pistachio milk floorboards upon which to set the refrigerator in which to store the pistachio milk kitchen walls that house the floorboards upon which to set the refrigerator in which to store the pistachio milk apartment ceiling to support the kitchen walls that house the floorboards […]
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I only knew her for one night. She was performing a show where she screamed for two hours uninterrupted without a single variation in pitch. I had no plans for the evening. Over a Sazerac, the hotel bartender told me he’d won a ticket in a raffle for donating plasma and her performance had been […]
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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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The neighbours all thought we were con artists. Maybe they were right. We met while waiting to view the apartment and pretended to be sisters to charm the landlord. It was never about influence. It was only about shelter. We just wanted to escape the heat. The ruse was instantly believable, even to us. Our […]
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My family has the luck of a penniless black cat at a high-stakes casino. When I was twelve, my mother, my father, and my older brother Jeffrey took a vacation to Hawaii. Jeffrey went surfing in the deep, blue ocean while I stayed ashore and observed jittery sand crabs as they popped in and out […]
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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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my discount full-size mattress has traditionally been known to comfortably accommodate a maximum party of 2—maybe— on a cool night when the hot air trapped between my legs and the old duvet isn’t so severe as to de-wrinkle the sheets but this night, we bunked our bodies, stacked like buttered toast on a diner plate […]
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it is a bright orange sunday and my fists are unripening and i am still contemplating that baby albino turtle born with a wide open heart – so tender and exposed, a small pulsing blackberry abandoned by his own shell. i try to cup his breaths like running water with my two inconsolable hands; each […]
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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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i’m from the overlap on the clock where wild dogs and roosters crossfire. the ambiguity of stars or satellites is where i wash my hair. ankles crossed, i forget that it is rude to forget about the margin between my knees. i wore jeans to avoid the reminder from men. still, he considered a handful […]
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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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I dusted my father’s old Bose CD-player. It was once white but now it has yellowed like tintype. Do you remember seeing ads for these blocks on the back of PARADE magazines that came with the Sunday paper? No? I guess your family only subscribed to commercial-free periodicals and only listened to jazz. You did […]
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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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i never could taste the bitterness of decaf coffee until the barista at the cafe on the first floor of the MSU library handed me a cup with the word “ma’am” attached to it, and now every sip of every coffee i take fills my teeth with grounds that taste nothing of the robust heartiness […]
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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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Voices golden like my heart or wait actually my hands ready to swallow flames like hungry moths or wait actually more like a hawk, jagged insides, chemical-drift, the lisped roundness of your scoopneck soft shirt the one you wore on the roof as the moon licked your neck curled behind you like a small mammal […]
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TW for rape I was stuck in traffic on Route 16 when the interview came on the radio. Rachel Dissell, a newspaper reporter in Cleveland, described her investigation of Ohio’s failure to analyze DNA evidence collected from the bodies of women who’d been raped. Close to four thousand rape kits sat on shelves in police […]
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In between the shatter world headaches and brain splinters and mildew and dry heat on Sundays and the gum-slathered concrete on third street and everything I hated I felt like I couldn’t find anything but picked apart bones and littered daffodils. I was born into the city the same year the Mars Polar Lander landed. […]
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You know what? I like you. I confess this to you in English, staring at the back of your dreadfully empty chair. Yes, I write you notes. Page 1: In art class you told me that watercolor painting was less painting and more making mistakes and being proud of them. You have hairy arms and […]
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figure 1: and you were talking about fucking on the beach (about having sex on the beach) and i was reading everything you said choking on sandwiches constantly choking on things going down the wrong way and coming up as something more filled with feelings than i meant to ever really feel and you were […]
