Picture a school of sperm milling around a monstrous egg, an ovarian Mount Everest, one thousand times the size of each swimmer. Their tiny flagella oscillating like oars on a small dinghy, each sperm filled with thoughts and prayers for a blissful genetic future rather than the evolutionary graveyard. It’s a biological version of veteran Manhattan shoppers jamming the front doors of Macys on the morning of Black Friday, except here there is only one winner, only one sperm who actually fertilizes the egg, sustaining their future.
“Soooo, that’s how you were made” Mom said, turning over the last page of “Where Babies Come From” and flipping the softbound book closed. I was six when I asked the question, and Mom was progressive enough to know that a kid should be told the truth when they asked about human reproduction, but sufficiently repressed to hand the task off to a text that was dry as a two-year old package of Tom’s peanut butter cheese crackers from an abandoned vending machine.…
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She has carelessly parked her car, not parallel, but at a slight angle at the side of the highway. She is parked on an incline, where whatever is on the other side, after the peak, is invisible to her; an unknown picture that will only reveal itself once she reaches the crest and starts her descent. It could be a thing of beauty, like when your vehicle is winding through the mountains, going up a steep hill, the car’s hood higher than your line of sight and then, suddenly, your body reaches the crest, and spectacular beauty is laid out before you: crisp silvery snow-capped mountains, a rolling river winding at their feet with shivering birch leaves on trunks of clean, white bark at the river’s edge.…
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When I heard about the government finding non-human biologics, my first thought was whether aliens would find me attractive. I fare pretty well with a specific type of woman, the hipster artsy girl. Often owns a cat or two, regrets none of her tattoos when she should regret them all, and talks way too much about authors whose books I can’t get past chapter two. My type is the blonde cheerleader from movies, often called Stacy, and driving a convertible VW Bug. Unfortunately, I’m the furthest thing there is from who they go for: muscles, a scruffy face, and a cool swagger resulting from a belief they can do anything. My type could be aliens, but I’ll have to wait until Congress approves the release of visual evidence.…
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‘the silence of God is God’
— Carolyn Forché
the sky dons its black cloak
and all its stars wrap about me.
light streams into my eyes
from so far away,
when the birth was first envisioned
on those starry nights of a distant time
that opened all around Them.
i. the idea
struck you,
the only free will,
to have your son begotten,
to give him flesh and blood,
then raise an arm against him
when no angel in heaven would dare to intervene.
hard to imagine the thinking, when the word was God
and he was with God, talking to himself, mumbling
this is suicide, murder —
only to be answered
why hast thou forsaken me?
one would know a human mind,
mercy, love, suffering and affliction,
all that is of the flesh.…
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You’re wrist-deep in turkey testicles, and you’ve got no reference for the sensation because there’s nothing else that feels like a tub of half-thawed turkey balls. Why the hell anyone would eat the damn things is as mysterious as the sensation of the fleshy oblongs squirting through your cold fingers.
The Okie cook is yelling at you to move your ass, orders are piling up, but he’s always yelling so you don’t pay him any mind. Breading testicles is a step-by-step operation that can’t be rushed.
Once the poultry nutsacks thaw, you scoop a handful of the slippery blobs and drop them into the flour tub. A quick swirl to dust them up, shake off the extra flour, then the turkey balls go swimming in the egg and milk bath.…
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My city is not a city, no more than a bare town that’s slowly growing. It’s got a Bi-Mart and a Safeway and a McDonalds—people never go there, though, just Big Burger across the street. It’s been here longer, and it’s not a chain, and my people here don’t like change.
The folks who live here aren’t slow by any means, but we like slow. We like watching the world subtly change around us, and we like taking our time as we live our life. We remark on the sunset every night, saying things like can’t believe it’s still light out! for half the year and can’t believe it’s already dark out! for the other half, accordingly.
It’s a town surrounded by the countryside, and there’s the great big Coleman ranch that’s got cows and horses and other animals.…
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With twenty rupees in his pockets, there was only one way Pervez could go.
And it was starting to seem like a tough decision already.
It’s not that he didn’t have direction. He had the directions and the dictation right: he knew exactly where he had been told to go. He knew where he was supposed to go. Surely, he could go there. But the minarets of the mosque didn’t pull at his heartstrings as much as the magnetic mansions that housed other objects of interest did: a friend’s house in a different locality, a local parchoon shop that sold all sorts of colourful candy, a bazaar, a ground where boys would let you play cricket if you contributed only twenty rupees. Pervez had twenty rupees to spare, the wide world to see, and he couldn’t make a decision.…
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