Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid
Danielle P. Williams
after Ruby/Hilary
For just
fifteen seconds
out of my twenty-
six years living
I imagine
myself
a white woman
bones breaking
in a new way
my
I told him about Nebraska and how it was a dried up ancient ocean bed, how farmers harvested corn and clicks, how there might be kings buried under the freshly tilled soil or angels who dusted the August crops.
after Ruby/Hilary
For just
fifteen seconds
out of my twenty-
six years living
I imagine
myself
a white woman
bones breaking
in a new way
my
if it were untrue, I might have been
less mad; I am the best of drivers
tiger mother, paper tiger, full
of slant, piss and vinegar
that occasion of our first big fight,
he connoted with a
I packed into this room during my second year's semester break of university. For all the years before, I slept with my mother upstairs. Our building is a three-story building built with rocks and
two seasons of sabrina,
the teenage witch
under my belt
i’m feeling powerful
i sign on AIM after 9pm
dial up noises are wands
just a secret crush
it’s always nice,
talking to you,
She imagined walking barefoot across the grass in the backyard, sitting in the hammock and reading that book her teacher from graduate school had published.
The landscape was a flat dimension, no mountains or hills. Farmland and ramshackle homes that looked like collages, you could see the years in them.
Before the landline was obsolete, Nathan and I lived for late night 272-DATE commercials, our city’s own hotline of lust. You had to be 18 or older to call and of course we weren’t, yet I knew to make
The diary didn’t have many entries, but it revealed how lonely Sarah had felt.
Usually I’d just as soon look away from cruelty, but Lemuel flung that chicken square at my face and my first instinct was to swat her, fretting her clipped wings and shrieking like a raspy old woman, down on the heads of the others. Simple reflex.
For a few years, before Carl’s dad won a scratch-off ticket and no one ever saw him again, I called Carl my best friend.
We laughed when he called it a “Shake-n-Bake,” but then looked nervously around the room; the crew veterans weren’t laughing.
Hey girl, heard you’re on the job hunt—and the place I work is hiring! It’s a bit weird, but… Do you want to be a matchmaker?
We lost my dad somewhere under the blacklights of Club Tabu.
Charlie would never cannibalize me; he’d have nothing to eat.
My happiest memories all involve an intense desire to be strangled.
I do not want to talk about how I need to drink more water. The Doctor in Her Eighth Year of Practice has already told me, in so many words, that the life I save might be my own.
after fiona apple
i've waited many years— i didn’t know i was waiting— my myself waited til no one was looking, and it ran, and it ran and—
all my selves run from me. when i look up they’re
Mama says mad freezes your face, so little girls with feelings be careful. Anger shows ugly over time, lines between your brows or pulling down the corners of your mouth. Girls should smile, say
On Sunday morning, at eight central in middle Tennessee, I watch the Grand Prix. This season is the 70th anniversary of the FIA Formula One World Championship, which feels like enough of a reason to