Dick
I arrive in face. The concealer and contour, still wet on my cheekbones, gives the illusion that I am a man. I’ve painted an Adam’s apple on my throat and drawn thick hair on my upper lip and eyebrows. My breasts are tightly bound, nipples pulled back under my armpits and taped down. I am...
Oh, You’re a Mean, Old Daddy
I was driving my daughters to Staples. They like to go to Staples. I needed more pens. The song “Carey” came on, by Joni Mitchell. The wind is in from Africa. Last night I couldn’t sleep. Et cetera. After the first verse, Rose asked what the song was about. She’s seven. I said I thought...
After More War News
The moon, lately, was a celebrity, full and a few miles closer than usual, enough to bring three of my neighbors outside near midnight. One of them suggested a chorus of “Auld Lang Syne,” but I was alone with my reference to the approach of planet Melancholia, how, for one perfect night, the fictional planet...
Slowly, Slowly
The face is my goal—al-wijh—and though as a barista I once pulled hundreds of crema-crowned espresso shots daily, this, my friends, is different. On first attempt, my coffee stares up at me without a hint of creamy face. Flat, like a soda without carbonation. When I ask our Jordanian neighbors about it with my newly...
Running in Place
In the fourth grade I wanted to be good at the mile. I wanted to be faster than the fastest girl in my class: the girl with the doctor dad and the straight brown hair and tan thin legs. I would never be faster but my football coach dad took me to practice because that’s...
I Should Have Left Him Then
You are at a frat party in Michigan—your first and only. Your cousin invited you to see the snow sculptures the houses erect every winter, mythical beasts glistening under clear February sky. His frat is one of those academic, no-secrets-no-hazing ones, and you watch them sing (silly song title) as they gather behind the basement...
Safe As Houses
In September you’re dating a woman who is too good for you—who is inquisitive, kind, who tells you she loves you and whose heart you break without meaning to or trying. You have a good run of it, Sundays all tangled up, meeting one another’s friends, trying to figure out what kind of gay you...
Darning
I am a grandmother of two middle-school-aged girls who call me “Granny,” and I darn socks. Not many people these days take the time to do it. People will throw holey socks away and buy new ones. As I darn in my wooden rocking chair, I know that with my white hair I look like...
what you love about new york
city, which you never appreciated when you lived here, is how the city requires you to develop muscle memory: your elbows know to circle around the lady who is taking too long to reach the corner, and your big toes stop a second before the jogger dashes in front of you, and so you never...
Cliff Notes for Coming Out
Consider that inclemency is always possible. If you come out often enough, and stay out long enough, inclemency may be inevitable. I don’t want to lie to you about this. Once, when I still lived on the West Coast, there was a frightful storm. In the aftermath, I went running down a barren road, which...
Creation Myths
Coyote chases his tail under the street lamp convinced he can catch what he cannot release the footfalls behind him fingers tapping his shoulder his deceased father’s family still whispering his name the one clue they left him one half of himself in the white chiseled letters on the white chiseled marble his own reflection...
We Are Stardust
Skin: our thin animal hide. An organ on the outside. Our blood running in blue rivers just below the surface. How vulnerable we are. We blister, burn, cut and heal, stretch and scar. From excess of elbow, to thin skin of forearm, to the relative roughness of the palm—note how this word echoes in the...
Like the Flowers
The gladioli refuse to bloom, indistinguishable from the volunteer corn stalks that sprouted after squirrels and doves threw corn from the porch feeders. I bought these gladioli greedily; the Westwinds Nursery was going out of business, and it was the final days, everything must go, so I took them—every single bulb they had in stock. At...
What I Did Not Yet Know
When surgeons wheeled away my sister, her twenty-five-year-old body so tiny and wracked with illness that there was room for a second body on the gurney, I thought about throwing myself onto the bed next to her, remembered how doctors said, even before she was born, that her life would be short and painful, that...
Author’s Note: The Elevator Pitch
Writers, like Hollywood people, are supposed to have an elevator pitch—a line you say when you’re stuck in an elevator with your dream agent, or, better, Sean Penn, that rough angel, or Wes Anderson, or Jane Campion. Not Harvey Weinstein, that skin tag, dear god. I lived in New York for years. Elevators are scary....
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