COMING SOON: How To Survive a Plague [essay]
The Monk [poem]
When I touched enlightenment,/ everyone swelled from two dimensions to three/ like a pack of long balloons/ inflated and flexed into poodles and giraffes/ and reciting the stories of their lives...
For Darwin [poem]
...She was a perfect/ beast. The lion who/ slays the cubs he/ didn’t sire...
Meeting Point [narrative nonfiction]
There is something hot in the middle of Hannah’s chest, something like an ember. I could see it back then, kind of glowing up and through her cheeks like a flashlight behind fingers...
Jealousies [narrative nonfiction, NSFW]
I see the twin bed, and the bright, woven blanket. I see her whiteness spreading under you like spilled paint, and you, slim and tan, moving over her....
*Content note: sex, casual misogyny
Lost and Found [narrative nonfiction, NSFW]
John had my windpipe in his open hand, in the crook between thumb and forefinger. He squeezed and my blood throbbed against the resistance...
*Content note: sex, BDSM
Mercies [poem]
When my mother told me what my father did,/ or might have done,/ I woke up the next day and of our conversation/ could only remember my own child-words
Sticky [flash nonfiction, NSFW]
I had anted up already: pics in the too-small bikini top he liked, back arched in his favorite Brazilian-cut bottoms...
*Content note: sex
Making Right [poem]
Even when the good drug/ pushed through/ the tubing and needle/ and his writhing/ body finally unbuckled....
A Compendium of Earthquakes [narrative nonfiction]
1. The first one was in the egg shop. I was a baby, strapped to my mother’s back in a blue nylon carrier while she wandered Kotwali bazaar...
The Bent Hourglass: Living in Crip Time [essay]
You go to the doctor and hope rises like a balloon. Maybe an answer, a prognosis, a treatment. Something to work with. But instead, only more tests, more theories, more maybes, more versions of try this...
At the Reunion [prose poem]
Do you have kids?
No, but I drove across the country and followed handmade signs to FRY BREAD near Albuquerque...
Shopping For One [prose poem]
The woman in front of me puts a single chicken breast in brown paper, an ear of fresh corn—its green and sugar scent is loud here—and one baking potato on the belt...
Mouth [narrative nonfiction]
The tomatoes I grew up with in New England were mealy and anemic, and their gooey innards polluted the lettuce in our nightly salad if mixed too vigorously. I picked those pathetic, pale slices out of my salad...
[3 Poems]
I am that girl I used to see
Out of the car window
That woman sunk into a man
On the back of a motorcycle...
The Third Place [flash nonfiction]
As usual, there is no one else to do the job, so I buy myself soup and pomegranates and pears and one Sierra mountain apple and four cans of food for Sophie and lay them out beautifully on the black conveyor belt...
The Flaw [flash nonfiction]
Would this story work better if I said that he hit me? What if I told you it didn’t matter that he didn’t hit me, that it wasn’t any different, really?
*Content note: Mentions of abuse & SA
Colorado River [short fiction]
We walk so long the soles of our feet ache. I recall a cartoon about a weary Paul Bunyan dragging his axe and carving up this ground. I need to keep seeing the river around the next bend.
