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
Still though, that’s fucked up.
I agree, I say. It is fucked up.
Even in death, I would make a showing of my conscientiousness. I would step into a black trash bag, first removing my heels to avoid a snag. I’d put a note on the outside of a second bag before pulling it over my head. “Please do not open; call the police.”
I stand in front of this body-length mirror. The compression vest is gone, the drains are removed, and all the cushioning gauze has been peeled away; I’ve watched video after video of other
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.
The last time I dream of him, my dead ex-boyfriend asks me to stop bringing him back.
Usually, when I dreamt him alive, he didn’t speak. I’d sit next to him while he sorted mail. I’d watch him turn
The water witch said that if I cut my hair and killed the prince and his new bride she would turn my legs back into fins and I could go home. I didn’t have to think about it very hard.
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.
I checked the rest of the house, but everyone was asleep. I had a brief moment of nothingness, of emptiness, and then terror bloomed.
Wisconsin
Can we please
go back to
your uncle’s house
in Wisconsin
that was used in
the movie
Amityville Horror
the house is
definitely haunted
but beautiful
even with the
piles of dead
The curtains opened, the ballerinas emerged, toes became violins, hands, trumpets, backs, cellos.
You make me cry
when you talk about her, and only now do I realize
that you never knew your mother at all,
there simply was no space for her in your crowded pocket
carrying poverty like a
“Maybe your ears are broken,” my husband mused to me one night at dinner.
I was wearing headphones, eyes trained to study my plate, the sight of chewing as triggering as the audible noises.
They liked to brag. Who had the highest dose of anti-psychotic medication? Who had gone the furthest off the rails during a manic episode? And they loved to boast about their suicide attempts. Whose was the most gruesome?
When Tony died, I stopped recycling. The kind of power play that was both meaningful and meaningless.
I don’t write “I have the libido of a sloth” in my online dating profile. I don’t use my real surname now either.
The Class of 1953 Tachikawa Air Base Bride School girls were fertile, well-fed and rested.
