creative nonfiction

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 […]

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 […]

(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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]