After last night, I’m no longer allowed at The Mint Bar. You could say it’s because I choked the owner’s daughter up against the wall next to the jukebox that only plays Cash songs—pushed her hard enough that a quarter fell from the coin slot—or you could say she deserved it.
I’m in accounting. Sally in the lab. Among her other duties, Sally is an odor judge. Her nose is rather ordinary to look at, what my grandma might have called a button nose. But Sally’s nose is legend.
The Chetrams were from Trinidad and listened to Bollywood music on the weekends. They were good, hardworking people. Their kids were polite. They were not Muslims as far as their neighbors could tell, since Chetram liked Miller Lite and the daughter wore high-waisted shorts in the summer. It was not polite to inquire.
But to write We thought is a fiction.
We always felt that…the moment you write this phrase, you have lied.
I looked up at Rudy, his back hitting the air like a ruler. The mind is an act of balance, he said, looking at me. It is a lever for the body.
Our hypothetical date tomorrow is at a show for the band Tennis. I have never heard of them, but I trust him. I say I will work my magic to get us in.
I love you best
like this: sun in your hair, a heavy daze
of pollen on your eyelids.
When we talk about a writer’s work, we are talking about the things she makes: poems, essays, books. It’s a mercantile word to apply to the artistic process, and yet it’s an inescapable one. Short
Like Richie’s “Hello,” Adele’s “Hello” is also an ode to longing.
Under the pretense of repairing things, I go to prove I am not broken.
I will never read this essay out loud, so let me take some risks:
Almond, salmon, Episcopal, peony, Adidas, melancholy, mischievous.
In my head: Owl-mund, sal-MON, epic-SKO-poll.
I add force
I’ve never run for political office and have no desire to run—which is not to say that I’ve never thought about it—but I do know what it is to move, to travel, to traverse, to go around for the sake of one’s ambitions.
When I mention this flash of sexual fluidity to people, it bothers them.
Felt, for a minute, like some façade had slipped, like a glitch in the matrix. Is this in fact the car we came in? Are we who we think we are?
When I was dead, I returned to my father’s house, an old farmstead in Northwestern Ohio, and I stood alone in the gravel drive, satisfied to see that the house was just as I remembered it—small and gray, rising on a plot of land west of a moonlit apple orchard.
The curtains opened, the ballerinas emerged, toes became violins, hands, trumpets, backs, cellos.
