The Tide
I am on a precious 15-minute break from teaching a summer writing course to incoming college freshmen. The students have mostly dispersed from the basement classroom I’ve been assigned, quick to escape to the stairwell to huddle in small groups and giggle and flirt with each other, to zone out while scrolling on their phones...
The Name They Gave Me
My name is Dixin. Pronounced disin, the way my mother whispered it when she was tired, the way my grandmother said it when she wanted me to eat more, the way I heard it inside my own head when I still believed I belonged somewhere with certainty...
Kneading
The first time two nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit place her weightless body on my chest so I can hold her skin to skin, she sticks to me like a hand kneading dough that begs for flour. I sit in a rocking chair but brace against movement, against breathing, although the nurses claim...
Zero
Today I am thinking that to be fat is to retain a vexing relationship with the number zero. This thought arrives with an egg in my hand. I am preparing an omelette and contemplating the mathematical representation of nothing, which at certain angles resembles the contour of the egg I am about to crack. There...
Here For You
The radiation oncologist holds up a piece of paper that looks like something used for target practice. Black outline of a human figure, faceless, gender neutral. You and your father watch as she points to a clump of black squiggles drawn across the figure’s pelvis. “This is the area we treated last time.” She points...
Jizo
It’s National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day, but I don’t yet know this as I wander up a side street in Nozawa Onsen, a bit bedraggled in my yukata and short jacket. I’ve left our inn with no clear destination, just want to be outside in the clear autumn air while I wait for...
Inventory for Some Kind of Fairy Tale
Solstice
Late June. Green rains. The gardens hum. Who would die when the days are so long? Yet my grandmother lies in a hospital room drifting toward death on dark waters...
Why I Can’t Stop Watching Women’s Basketball
Because biceps and quads and shoulders for days. Because lit women, hungry women, growling look-at-me fast-breaking behind-the-back-passing three-point-shooting-28-feet-out swoosh women. Chest-crashing blood-spitting skull-cracking and play on women. Women who own ball, court, confidence, six-plus feet of bone and plasma and muscle and ass-kicking. Own swagger, own fans, own media, own dominance, own queerness, own the...
Periwound
Wildfire smoke drifts over the hills and erases the farther shore. I’m waking cold from the same purple dream. It involves the edge of a dark cliff; it involves deep water. Recently, my sister has claimed avoidance as a cure for any ailment. My friend’s summer fling buys her a book on avoidant attachment and...
A Lexicon of Palestinian Boyhood
1. Saf
Literal: Classroom.
Lived: A stage for fear, laughter, rumors, and miracles—all within the same forty minutes. A place where windows were watched more carefully than teachers, in case the sound arrived...
The Neighbor
I am afraid to leave my apartment, which is strange because a man died here. He died on the sidewalk below my balcony, actually. What I’ve come to refer to as bloodsand was the only change the next day. No yellow crime tape, only orange-soaked sand swept up to the wooden edging that encapsulates dark...
Bad Apple
I-10 into Houston on a Monday morning, and traffic doesn’t stop so much as give up. Just lies down and dies like a tired old horse. Sixty-five to zero in a blink, brake lights stacking up until the whole interstate looks like a busted Christmas parade. My CB comes alive. “This is Bad Apple, eastbound...
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