The markets are bullish, Bloomberg reports at the crack of dawn. We’re the only ones awake at this time, and we know. We made the markets bullish. Our apartments are tiny. We tiptoe around, getting ready for work, so we don’t wake our fast asleep partners and fast...
Asynchronous Workshop
Don’t Walk In On Paradise Naked (or a Mononet for Love)
The bullet lodged in his rib missing him For he was his heart and it was safe That from which she was made saved their love It had been a ricochet from a wayward gun To the tree of knowledge to his chest An absurdity of physics and mathematics He took it as a sign...
Postcard to X
Just Alice and Willy and Ben now. Dragging our bones across the city, hitting every red light but nothing slows us down. We streel over to Old Calton Burial Ground and dance, weave joy in and out of the gravestones, crackle and spark and sing our throats to ash. Our...
A Machine-Learning Guide to Playing Dead
When an eight-year-old punches in the keywords first and love, play dead. Remind him of his mother’s milk, its sinewy aftertaste. Shower him with images of broken vases and heart-shaped balloons that pop to the touch like a zit. Show him an essay on the...
Privilege
Chicago, Illinois, 1981 The heroin addict has dishwater blonde hair, pinky-beige skin, and an impish grin. There’s a twinkle in his eye, a gleam in his pinpoint pupils as he peers through a crack in my kitchen door. Suddenly he’s nine again, sneaking a peek in our...
Breath
i. Airway. When you plunge into cold water there is a rising: heart rate, fear, darkness. The water, pushing down, surface tension dented by your body, until the water breaks over the top. A catch in your breath—no breath. Crushing pressure suddenly released; smile in...
Countdown
10… My yearning could have deforested Maine; it continued for days, ever since I saw her, open-faced like the books on display in the museum gift shop. 9… I spent my days at the gift shop mulling over the dictionary. I glared at words I would never use. They sprawled...
Tik Tok Dance Tutorial
1. Hands in front of you, sway hips x2. A woman with parts of her stomach injected into her ass is teaching us how to dance. 2. Draw heart on chest. She doesn’t ask us to adore her, she doesn’t have to. 3. Tap each wrist x4. I’ve lost whole years of my life watching...
The Saddest Music
Then, by a tree, we come to a stop. I think of impetus as a mysterious intrinsic property. The perseverance of things in themselves. How this tree, for example, persisting in its treeness, will eventually envelop this wrought iron railing. Will subsume all foreign...
Jangles is Aware of the Dangers of the Clown Car
Jangles is not cramped. Clowns are pliable, fold together neat as origami. Noodles’ round red nose against his chest, Yurple’s giant shoe against his face, these feel right and holy as a lover’s embrace. The intermittent beeping of horns and tinkle of bells as clowns...