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...
A Normal Couple
Sometimes I think he’s better … and then we’re out to eat and the coughing begins and I forgot—he forgot, we forgot—an inhaler (which bag was it in??) and then the looks from the other diners start and I swear he’s not dying and I’m not a bad wife for sitting here unconcerned as he...
The Old West End
With a vein of Lucille Clifton’s “In the Inner City” Our mothers left for work before we woke for school in Toledo in 1975 and our fathers left us latchkeys on the windowsill or under the mat in the inner part of the screen door. Our city was marked by demarcation zones of avenues. We...
I Only Know Jimmy Because
he waves whenever I walk by. He lives four blocks away, and he lets the neighbor dogs poop in his yard. He lets mine. That says all you need to know about him, or all I needed to know. To say it’s okay for an animal to crap on your lawn is to say we...
Somewhere on a city street
three pink roses sit out on a peeling window sill. No bigger than the tip of my thumb, they’re tucked in tiny thimbles of water. It’s a day when we walk back slowly from the community center, late summer heat, a strange, sticky silence on the streets. It starts to rain, not quite drops, but...
Tell No Tales
First day on the ship. Hodge shows me around. Here’s the mess deck. Here’s your rack. Your workspace, ragged. Oscar flag hanging from the bulkhead. Your shipmates, Beltowski, Pierpoli. That’s forward, aft. Pronounced folk-sul, bosun. Watch your head! Months go by. We cast off. So this is the ocean. Get to work. Sign these papers...
White Female, Brown Male, Black Vehicle
In four years Caitlin will walk up the stairs of a barn in a cornfield wearing a white lace dress and a peony in her hair and become my wife, but presently I’ve known her for three weeks and a sheriff pulls her out of the driver’s seat and walks her along the interstate to...
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