what a creature I would make of myself if I were able
to be known to be close to anything to be grounded
Naoko knew all too well how difficult it was to imbibe the air of a foreign culture. She had matriculated for a year at the University of Santa Barbara to study saxophone and marked each day as a progression from one shameful moment to the next.
It’s that night in the summer when your open windows mean nothing, when your bed is just stuffed heat
My daughter stood on tiptoe by the metal grocery cart and told me we needed two more bags of Colby Jack.
StreetRepeat is an online project curated by photographer Julie Hrudova that aims to recognize similarities and repetition within the genre of street photography. Hrudova arranges each entry on the
He had a disciplined approach to all things that surely came from the military. For breakfast it was always two hard boiled eggs – you imagined he swallowed them whole – but on the road, he allowed one indulgence: a short stack of pancakes.
It’s someone’s job to bury the dead.
“I was just thinking about you,” he emailed, a week later. “I’m rereading The Bell Jar.”
They were not in Brooklyn, California, a nice suburb outside D.C.
They were in West Virginia.
Hey, here’s an idea: how about you don’t spend half the period texting your boyfriend, and then he won’t dump you in the middle of class. Ever think of that? Maybe you talk to him like a human being instead of sending him a bunch of fucking sideways sad faces.
Two years later, I fell in love with a boy whose devotion to The Smiths matched my own.
He paints using the ashes of the towers in his watercolors.
Anthony was my reason for everything ... for South Park, for Tupac, for horror movies, for music that sounded like screaming, for my parents' vodka, my sister’s mascara, for all the girls I put down.
What we really wanted was to be older. What we really wanted was for something to happen, take us away from Florida and into the rest of our lives, but that doesn't happen for teenagers, not so much, and so we stood and waited.
The air before me
is the flavor of
an oat cake popsicle.
Or a shoe box.
Or the water sports
I’m not doing.
So I sign for
a prescription
while all the world
is water sporting
in
Civil War Day was a staple at Reginald Middle School, implemented somewhere in the shady patriotism of the Reagan era before carrying through as tradition.
On my last night in Zhenjiang, the three other laowai and I—each of us western foreigners: three upstaters and a guy from Toronto—walk the condominium-lined miles out to the banks of the Yangtze river.
When it began, he was deep in the hole, backhanding a two-hopper toward left field, and he rushed the throw, scooping it up, a cloud of dirt trailing off his glove like a cape as he raised his left
Fifty cents for tickets in the bleachers—then. Fifty cents a railroad car to Pittsburgh.
A “marvel” they’d called it. Three tiers of steel, the façade terracotta, the balls off
the deck, bouncing.
