i. You find her in the summertime. She is down near the Gulf beyond the highway billboards that offer penitence to women with healthy wombs. She looks like a poppy field with ripped overalls and thin, Georgia hair and you imagine she will taste like the same cigarettes her mother died on. This is a place you’ll only find behind dancing eyelids, fasting on sleep and long-term memory.
ii. You find her later in the showers of early fall, when the harvest moon carries her over the Mason Dixon line. In a dream, you tattoo a promise you both made across your wrists and you decide you will live there. It is not the first or the last crossed-out promise you both will make together. You tell her you love her the same way Gulf waters love their tropical storms.…
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In a recent interview, New York punk poet Eileen Myles calls for men to stop writing. “I think it would be a great time for men, basically, to go on vacation,” Myles says. “There isn’t enough work for everybody. Certainly in the arts, in all genres, I think that men should step away. I think men should stop writing books.”
Since the day in 1440 when Johannes Gutenberg popped the tab on a can of pilsner and congratulated himself for having invented the printing press, readers and writers and people who aren’t either have been telling us what we should or shouldn’t read. When one Caliph Omar was asked what was to be done with the library of Alexandria, he was reported to have said that, if the books in that library contained doctrine opposed to the Qur’an, they were bad and must be burned, whereas if those books supported the most important text of Islam, they should be burned anyway, for they are superfluous.…
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Do you remember the days when men loved other men like sons,
or the days when women gave birth in the oceans of California?
The sea children and their tea notes schooling fish songs—
they kept a bath of grapes for paint in elegant professions.
Merlin painted near the sea.
I can’t tell what men love other men like these days,
or if women still give birth in oceans of California.
I can taste this sea in blood teas and floods,
and the grapes come in smaller packages.
They’ve never met a Merlin.
The fog horse and his paladin,
who ran out of crusades,
forgets the sea is paid for.
The insects flay me for suits.
– James Vu…
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Her hair was falling out. She ran her fingers through its lengths, a fistful coming out and dropping to the hungry sink below, the rushing water of the faucet sweeping it off to its watery death. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
Fast Forward
Kaida looked up into the sterile light fixture above her. A bee hummed and darted across the room to the window. Kaida was allergic to bees. She hoped to God it wouldn’t come near her. The fan in the corner circled toward her, blowing cool air her way. Her hair fluttered, sending loose strands floating through the air, eventually statically magnetizing themselves to whatever unfortunate item of clothing had enough clingy, dry, static electricity running through it to be forever practically inseparable. …
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July is a shit month, and I’ve wanted to die for about three weeks. Last night I dip-dyed my hair bright red to distract me from my broken mind. Unfortunately, it also distracted mi padre from his chicken casserole at supper tonight. He’s calling me to the living room now, away from the fifth Supernatural episode I’ve watched today. I slouch down the staircase, gripping the pinewood railing. I remind myself that under no circumstance will I cry in front of my father. He has no right to calmly observe my emotions like he did two months ago before my graduation. I wander into the living room where he lounges in his worn recliner. My mother sits on the love seat across from him and folds towels.…
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“Mama, did you know that when a mother goose sees a fox, she pretends to have a broken wing? She flaps and splashes away into deep water, so the fox follows her and drowns while her chicks hide all safe. Isn’t that brave?”
“I did not know that,” Pari said. She beamed as Alemi ran ahead of her in the wooded park that flanked the suburb’s sole shopping mall.
“I saw it on the nature channel; it’s my favourite.” Alemi slowed down and caught his mother’s hand. “But why do the foxes follow the goose with the broken wing every time? They must be stupid!”
“They must be — everyone knows that you shouldn’t mess with mama geese; we’re the cleverest creatures on the planet.”
“You’re not a goose!…
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She doesn’t know what is she doing there. Or when did she think this whole theater was a good idea. Out of habit, she thinks, she did it out of habit, because Carlos was so tiresome that, in the end, she agreed only for him to close his mouth and leave her alone. She should have sent him to hell, but anyway.
She forces herself to think it isn’t so bad. In less than an hour, she will start drinking until she loses consciousness. She just wants her tongue to be free before they take her to bed so that she can tell everyone what she really thinks of them. She is going to tell her mother all the reproaches she’s been swallowing since she was a teenager, she’s going to throw in her father’s face his visits to “gentlemen clubs”, and then her future in-laws will be next.…
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