The I is the one who drives down a two way highway in autumn. This is the future. The I is a member of the LGBTQALMNOP+ consortium. Guess which one. The I is the one I never see but other people do. Because he is different. The I must write he is disabled. Sees...
Issue Thirteen
Voices
She hears voices, but not clearly. And not in the other room, either, but from outlying districts. They seed themselves in her mind: Whiny and nasal, like early Woody Allen. Flat and affectless, teenage girls tamping down fires. Rich and scurrilous, rappers choking on...
Sombreros
That's how you sell sombreros, from the bottom up, truth to tell, Where a neighborhood girl with fine big thighs in little shorts[1] And a Mona Lisa face has one foot up on the second step Of her row house, her ass pushed out to traffic as she alternates Trying on her...
Ice Floes and Bipolar Bears
A piece of junk mail flutters in my hand, but a few of the words are already feathers torn out and sifting in the air somewhere between the floor of my consciousness and the floor I am standing on. Like the wings of a dead bird, the ripped envelope still hugs the...
WHAT I’D SAY TO MY THERAPIST TODAY IF SHE HADN’T CALLED IN SICK
I always read the acknowledgements. Long before I finish a book. This one comes at the end of a debut story collection. The author thanks her children, says she never would have tried to write, to learn this difficult art shortly after giving birth, had they not made...
The Stranger Inside Me
I’m having a boy and Daniel is over the moon but I’m scared because I have no brothers and Dad left when I was two and how am I supposed to know anything about raising a boy even though Daniel says don’t worry I have four brothers so trust me you’re worrying about...
Fifty- Five
There is a mountain you come upon that no one tells you about, sudden watershed, and once you crest it, the dead people you read about in the paper are no longer some people but your people, actors from your production, not your parents’, so the wakes and the funerals...
all the dead birds say i’m searching for smthng
they been whisperin to me lately: “time to stop. ur done. it’s over” and their voices are like leaves, or like gravel, or layers of skin. they need to stop; i can’t sleep with all their shifting calls. but now that one’s flown into my window i’m fin’ly done searching,...
Beast File No. 22
The night lights up like lightning. Not a single cloud in the sky. Only fireworks: red, white, and blue as far as the eye can see. Pop. Fizzle. Sizzle. Boom. There are lights on the tombs. Graves in the middle of nowhere. An old cemetery still in use. The lights on...
A Body Parts Comedy
Do you remember ten springs ago? Back in that season of renewal, I remember gulping down IPAs at a now-closed dive bar with my roommates. At Market & Fremont, we wobbled onto the crosswalk in a pack of testosterone as a klatch of estrogen strode toward us. Under...