Against the Current of the Moment, We Arrived
At eleven years old, I knew how to hold my own bag. I knew how to stay close to my parents. I knew how to listen without understanding, how not to cry when adults spoke over my head in a language that moved too fast. My family of nine had crossed the South China Sea...
We Walk a Figure Eight
Like a snowman, one of my twins suggests—looping first around the cracked basketball court and playground equipment, then the large parking lot where caregivers line up early, some in pickups, some in indistinguishable SUVs, one in a Cybertruck. Adults fall into phones as they wait to collect their middle schoolers
Flowers Are Not Safe
“I hope you don’t mind,” she says. “I went ahead and added this floral embellishment.” Ellen runs her fingers, nails painted pale pink, over the silicone-studded band that will keep my custom compression garment snug around my right thigh. Ellen is my new garment fitter. She parts her hair and color-coordinates her outfits the way...
The Ill Well
The cow’s been sick for three days, like nothing I have ever seen before. Standing in the yard, heaving. A violent rhythm. Like when you’re so sick your body fights to empty the stomach, only her chest is covered in froth, new and virgin-white, not bile. And her mouth hangs open, mucus from her nose...
Winter Coat
In Moscow, everyone disappears in winter. By November the city is a procession of dark wool and fur-lined hoods. Bodies thicken into silhouettes. Shoulders square under padding. Necks vanish. You can’t tell who is soft, who is angular, who is young, who is older than they look. The cold flattens us into outlines. I bought...
Never Fall in Love With a Man Who Treats Your Pyrex Like Shit
The apartment was empty when I got home. I knew it would be. Inside was dark but for a few rays of sun slipping through the windows, coating the kitchen in orange. I pulled a Pyrex dish out of the refrigerator, the note with his name and a heart still taped to the lid. Three...
White Is the Color of Death
A veil like a tomb for the body before it is burned, before it is buried, last rites before decay. White is what’s left of the night. Broken promises. Buckets of milk. My grandfather’s body was wrapped in yards of clean white cloth the morning after he died, his nostrils stuffed with cotton. Mango leaves...
The Best Day Ever
Through a Dari interpreter, Ahmad’s mother told me he began to stutter at age four, after he saw someone killed and tried to wake him. Ahmad and his family had been Afghan refugees in the U.S. for two years. I’d been his ESL teacher for a few months. One second-grade morning he asked me to...
Am I dead inside?
It's fig season again and again I'm thinking about whether I should have children. It happens every year. Something about late summer when the days are so long it seems like time will stop. Right here. So I take a bite to feel the plushbreak against my teeth one last time. But it doesn't stop—time,...
Nursing
When my great-grandfather was born in Mississippi, white folks still hired Black women living in the sharecropper cabins as wet nurses. On the long ride to the plantation house, or the mansion in town, or the cottage ‘round the way, the women crossed their arms over shirtwaists sticky with milk
Derby Day
I know it’s cruel to whip a horse, and yet I watch the derby every year. It is a part of myself I fail to justify again and again, but then most things about my old Kentucky home are unrealized, floating unsurely in my viscous half-belief. I can only look at it with one eye...
List of Lasts
The last turned apple in your hands, the last muttered apology, the last aggression; The last baguette smeared with cheese, the last beady eyed bird on the fence, the last bug squished; The last call home, the last cough, the last conundrum; The last ditch, the last dog, the last dark night; The last email...
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...
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