The Story of Art We all supported Mom going back to college—that wasn’t the issue. She’d devoted her life to others—raising four sons, filling in at Dad’s shop, keeping grandchildren. At sixteen she’d helped start a labor union at the Friendly’s mayonnaise factory, still the only unionized business in Foote, South Carolina. She deserved something […]
Last Summer Home Inspired by “What’s Love Got to Do?” by Richard Blanco All that summer I wondered why the gentle green mountains around my parents’ home weighed on me so darkly. In the room my dad cleared out for me, leaving me two empty drawers, I woke in a panic, trying to figure out […]
On (Still Not) Coming Out I try to anticipate the woundfor the second time. I ask the nurse ifI launch across handlebars, flay a tooth,will spring stems break from cement?he says every stoplight’sblood-thick tongue bites before itforgives. dogs pant in front yardsfacing the sky so I’ll heal without marks:I can pick the thread color for […]
A Quiet Passing [I] at night he tells me about the people he’s killed, about the boyby the river, the woman in her mud & thatch hut, the manhiding in the sharkskin grasslands after dinner we kiss & cuddle, we no longer make love,it is too much, too much to hold & to cradlewithin my […]
No Backsies the extra-large mini-fridge starts up a shimmywhile I’m mid-sentence with my father on the phoneI roll my shoulders against my freshman year cinder block dorm wallsand the ceiling splits—in pokes the head of the Dolphin That Cannot Lie my roommate’s Grapenuts box leaps from the shaking fridgeand out spill my preschool paintings, plastic […]
My hair leads me throughmy own house like a ghostlooking for proof of itself,finds only the inconvenientsoft smells of the living,bitter as pith. In themorning I read booksby young men who are oldtoday, or dead, their everyerror cast now into legacy.They seemed to know soearly the worth of the windthat rippled across their longand lingered-over […]
I’m here to pick up a pre‑scription already writteninto my future from historyyou could say I did this tomyself but I was fed and I wasfed and not just food or barelyfood you have to pay whatthings cost and one organ leadsto another a failure to graspthe path from action to con-sequence is written into […]
It was the year my boyfriend and I were playing a lot of sick. Play, mental health experts say, is important. A basic psychological need, in fact. We traded off: every month one of us fell terribly ill, tasking the other with the role of nurse. We’d both grown up before Project GetWell, meaning that […]
His throat opens like the crackle of a flame,his thick mustache, a ribbon carrying the melody as his mouth moves up and down. Above the dinof ATVs, tractors, and chivos, his voice wavers through air like a swallow wheeling deeperinto that abyss. Somewhere constrained in those tremulous notes, he finds his brother, the dead one,asleep […]
Exposure and Response from Vol. 20 No. 02 One toothbrush was orange, the other green. Neither color instructed him on which would be the appropriate choice for a white, straight, twenty-nine-year-old man. If the toothbrushes had been pink and blue, Peter would have chosen the pink one to avoid gender essentialism. He had already touched […]
