We met in the third grade, the same year I started parochial school at Our Lady of the Rosary. We weren’t friends at first. Not that we weren’t friendly, but we weren’t close the first year, nor the second. K was one of the class originals, the ones who had been together since kindergarten, and I was one of two new kids. K was friendly enough to jump rope and hopscotch with the girls, and cool enough to play basketball with the boys. I didn’t play any of the games well enough to know, but she was good at both from what I could tell. She never wore uniform plaid, or pleated skirts with bike shorts like the other girls in our class did. She wore the same polos and khakis as the boys, and I liked that.…
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Downtown’s ash trees are wrapped in green
Marked so we know the emerald ash borer
Is slouching this way.
The Mongols once had flung whole trees at Baghdad
As they sieged the city, symbols for its citizens
That the end was near, and now I’m
Looking at the dead bough that hangs over our house
Branches peeling off in thunderstorms
New dead dendrites each morning.
Doesn’t the neighborhood smell great, he said,
With all those lindens in bloom?
But they found the ash borer in Omaha,…
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On Monday, he had a first date with a man he’d been talking to for about two weeks. They met at a park a few hours before sunset. They talked about themselves, their childhoods, their interests and intentions. They had dinner together. They shared a drink. They made jokes, and felt completely and utterly attracted to one another. They enjoyed their time so much that they ended the night inside each other’s mouths. Laughing, smiling, holding onto one another, happy. By the time Marcel got back to his apartment, he knew they were in love. He fell asleep thinking of their future together.
On Tuesday, Marcel woke up to a phone call from the police that both of his parents had died. They’d been attacked in their sleep by an intruder the night before.…
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During her omnipresence in the 1990s, Martha Stewart never did it for me. Of course, I knew of her and was very aware of who she was, but I rarely engaged with her celebrity, being somewhat turned off by her caricatured fussiness, whiteness, and wealth. To me, she epitomized a starched, bland Stepford Wives aesthetic that I thought would be stultifying. Without really knowing of her work, I thought she was exceedingly tasteful, to the point of being antiseptic. Though I was a huge consumer of cooking TV, I never warmed to her oeuvre, assuming her schtick would be too complicated and unattainable. I preferred by celebrity chefs to be chatty, accessible, and fun, like Rachael Ray or even Ina Garten. Martha Stewart would glide across the television screen, her frozen beauty akin to the White Witch from C.S.…
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haven’t showered in maybe three days, it doesn’t matter, i’m in la which means i’m going to be the least fuckable person anywhere i go, there’s a van that takes people from the airport to a fancy marriot, i’m not staying at the marriot, i’m staying at an airbnb in historic filipinotown, but i’m not one to turn down a free ride, the driver can tell i don’t belong, i only have a backpack, worn-out red canvas with “bastard” written across in faded sharpie, no one sits next to me, i check uber to see how much i’m saving, not as much as i’d hoped, i redownload tinder, i’m going to be the least fuckable person anywhere i go here but the novelty of an east coast butch with a bunch of shitty stick-n-pokes will get me somewhere, i want to be used, i lose most of the day stumbling around little tokyo stuffing my face with dairy-rich desserts, all things considered—yes, all things considered—i am, unequivocally—
– Rachel Stempel…
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Mary was sitting across from me, her fingers touching the top of her water glass, the sides coated with condensation. Not using a coaster. Not that it mattered, the table topped with pocks.
“Is it going to snow?” she asked. “I know you can’t say for sure, but have you heard if it will?”
I finished chewing my scrambled eggs and poked at my hash browns. “Not supposed to,” I said.
“You what?”
Louder, I said, “Not supposed to.”
She drank from her water glass. “I have a long trip ahead of me.”
“It won’t snow.” The hash browns were perfect; golden with a hint of butter and the crispness factor was optimal. “What time are you leaving?”
In the booth behind Mary were an elderly couple, the kind of people who likely came to this place frequently, maybe every morning.…
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You almost walked by me as you’d done many times before. What made you ask me for a dollar this time? Why did I stop to consider your blasé request? I was fickle with my handouts to the countless panhandlers in downtown Oakland. There was no pattern to my altruism, but I always carried a single dollar in my front pocket for the perfect, albeit erratic, tug on my conscience to dole it out.
You were one of the faces in the throng that was questionable; were you another unlucky destitute soul or a street hustler eager to swindle an easy handout into a bigger take? You had smooth black skin and indecipherable clothes: a tan jacket that could be second hand, dark baller sweatpants you might’ve snagged from a lost and found, and a grungy white and red ball cap with its tags still attached.…
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