Enjoy your life after I’m gone, Jon would tell Rachel. Go to the theater with rich widowers. Travel. Just promise me you won’t die first. But then her cancer returned, and she tried to prepare him, explaining where the passwords were filed, how to use Venmo and WAZE, telling him which of her widowed friends […]

  I was seventeen and a half when I took part in my first and only orgy. It was 1991. My family and I, originally from Belgium, lived in Rwanda, where my father worked as an epidemiologist mapping the HIV-AIDS pandemic. In November that year, Magic Johnson announced he was HIV-positive; a few weeks later, […]

You stay in the room with him the whole time. You only leave once to pee, and you let yourself linger, praying it’ll all be over by the time you get back. But, of course, it isn’t; it won’t be over for hours. Sometimes you’re alone with him. Most of the time, your father and […]

Your mother used to call you zaftig. Yiddish for: a full figured woman. Used mostly for women, though occasionally for men if they are a little chubby. You had long, beautiful brown wavy locks. Gorgeous hair, the women used to say, in their nasally Long Island Italian accents. Hairdressers would pose you for pictures like […]

What does it mean to be lying on my bed and feel nothing belongs to me? The world is…—   Detached? / / Simulacrum??   —have we finally reached the place where the movie I’m watching is more real than reality? The irony: the movie   is The General, from 1926—the movie is silent, is […]

My family forked mashed potatoes, peas, and Salisbury steak from Swanson’s TV dinners served on TV trays as a reporter’s urgent voice narrated poorly filmed scenes: green blur of jungle, young men toting guns and ammo, helmets heavy. I read comics as I ate: Batman, Richie Rich, Sad Sack. What did Vietnam have to do […]

January comes, and he forgets to look both ways when crossing the street. To say forget implies innocence, that it was not a choice. Light that is not quite morning not yet day sleeping just below the sky’s marbled skin. Morning is another way of saying is it over yet? Over his doorway, he staples […]

The Feast of Flowers: A Floral Game of Fortune Adams & Co, 1869   a flower appears in my dream not nodding they don’t always nod and reminds me of Trisha, a florist, who always told me— branches in a field of moss behind her— about arrangements, the structure of corsages, and the languages no […]

yourself behind John Rawls’ veil of ignorance. You know nothing about your gender, your country’s stance on faith or border, your age, your health, your assets. There, in such a swaddling, pronounce. It gets much harder, doesn’t it? Suddenly, you become a fan of the conditional. You write in pencil, not pen—   … [Click […]

In this photograph, he cannot move–– his right hand will pierce the sky, suspended, open, it cannot touch nor grip nor hold. The sun tangles sap in his golden hair, makes a lamp of his pink cheek––lighting   … [Click here to purchase a copy of the magazine]

Anna came in hot / told Mom she was having / an abortion / Mom said wait / and didn’t she know Mom and Dad / had been trying / to have another baby / and no they couldn’t / could she? / do it / for her mother? / Anna crackled and heaved molten […]

Help. I can’t stop opening my phone. Someone has placed my life on a high shelf where I cannot reach it. Help me. I keep toying with time like it isn’t a tiger on fire. Worse, my interest in the rhyme between satiety and society makes me full. When it doesn’t, I try to remember […]

I used to go to therapy once a week in a building full of therapists. I’d sardine into a tight elevator with other people going to see their therapists and we’d pardon ourselves quietly as we squeezed past each other into long hallways of locked doors. After my therapist opened her door with her half-smile—I […]