In elementary school, when kids talked about being “Christian,” I thought they were talking about race. 

One time I was sitting near a row of bushes along the side of the house playing with some toys. Immersed in what I was doing. And a thick river of shit flowed from my asshole.

“For years after the war and after the camps, Chava Rosenfarb woke up every morning at 4:00 a.m. to write. She’d open her eyes in the darkness and slip out of bed without waking her husband...

And then I found her on a VHS. My double, my twin, my doppelganger. Laura Palmer.

Sunday paper. Card Showers announced for Cecile Jarry, 99, and Fred Aldrich, 90. Meeting of the Sherlock Holmes Club this Wednesday.

What we liked to do that fall—once mornings had grown thin around the edges, the sun sheer like white linen and gone by four o’clock—was to put on eyeliner and these old fur stoles she had collected from thrift store heaps...

This essay is not about Star Trek in the way that Star Trek is not about space.

I thought it was a baby. It was possible, though not—and this is the important part—likely. 

I towed my worldly goods to a remote plot with real snakes in the grass, real primroses near pathways, and I wasn’t a tisket-a-tasket girl running errands but an adult with a narrow skill set that had sent me toward serial opportunities, jobs, my career not careering but ascendant as I checked off items on widely circulated how-to lists, but no one could tell me how to succeed at love. 

In the summer between Michael Sam’s selection in the NFL Draft and the day he was cut, his jersey ranked as the second most popular of all rookie jerseys, behind only Johnny Manziel of the Cleveland Browns. Almost like there are gay sports fans.

A few weeks ago my wife told that I have some mild hoarding tendencies.

She said she was sick of it. The thousands of marijuana roaches I'll never smoke. All the goddamned books lying

I pass a woman who holds a red polka dot Christmas music box in her lap. I never see her turn the key, but as I scan the aisles for my specific things—the white balsamic vinegar, the slivers of blanched almonds—I hear Jingle Bells faintly, somewhere behind me, no matter where I am.

That ability to dissociate—to look from above. You think it would make us save ourselves, seeing the planet from afar, feeling like with one hand, maybe you could fix it.  

At first sight the line, nearly invisible but sometimes catching a ray of sun through the clinging water droplets, ran parallel to the brown water’s surface, from the tip of the pole held by the fisherman standing in the shallows out to unknown depths.

“My son was murdered last year. His bride murdered him.”

Where the fuck are the collected plays of Ron Allen? The police have won, that’s where.

Cockroaches

This was a sign as far as I was concerned. The high water mark. The North American standard for being a shitbag.

A plague of the poor and dirty.

So when we started to see

LOL. When I send you emails re: feminism I feel like I'm trolling you. It isn’t that you don’t care about equal rights and access. It’s just that it’s not “your bag” to talk about it a whole lot.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like squeegeeing sewage out the back door of the break room for three hours. Or push-brooming a greenhouse until your black snot could be used as an adhesive. Cupping each writhing Bag-a-Bug to see if they’ve eaten their fill of Japanese beetles. 

 I breathed in deeply, not knowing at the time I was breathing in the lives of all those at the café, those I sat with just moments before, molecules sliding from the rubble of the explosion into my lungs, bones nestling behind bones.

My roommate lives her life differently. This is what she claims. 

You are obsolete. The cashier in your neighborhood’s grocery store is obsolete.  The typesetter—who placed each individual letter for the headlines of the morning paper—is obsolete. Tollbooths barely require someone to stand sentry in the middle of the highway to collect coins anymore and soon enough lasers will replace surgeons in operating rooms as well.

How we pretended to be other people for fun: “Hi, what’s your name?” she asked. “Bill,” I said. “Bill, huh? I can think of a lot of words that rhyme with Bill.”

If one person can take from this that it is not about privilege, it is not fiction versus poet, it is none of the internet fashions of complaint and it is not anonymous (even though I am any-goddamn-pleasing-way anonymous with or without my fucking name) ...

The next three and a half or four minutes will be used to draw conclusions on the relevance and authenticity of Christmas based on self reflexivity by using photographs of Cheryl Ann during the days leading up to Christmas.