memoir — MEMOIR — Split Lip Magazine

i THOUGHT I gave up my virginity to a Pretty Ricky song but that’s not the point

asked me what i needed in the moment (this was his first and last sweetness) i asked if he could play Aaliyah i asked if he could play I Care 4 U like how i had imagined it every time i had imagined it it was 2008

memoir, 2024SLMApril 14, 2024m. mick powell

Fairy Godfather

In May of 1985, my first play, Bonds & Options, was in rehearsals at New York University. I was renting a futon in an alcove in Flushing where the cockroaches did compulsory exercises, Gangnam Style, on the kitchen countertops, and I took the 7 train into Manhattan five days a week.

memoir, 2024SLMMarch 14, 2024James Magruder

Buzzcut

My hair is coming in faster now. Or I’d never noticed how fast it grew before. I shave my head every winter. Not because everything’s dying and not because everything that pretends to die will come back, but because there’s not much else to do.

memoir, 2024SLMFebruary 14, 2024TR Brady

Metamorphoses

If you want to do damage, you can do it in Target. You can build a small grave for yourself out of five to six items and you can lie in it and die.

memoir, 2024SLMJanuary 14, 2024Sabrina Bustamante

Tidewrack

It was two months after Mum died. I would not meet anyone. I would not answer messages. I would not talk about my feelings. I didn’t want to chat. I didn’t want people. I didn’t want feelings.

memoir, 2023SLMDecember 14, 2023Michael Bird

Williamstown, Summer 2003

Famous was a matter of time. We inhaled stardust and pollen in the sweltering heat of Massachusetts June, summer theatre. A cicada finale played as the curtain of dusk descended over green hillocks nightly, an audience of mountains darkening in the distance, fireflies our dimming footlights.

memoir, 2023SLMNovember 14, 2023Michael Todd Cohen

If You Want to Know What You’re Made Of

First, it’s just a log you keep in the back of your diary. Novelty. Dates you’ve gotten stoned with friends in the neighborhood: Elly on the electric box, Billy and Sara at the Grove, first period behind the school cafeteria.

memoir, 2023SLMOctober 14, 2023Jennifer Battisti

Valentine’s Day

Last Valentine’s Day, I got six tattoos I did not want.

The six dots formed a constellation, a guide around my breast for the radiation I would receive.

memoir, 2023SLMSeptember 14, 2023Elizabeth Koster

GRAY RAINBOW

I’m more uncomfortable when Jake strides past the server and secures a table for two—the best seats. Late, and the rooftop is nearly empty. Downtown yawns before us. The St. Louis Arch frowns.

memoir, 2023SLMJune 14, 2023Crystal Odelle

In the Sunrise Hour

In the hour before the rays of the sun find the face of Grandfather Mountain, everything is still. The birds wait somewhere high above, dew hovers over lush grass, and the sky seems close enough to touch.

memoir, 2023SLMMay 14, 2023Cassie Mattheis

With Flowers

I’ve tried to tell this story before. Let me try again. This time with flowers.

My mother died on Mother’s Day. It’s nearly impossible for me to comprehend, because she was my mother.

memoir, 2023SLMApril 14, 2023Kimaya Diggs

Money

Give me a quarter for every one of those women who goes to India to learn what yoga does for her body, a dollar for every one that says, I don’t mind taking a tour, but can we rent a car with an AC?

memoir, 2023SLMMarch 14, 2023Geetha Iyer

eat your feelings

I wanted to redact. I’m not sure when redact. Just as I find myself stumbling through nearly every therapy session, despite my efforts to write about anything or anyone else, I can’t obscure this truth: my mother is sick, and I have to come to terms with it.

memoir, 2023SLMFebruary 14, 2023Grace Dunbar-Miller

Two Immigrants

A few summers ago, on the final day of a cycling trip from Lisbon to Seville, I stopped in a small village to wait out the hottest part of the day. It was the siesta hour of deserted streets and shuttered shops.

memoir, 2023SLMJanuary 14, 2023Ajay Makan

Material History of the Closet [Soft Serve Ice Cream]

A photo: me, a high school freshman, blue with joy for making the team, standing flagstill in a parking lot, crumpled eating a soft serve ice cream cone out of a baseball mitt.

memoir, 2022SLMNovember 14, 2022Tyler Raso

On Going

Where the roads meet at the top of the hill and you can see farmland stretch as far as the city lights, I become intimate with everything I’ll never know.

memoir, 2022SLMNovember 14, 2022Dina L. Relles

The Young Harris Psalter

memoir, 2022SLMOctober 14, 2022Coyote Shook

In the Wal-Mart Parking Lot

Eight-seater suburban parked deep-deep in the Wal-Mart lot, legal twenty-four hours or so they say, though every time we see a car coming too close we pull the sleeping bags up, stay strict-still and make like a backseat of junk.

memoir, 2022SLMSeptember 14, 2022Hadley Griggs

Still

You can come in now, they say, holding open the door between the waiting room and the inner sanctum of the ER, and I stand, smoothing my wispy summer dress and unsticking my bare legs from the vinyl chair where I’ve waited…

memoir, 2022SLMJune 14, 2022Casey Mulligan Walsh

Stations of the Working-Class Pubescent Cross

We are nine when our mom enrolls us in the Fairlanes Young America youth duckpin bowling league. Duckpin bowling is Baltimore’s bastardized version of ten-pin bowling, played on a regular-length lane but with squat little pins and hard rubber balls swirled with marble or speckled with glitter.

memoir, 2022SLMMay 14, 2022Jen Michalski