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 MoreWhen the desert highway freezes over in the dead of night,you can lay on that cold-soaked mattress in the truckbed,you can watch the bruised purple skin of the sky. Freckled with stars,
as a man gathering flowersbeside the road, his totaledcar smoking in a ditch. dear lord, you can yank my chain as hard as you want,even if it hurts, as long as it
You never realize how little you know about death until someone dies and you’re left picking up the ashes. I mean that literally, even though it sounds like a great metaphor. It’s
What If Hermaphroditus Let Salmacis Stay Part of Them Because that They had come to think⠀⠀of weight against the body as a kindnessThey were gifted—that undisputed They.⠀⠀Because it was a body scores
after “In Which I am Already the Queer Igbo Elder I Needed” by Nnenna Loveth Nwafor I can tell you stories just like anybody else about this place. I ate the soft
NEW ORLEANS IS FORSAKEN THIS TIME OF YEAR a cartoon cigar smoking a cartoon cigarette with a look of rancid terror on its filter-face. you good? i’m good. nails bitten down low
with lines from Sappho, Bishop, and Oliver Sometimes I forget my non-man hands—like can openers—cut circles in the air. If the silence in each fingertip is hereditary. If submersible. If for once /
Daily promise of blankness Scraping against whiteness Not loneliness but loneliness The house is not the room is not the bed is not the moment is not Cold nestling in after My
dollar store sonnet i’m a five-below tree frog bitch so i can’t tellthe difference between the tree, the general, family$1. usually there’s a section where thingsare 8 times $1, so after i
To Sleep The pink sun has fledto its bedchamber, leaving my hands darkened—wrapping‘round the sleeping beast his prayers, shadows and starshinehis hooves, bent toward the bloody moon begging for forgivenessas my fingers