In the city that birthed rebellion in the decade before my mother birthed me, I have built a home out of ruins. This city that burned itself and then rose from its own ashes has been my guide, showing me the way through the flame ignited by my own personal book of matches. This city, […]
Read more
Little Sister The scene is Dad on a staircase. Yellow air. Sticky-sick sounds formulating. “He’s like an angel.” There was a banal frame, Macy’s-like, with husband, mother, daughter, son-brother. “It’s the white shirt.” There are screams. There is a mother clasping head between arms between legs and cracked-door. Legs and arms and matted hair. There […]
Read more
My mother broke herself into so many pieces that when she glued herself back together there were some shards she would never find. One day, she decided to stop trying to fix herself and focus her attention on shaping someone else. So she adopted a baby from China. She would mold this child into a […]
Read more
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, […]
Read more
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. […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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; […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
(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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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, […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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, […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
“I’m feeling apocalyptic,” I tell them. They know this word to mean the apocalypse. The end of us all. But they don’t know what I mean when I say I feel apocalyptic. It’s a mood, a feeling, a place I go when I try to imagine tomorrow and am not sure it will come. When I try […]
Read more
Dear David, To begin, I want to say that I forgive you. I forgive you for not calling. I harbor no resentment that the only tangible remuneration I got for sucking on your cock was a slightly salty aftertaste and waves of queasiness for the next few hours. In fact…and, I know this is going […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
Pregnancy was everywhere. That’s what happens after having really good unprotected sex. I bragged about it to my best friend: about how my lover and I had been spontaneous and placed our bets on the pull-out method, how I’d broken my rule of saying his name. Hundreds of miles away and with her face bright […]
Read more
Few things give me more anxiety than going to the dentist. The moment I walk into the office, with the high-pitched whirrs of the drill piercing my ears, my primal instincts kick in to high gear, and I have to stop myself from bolting out the door. Even as I write this, I feel a […]
Read more
The first man to name me “goddess” was twenty-one and drunk on gin. Breath heavy with lust and booze, he told me that most nights he carved poems into the walls trying to write me alive in the room with him, so when the light hit the scrapes just right, he could catch his breath […]
Read more
VAGABOND CITY 