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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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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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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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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“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 […]
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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 […]
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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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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Sometimes I swear there’s a rock in my stomach. It shakes a little when I lie on my back at night, staring up at the starburst-textured cement ceiling of my bedroom. The rock is always there, but there’s something about the time I take to fall asleep that makes it want to be known, like […]
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Alcoholic Anonymous’ Thirteen-Step Guide on How Your Addiction Destroyed Her Life: {for best results, follow the curve of the theory. trace it to the bottom of its backbone so you can find how best to hollow out her spine.} i. get a young woman. be her father. tell her she’s your sun. your stars. tell […]
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It was a knowing. A Gnostic phenomenon. I had seen the place before, a place that stood quietly at the edges of a town. It was the type of place one intended to visit, but intentions are not actualities. There were around it wheat fields to one side, and large quiet looms on the other. […]
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1. I don’t want to be begged. I am turned on by a steady affection, an unwavering rationality. I want you to do my taxes please memorize my social security number darling. 2. Be careful be careful be careful I am sharp in unexpected places I will remember your mother’s name and kiss your earlobe […]
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I’ll be at a party, clutching a plastic cup of something that probably doesn’t deserve to be called beer and making the motions of small talk but actually just shouting to be heard over the loud music. A tall econ major and I will be talking about something utterly banal, maybe an observation about the […]
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