My Bodhisattva
I was doing my daily meditation but also aware I was hungry and craving a hamburger and thinking about getting takeout from the bar down the street with its gruff bartender who always writes up the order, which last time and the time before and, yes, the time before that wasn’t ready by the promised...
Women These Days
[Compiled and arranged by searching “woman + [verb]” (walking) in national news outlets over the past twelve months] An Ohio woman was shot dead while cooking Thanksgiving dinner; witnesses report that at the time of the shooting, she was standing at a kitchen table, preparing macaroni and cheese. The body of a North Carolina woman...
Hairy Credentials
Summary of Qualifications Nicole is a professional woman who wants to rock her Afro in business settings and still command respect. Her career includes ten years of camouflaging her true self to stay marketable and frying her mane to avoid frightening employers with her real hair texture. The consequences of her cover-up—a bald spot and...
Anniversary Disease
Every day is the anniversary of something. May 26th is the anniversary of my mom pulling out half her hair while giving birth to me. It is also the anniversary of the public hanging of Alse Young, the first person executed for witchcraft in the American colonies. May 27th is the anniversary of my unquenchable...
Autophagy
At first, I read and tried to write how the mother octopus is so dedicated to her newborn children that she will stay with them as long as needed until they can survive on their own, neglecting herself past starvation, past wasting, and she will eat her own arms in what I want to tell...
Field Guide to the Weather
Occluded Fronts (Accelerando) In yoga class on Saturday morning, resting in dead man’s pose, I felt time move through me: not a cobra slithering, not a fish gliding on the bottom of a river. A storm wave, flash flood, catastrophe. Like it or not, our bodies are clocks: left foot two o’clock, right foot noon....
A Pop Quiz for White Women Who Think Black Women Should Be Nicer to Them in Conversations about Race
True or False: Gender oppression is way worse than racial oppression. True or False: I am aware that Black women experience both, but feminists should stick together and focus on fighting sexism, instead of getting distracted by what divides us. True or False: Racism is mostly about personal slights and hurt feelings, not a systematic...
What You Are
1. I found my Korean name in the junk drawer. It was printed in old typewriter font on a tiny pink bracelet; the kind that babies wear after they are born at the hospital. But my parents did not take me home from a hospital. They took me home from an airport, after a Michigan...
How to Erase an Arab
“Israeli General Says Mission is to Smash P.L.O. in Beirut” Seventh grade, social studies—On the family tree, next to the names of my father’s family, I write locations of birth: Lebanon, Palestine, Syria. I trace flags from my atlas. There is no Palestinian flag in the book, but I know how to draw it. When...
Bruised
I cut off every curl. Every nappy thread that would forever belong to him unless I disposed of them. Even now, when I lie alone at night and close my eyes I can feel his cool fingertips tracing through my scalp. Until he clutches his fist, my strands tangled around his fingers,...
From There to Here
Things you should know: Before my mother was the world’s best lesbian, she was the world’s best Jehovah’s Witness. She quit one to become the other; the two are not compatible. Before my mother was the world’s best Jehovah’s Witness, she was the world’s best stay-at-home mother. She quit one to become the other; the...
The Woods Are Going to Close
Mother unzipped our snow pants and clumps of sawdust fell to the floor. Before that, the bloodhounds sniffed us, and their handlers asked us where we had been. The police needed to retrace our tracks, to know that the hounds had been on our heels. Before that, the man offered us a ride in his...
I Wonder What Happens Next
Sister, you already know what I am going to say. We leave our mother’s womb together. Our stomachs flower brownly into diapers. Screaming from our cribs, we watch colorful bears bounce across television screens. It is right that a bear should have a rainbow on its stomach. It is right for that stomach to radiate...
Hospitality
is when she walks into your restaurant, a tired young woman in fading clothes, because it is the only one that is still open past midnight on Atlantic Avenue and orders the cheapest thing on the menu and then she starts scrambling to put together three dollars for a falafel sandwich from the dimes and...
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