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Concertina clavicles, you shrug and knitting needles escape flesh. Much genuflecting will follow. Alight, we shuck oysters and lick pearls. This is making love. This is the Northwest Passage. This is the loose thread that preludes hallucination. Imprisoned in nomenclature, you are unbridled and scathing. I wait for the word. One word and the sea […]
Read moreOur mother named you after a lighthouse keeper from a book she read once and I always wondered, when she told me that, if she thought you would be her salvation because it certainly seemed that way with how she spent those hours secluded in her room talking to you on the phone while I […]
Read moreObsession is something that happens to people who aren’t so together. You have a full time job. Forty hours, on the nose. A four-door sedan—moderate, comfortable. You sit in rush hour for forty minutes, both ways, every day. You eat four meals, usually. Your life is full of four. This. That. You aren’t obsessed. You […]
Read moreMom always talked about the importance of ancestry. She’d say that most Black people don’t know their history. She’d sit me down, and go over a list of books: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, From Slavery to Freedom, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Things Fall Apart, Black Boy, and Black […]
Read morePrompt: 100 words on water. Give it a shot and tag us on Tumblr, Instagram, or Twitter & we’ll show you some love! Bright summer nails look like bits of coral floating through the water, I think, as my hand grazes the lake. I wipe five coral fingers on my melon shirt. Solo wears orange […]
Read more6 “I like it for its bits,” she prefaced. She sent me Little Expressionless Animals by David Foster Wallace. It was as if she were trying to kill me. She’d gone through the trouble of creating a PDF I could print because she knew how I felt about holding words in my hands in order […]
Read more(I sit on the edge of a bench facing an overgrown field that has been infiltrated by daylilies. Orange heads bobbing above tall weeds and lush grass. Cleverly disguised snipers waiting in trenches. They call them the Ditch Lilly. An old man sits on the bench next to me. Nods his head. Crosses his legs. […]
Read moreThese knees, will be the pick-me-up when you fall on them. Knees, that you fell upon, crabby and rude in your A,B,C baby swing. You marveled at your mother in her cocktail gown, the shape of her shoes out of your reach. You lay there like a splinter until she picked you up. On your knees, struggling to see. Hide-and-seek […]
Read moreNo, I cannot go back there. It is June, and so, there will be no Christmas lights, or bows on the carousel. And it is late, so, it will be too crowded for me to hear the piano that reverberates on the white tile. That is what I think of: mornings before camp, when I […]
Read moreYou knew it would be someone, it always is. Before you try and count the times the Ohio River has seeped into your neighbors houses. Before you hear the push brooms hit pavement with a resounding crack. You, standing inside your dry house, just out of floods reach, staring at origami swans hanging in the […]
Read moreThis is an apology. I’ve been throwing my hair over my shoulders for too long. Sometimes, I remember how to be still. I’ve tried, but I don’t know how to talk about her. Last summer, my nails were short and I spoke to people about who she was. The backyard of my parent’s home and […]
Read moreMy friend Phoebe is the first person I ever heard say the word ‘feminist’ in real life. “You know,” she had said, “I think the feminists really ruined it for us women.” It was the first time I had encountered the word outside a YouTube video, or a Tumblr post—my peepholes into American culture in […]
Read moreWe met in class. I sat next to her and rested a forearm on the desk, watching her draw a pair of eyes. She looked up. “Can I draw yours?” I wore my hair pulled back into a ponytail, a t-shirt with sleeves that went to my elbows and a bare face; Mallory had black […]
Read moreEvery day the world chooses a darker turn, a crueler path. Apathy seems the best course against this indecipherable savagery, this unspeakable calamity. Like a turtle, I want to crawl within my shell and disappear. So I take myself to the mountains in springtime where its verdurous raiments can soothe my rattled nerves. Here the […]
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the politics of getting noticed in New York straddle borders and sit next to me on park benches. I keep headphones on so they won’t touch me with their Hey what’s your name but that man is still beating one off on a park bench. there are still parts of me that want to be […]
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1 I take flight at dusk, pink and indigo sky stretching each way into infinity. Blue wind over my skin I think of how the world came to be. In a dream last night I was a hummingbird in migration. A sudden storm and I was in descent, torn from the sky.
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I wasn’t even part of this — but it’s spread into everything like motor oil — stays around — I wonder what decides critical — sticky and forcefully there — I wonder who decides who gets a house — I want to know how much money they lost — to lose even more — what […]
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VAGABOND CITY 