In December 2014, I had just completed my first semester of a creative writing MFA in Boston and was home for the holiday break. Mileage may vary for those in MFAs—and elsewhere, I’ve shared some my own small and large battles—but my first sampling of fiction workshops and rhet/comp teacher
Read More
i. There was a time. There is time, and it fools us. It really does toy. Like he put it, it is titillating, this foreplay with death. As one day dawns with
LM Brimmer is a co-editor of the anthology Queer Voices: Poetry, Prose
A Short Film Starring Me at a Bathhouse I have a line
Having For So Long Been My Mother’sLive-In Caregiver I could call the doctor, make oatmeal,buy vitamins, change batteries,and dim the blinds all day long.I could service your concentrator,clean your nebulizer,or do something
because there’s something I should tell you,⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀but you’ll need to come to me. I reachand the rock of me stays,⠀⠀⠀⠀ just here where I’m mortared— ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ I must, then, own my arms,
All around is a dark sea threateningto swallow challengers – boats approach in failed attemptsat reconciliation, boiling over⠀⠀⠀⠀ at the hull with sailors shaped like menmouthing tame loose-lipped⠀⠀⠀⠀ apologies. Mumbled voices blanket
Our bracken pool tidesin the small of your back. I move the earthor the earth is you or⠀⠀⠀ the earth moves usthick in the shadow-dark air.⠀⠀⠀ This once gravityis the law we
I.I sweep my porch in the sticky Georgia heat. I sweep, sweep, sweep like the dirt and the stray pine straw and the single bird feather will disappear as easily as the
Someone calls the afterlife a palace of portraits hung in empty halls then mauls the meat and veggie platters. We cannot decide
Cleave With a mother so sweet and easy to please, I had little opportunity to exercise obnoxious contrariness. She would usually say “dikkatli ol” and then let me go my American way.
It’s 1982. She’s a junior in college, an English major, spending the spring academic quarter studying art and literature in England. The cuisine is awful: gloppy meat pies, mushy peas, Marmite, treacly-sweet
where you’re –so– worn out ⠀⠀⠀you won’t mind ⠀⠀⠀being wiped out; ⠀⠀⠀hell, you’ll even thank the tsunami for ⠀⠀⠀flicking you off ⠀⠀⠀the face of this ⠀⠀⠀flaming planet far far away ⠀⠀⠀from that
i. There was a time. There is time, and it fools us. It really does toy. Like he put it, it is titillating, this foreplay with death. As one day dawns with