My Daughter Has Never Heard of Home Alone or All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth
Adam Hughes
She lives with her mom
two states away
and I wish this was all
I've failed to teach her.
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
This is the Santa crushing it on Etsy.
This is the Santa denied unemployment.
This is the Santa whose Zoom background brought his therapist to tears.
This Santa doesn’t give a shit—he’s a
First, I visited my father’s house. After I returned home, my mother asked me to bring her there in the dark of night. We got on the highway, drove north, then took the second exit, but that was all I
She lives with her mom
two states away
and I wish this was all
I've failed to teach her.
I’m now constructing a mental pool for how long these two can keep up the corporate veneer before they go insane or at least pop Gene in the teeth or at least say Okay you’re done no more pineapple and then whisk away the tray of pineapple Mom and I have not stopped noshing and ogling and noshing...
1955
Nothing is earned unless something is lost. You lost your father in a car accident, as mommy explained. You are less than a year old and don’t have language for anything, much less grief. The
When Michael left for the West, I experienced what in Portuguese is known as saudade, an intense nostalgia for a person.
sour
i wanted
in the way
that want follows
bedraggled
a half moon
of bites
it starts
like this
slowly
rara saw
FIRE FIRE
in my eyes
hard to describe
to you who
no longer
The first time I went rock climbing, I lasted 30 minutes.
On Shaving my Legs for the First Time
the offending hairs that sprout from dark skin
like unwelcome ants that toil through the night
hairs that signal virility on my father’s chin
draw taunts
an immigrant love letter
this is a love letter
to jasmine rice and soy sauce in the ethnic aisle to the crisp
melting of duck skin in my mouth you taste the
I smile now, waiting, always waiting, for you to reappear and remember me ...
My wife and I are in pretty deep with the Mac. You can tell because we call them "the Mac."
I WRITE PANIC
into the locked kitchen
cabinet, china chipped
& sticky. i write
myself into a bottle
of vodka, sloshing
in waves of bitter
padded tongue.
i write the morning
green &
I once let the person I loved prick my ribcage with a needle a thousand times so I wouldn’t forget. A collection of dots arcing messily into two black brackets.
immediately I thought, “Oh shit! They got Kanye!”
words to describe love
saw a pretty plant through a store window
picked out a different one instead
that
I am writing you now from a city we scored with nomadic walking fourteen months ago. During that trip I had been ill.