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...
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...
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...
Why I Bought an Inflatable Hot Tub from Walmart on Black Friday During a Pandemic
Because my mother was tired of peeing her pants at Super Value Grocery Store. Because someone told her about an amazing same-day surgery that would fix everything. Because it was a miracle cure! Because the docs said they’d hoist her sorry leaky bladder up onto a miracle mini mesh “hammock.” Because they promised it...
Almost
An inch below your belly button, you pinch then pierce the skin with the first of many 22-gauge needles, pressing the syringe until thumb meets forefinger, until every last drop is released—a hormone bath for your aging ovaries. At first, this is exhilarating, a miracle of science, growing follicles in your body like the cherry...
This Abortion is an Act of Love
For crows. For the robins bathing in my potholes. For cacti, for succulents, for shade. For the 7.5 billion people on this planet competing for access to fresh air, clean water, nourishing food, good love, and safe housing. For the planet’s three trillion trees, for the sheer improbability of trees. For the fewer than 30,000...
Identity Theft (Side B)
Origin Story Smoke-thin memories penciled fast as you can while your mother breathes ghosts from the end of a line you can feel cannot touch the words on the paper reaching like seeds seeking like roots for who you are who she was and why you left your left ear goes numb to the sudden...
A Black Hairstory Lesson
There was the year micro-braided, brokenhearted girls sang Ashanti in prayer circles, their sopranos trapped in their sinuses, the incantation to be unfoolish neutralized by the next shape-up with a pair of Butters. Then the year triple-X-tee’d boys-will-be-boys broke down the name of Osama bin Laden into call-and-response, pounding the battered faces of lockers to...
Dear Editor, Who Made the Remarks About Not Wanting Walmart Poems
The first thing I thought of was writing an Ode to an LOL, these little dolls that come in ovals that you open to find a different one (surprise!) that my six-year-old daughter is obsessed with and that my wife sneaks off to Walmart to find in the check-out line and bring them home and...
Midnight Baseball
Mrs. Dufek says if people could travel at the speed of light we could go from one side of Earth to the other in the time it takes to snap our fingers, and even though I’ve never left Wisconsin and I’m no Jeannie saved from a bottle on a deserted island by my very own...
Chasing Our Elusive Voice
My writing partner of ten years was frowning. “The voice,” she began. “It’s formal and distant.” She stared at the manuscript I’d slaved over for months. “I can’t explain—it just seems off.” My friend had struck my literary Achilles’ heel. Voice is an aspect of writing craft I’ve struggled with for years. One of the...
Shana’s Father Wins a Monkey
Our friend Shana… her… father… well, she wasn’t born yet. But her father won a live monkey at a drive-in movie. [Sniff.] No time to talk about the… it’s got too many distasteful details in it … nothing bad happens to the monkey, don’t worry. The monkey dies, but of natural causes at an old...
Autophagy
At first, I read and tried to write how the mother octopus is so dedicated to her newborn children that she will stay with them as long as needed until they can survive on their own, neglecting herself past starvation, past wasting, and she will eat her own arms in what I want to tell...
Are Now All That Remain
The way he slid Dylan from its cover and fingered the vinyl onto the platter. The way he picked up the needle, more than once, to make sure we heard the sizzle before the song. The way he shuffled into the kitchen in his socks. The hardwood floor of his living room dull and dark....
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