It was a blue-sky summer evening and I bounced on my heels and grinned. At seventy, I had finally made it to Paris. My husband and I eagerly waited in line to climb the Eiffel Tower. But the line wasn’t moving.
“I’m hungry,” I said, hoping for a view from the restaurant on the second level.
“Me too,” said Steve. “We’ll be up there just in time for sunset.”
At the ticket window, a Middle Eastern family waved their arms in the air. Nearby, a handful of Japanese tourists milled around wearing puzzled expressions. Then a man in a business suit appeared, shouting first in English, then other languages.
“The Tower is closed temporarily! You may wait at least an hour here or proceed to the exit!”…
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She received us with a fright, Lillibeth and me, her body half-hidden behind the door as she opened it. “I’m not ready for bed just yet,” she said twice. Mom had recently taken to fearing bedtime and would say this repeatedly before remembering me and that it’s not my mission to put her to bed. “It’s about time you’re here, Sassy,” she added, exhaling.
“Mom, have you had dinner yet?” She shuffled away from my question in her slippers and robe, plopping down in her armchair and taking up a magazine.
“I’m pooped, Sister” was her response as Lillibeth could be heard cranking open the can of split-pea soup in the kitchen. Looking over at Mom’s natural pine Christmas tree, I was surprised to see it was stripped bare of ornaments and lights.…
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When dating, I’d love to watch my partner
drop her credit card from her tanned hands
and attract the male Spanish-speaking servers.
She’d get frustrated they skipped her
Hawaiian name’s too-many successive vowels.
She’d adjust her inherited Hawaiian jewelry,
declaring her identity and anger at them
for jumping to connection with her Spanish last name
and not knowing Pelayo is Spanish from the Philippines.
Oh the struggle of mixed-race names
the ones that have stories behind them,
stories that are never read.
I loved her frustration, that impotence
you feel at being unheard but loved.
Love that makes it impossible to complain.
When we married, she took my last name,
hyphenated ethnicity and confusion.
With the added punctuation, she became
less of an individual
more connected to me.…
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In 1830, a very young Alfred Lord Tennyson composed a tender poem called “The Mermaid.” In it, he imagined himself as a “mermaid fair” with “a comb of pearl.” He saw himself frolicking under the sea, where “I would fling on each side my low-flowing locks,/And lightly vault from the throne and play/With the mermen in and out of the rocks…”
The poem may be coded longing for a queer life that was impossible to act upon in Tennyson’s day. But it’s also something else entirely: a prime of example of how mermaids have been co-opted as cultural memes stretching back thousands of years.
With the release this spring of Disney’s new live-action film, The Little Mermaid, mermaid-fever is reaching a new pitch.…
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He texted his landlord the lie that he had Covid, even though he knew Ben was away on a road trip. But Ben could come back at any minute. Maybe he’d grown a little paranoid. But the apartment had gotten that bad. In the kitchen, he had put out the apple cider vinegar and dish soap for the flies the night before. Weeks too late. There were dishes in the claw foot bathtub and compost in the kitchen sink. The drain to the kitchen sink didn’t work. But he couldn’t let Ben know that, of course, because Ben would have to come into the apartment to fix it and to let him in would be to get evicted.
In the main room, a sense of paper overwhelmed the eye.…
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1
Amid the usual smell of sour milk at the Stratford dump, a burning odor. The rusty flatbed rolls off the scale, turns for the graveyard of refrigerators. Robert holds up his hand to the next truck, extends his neck and sniffs. “You smell that?” he says. It has not rained in weeks.
The driver says, “Something burning?”
“Sure hope it isn’t here,” says Robert, stepping off the platform outside the trailer and rushing a few yards through the dirt to where he can survey more of the place. “I don’t see any smoke.” He radios to the crew: Erik over in metals, Mary up at freon, Juan in general, Steve in recycle, Donna in brush. “You guys smell that?”
Mary says, “Fire?”…
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The day before the funeral, Nathan’s dad came by to pick me up. He wanted me to spend some time with their family. On the ride over to their house, he commented on the changing colors of the leaves. “The trees are vibrant this year,” he said. I merely nodded my head, afraid if I opened my mouth the truth would come gushing out. The car would be flooded with my honesty, my tears, my shame. That I was at a party while Nathan was dying. I was having a great time dancing, bumping into strangers with a red solo cup in my hand, sloshing beer on the floor. If he knew I was drunk while his son was newly dead, he would hate me.
When I was in high school, I wanted to meet Deaf kids my age so I could improve my signing skills.…
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