Bear, 1a. transitive verb: to accept or allow oneself to be subjected to. I couldn’t bear my mother’s screams the night we learned my father died. The 11:00 PM news anchor announced the accident: a pedestrian (no name until the family could be identified) killed in the crosswalk in front of Sullivan University.
Read MoreSeventeen, and I am dancing. Spinning, spiraling, suffocating. Seeing heaven when I’m hungry enough. Setting little fires around the neighborhood until each green lawn is singed with yellow.
Read More1.
The only thing capitalism is selling that I’ve ever wanted to buy is “illness.”
A woman opens and closes window curtains inside the tight walls of her childhood bedroom. A green orb explodes behind her clenched eyelids—chemical stars packed into shells, propelled by gunpowder and flame.
Read MoreGood love.
The email request was that you write about good love for a Valentine’s Day reading event.
Summer 2019 was like the opening to DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince’s “Summertime,” full of heat and anticipation. My hot girl summer. Two years out of my relationship, and one year out of my old job—both of which had felt like certain stagnation—I indulged myself.
Read MoreResplendent in clearance sale plastic go-go boots and polyester mini-dresses, my teen aunts, Paula and Brenda, use the battered handle on the kitchen cabinet drawer to pop bottle tops—sometimes ice-cold Coca Cola or Pepsi—but mostly RC Cola with salted peanuts shoved inside the neck to make both a drink and a treat.
Read MoreCrouched in my driveway, I inspect the fender recently pried loose by a streetlight. I wouldn’t have backed into the pole if I hadn’t stopped for lunch, hadn’t finally dropped off the dry cleaning, hadn’t shoved an oversized envelope into the postbox.
Read MoreWhen my son, Cyrus, was a year and a half old, I took him and his older sister, Maya, to Karachi, Pakistan, where we ended up staying for five months. It was 2003, some months after the U.S. occupied Iraq, and for a time my American life no longer felt tenable. We lived with my father in the home I grew up in, across the street from my mother and her husband.
Read MoreA verifiable fact: The Army discharged my father from his tour in Vietnam three days early.
Read MoreI am thirty-seven weeks pregnant with a sex drive that suddenly has no limits, and everything turns me on. How have I become the most sensual of beings? I’ve almost never written poetry; there was that one time, but I was sixteen and thought I was in love.
Read MoreThe neighbors can see my nipples; I’m sure of this. I’m particularly convinced that they have been seen by the person who lives to the right of me, as my kitchen window looks directly into his home.
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