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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
My First Dead Body
I clicked up with a gang of my peeps at the payphone across the street from Brown Middle School. We were fourteen and school had just let out for the afternoon. The sun was bright and smiling down on us, just your average happy day. I called my girlfriend, Boo-boo-kitty-fuk, told her I was coming...
Rumpus Room
I’m nine. I stand behind a leather couch in the larger area of the daylight basement everyone calls the rumpus room. It’s Easter Sunday and cool and hazy outside but not enough so that my grandfather will need to ignite the fists of coal already mounded in the grate of the fireplace. Three of my...
Writing as a Doorway to the Unknown in Ourselves
Dante’s often-quoted beginning of the Divine Comedy has the narrator arriving at a dark wood, unsure of which way to turn. To many writers and artists, Dante’s predicament is a familiar, disquieting, and essential starting place. Leonard Cohen wrote, “I write to reveal not what I know, but what I don’t know.” And of an...
Vulnerability is Strength
The most important thing writing has taught me is this: the more vulnerable you allow yourself to be, the stronger you become. It sounds counter-intuitive, I know. It sounds like bullshit. Here’s the thing: you can’t change the past, but if you can face it, both the present and the future will shift. And it’s...
House as Home: Writing the Places That Raised Us
Childhood was rooms and doors, gaping lace in open windows, potted parsley in yellow kitchens, splintered floorboards, buckled carpets, the bug-zapper sound that the basement light made when your father pulled the string, and then that tube of violet light abuzz over his box of tools. Childhood was place as much as it was people,...
For Great-Aunt Jeannette, Who Donated Her Body to Science
She was still alive when the doctors started. They first carted off her breasts. Both glands at once, after the cancer. Next, patches on her arms stippled like ostrich skin, burned a syrup-thick hazel from sailing trips in the Whooping Crane up and down the salt-slow gulf. They’d begun taking from her ages ago. Begun...
Go, Jim Dandy
Sandy carried a vial of patchouli oil wherever she went. We walked everywhere in our Converse high-tops. She was almost always restless; I was almost always bored. In October we hitchhiked 175 miles to find a stringy college boy I had a crush on. A carload of guys picked us up and asked if we...
Going Cold: Writing Emotion, the Earley Scale, and the Brilliance of Edwidge Danticat
In a scene that is central to Edwidge Danticat’s novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, eighteen-year-old Sophie Caco’s mother guides her gently to her bedroom and “tests” her for virginity—with a finger, just as Sophie’s grandmother tested the mother and her sister every week. It’s an invasion that shatters Sophie’s sense of boundaries and will make her...
Cake
At the edge of the counter, on a plate and wrapped in plastic, was a single wedge of cake. Not just chocolate cake, but German chocolate, layers of sodden coconut and crushed nuts bound by nectar as sweet, I imagined, as the honey drop I once sucked from a trumpet-shaped petal of a columbine. I...
Extinctions
Theresa’s mother is crossing the street, carrying two stuffed animals in her arms, and this is the most apocalyptic thing my mom has ever seen. Theresa was born with gummy lungs. After a while, her lungs got too gummy, and she died. Now Theresa’s mom is coming over to give my sister and me two...
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