Dragonflies are like Waze. They predict. They don’t chase after mosquitoes, they intercept them, which means they have to calculate the mosquito’s distance, speed, and trajectory. Dragonflies …
How much muscle one carries is the largest determinant of bodybuilding credibility, regardless of the degree of fairness with which it’s constructed, and by this metric, he was the one, not me, …
Unaccustomed to performing without instruments, Los Guaraguao’s hands moved everywhere: through their hair, over their chests, into their pockets, through their hair again.
I once told him, “I think I’m dying here,” and he reached behind my head for the orange pill bottle. He dumped the oxy into my hand. The drug he took for migraines and back pains. “I won’t …
The spindly stalks creep out from the nexus of the composition like arachnid extremities. The pronounced compression of space pushes the roughly hewn roots into the forefront for the beholder’s …
This is the fantasy of self-sufficiency: healthy in a closed loop, without needing anything from anyone else.
My head often feels filled with concrete. This is not to say congested. If anything, I am rarely sick.
Pinball takes place in a more liminal environment: those may be your physical fingers hitting flipper buttons and your real voice cussing out Bride of Pin-Bot, but your vision, your …
We talked about light and dark, how to render it in paintings and drawings, and how it connects to spirit. We talked about Emerson and Thoreau. They connected their faiths to mine, to the pantheism I …
I still very much care about that idea of measurable quality; the idea that a consensus can exist between serious readers about what is great and what is merely good.
...attending, as Hoagland did, to how white male hegemony produces and reproduces itself constitutes a valuable step, I think, in naming and deconstructing that hegemony, in refusing to accept it as …
K’s profile said “seeing someone.” Through the plate glass window wall of the Southern-themed bar, I saw her sitting on a stool reading a book on mass incarceration. Her muscled shoulders wore …
My first non-Jewish boyfriend is my boyfriend in 2006, the year that my grandfather dies. Like me, he has only ever known one of his grandparents. Her name is Mary, and that’s what everyone in his …
Your parents work for the Central Intelligence Agency. You find this out in the fourth grade while conducting an interview assignment for your English teacher, Mr. Taylor. Before, your parents told …
“They’re here!” My mother’s voice would bellow through the house on Sundays. Everything about her was loud and unapologetic, her slippers slapping the carpet as her long legs raced toward the …
In the bed across from me, my sister was sleeping. The blue bolts of lightning illuminated her face, her eyes half-open, the way she always slept, like a rabbit, her chest rising and falling, …
The most private thing he’s willing to admit is that he once took the Love Languages test, though he is not willing to divulge the language he speaks.
Why did he shape my brother’s body to the contours of war? Is this the shape of all our language already?
It’s not the contraption itself that I love—this pair of shells of steel and lace—but the woman who measures me and tests my straps as if armoring me for battle.
The other day I received my first offer for term life insurance (how are corporations so prescient?), which has the effect of reminding a man he’s going to die, just as a baby has the effect of …