YOU’VE GOT A MATCH!
Are your friends writers as well? (is poetry all you talk about?) / Define friendship (my IG friends are closer to me than God)
Girls Bloom to Burn
“My grandma calls it / your bloom. Once I saw a used pad / on the bathroom floor, and the stain / did kind of look like a flower.
Nadine’s Fat Baby
“That’s when Nadine started to act as though she were built superior, even though she didn’t have the widest hips, hadn’t even shown that much before he was born, her stomach more of a suggestion than an assertion of pregnancy.”
Do I Have Post Partum Depression?
“Form 4: Self-Care Checklist
Instructions: as a new mom it is very important for you to take self-care seriously. Please mark each form of self-care you participate in. Please see footnotes for extra detail:”
watching skylines die or the taller our tombs
“I am reminded one morning in montparnasse cemetery / searching for markers in the fog with my new family”
Heron Wading through the Shallows
“‘You don’t have to say anything.’ The blue heron is picking its way through the shallows, and they watch him finding his food. Charles said, ‘There was one time I had to kill a man with a knife.’”
Wish Upon a Bathsheba
“…you think about how the prettiest girl in your Catholic middle school / compared the bodies of girls who touched the bodies of boys to the body of Bathsheba.”
to da lady who stay looking down her high makamaka nose at us
“…you never see kids using food stamps? Are we not rich enough for you with our brown hands gripping colorful paper that is not quite money...”
Crueler Than Fiction
“ Like the sun, God / follows him home. Like the moon, he never marries. Chooses to adopt. / His father calls with bad news. The phone a brick in his hand.”
Angelica at the Rock (After Ingres)
“The closer you get, the more the emptiness emerges. What is keeping it all together? she wonders. And Who decides where it all goes? And What’s a girl gotta do to get off this shithole rock?”
Nothing’s Going to Happen
“Nell gurgled around the thing in her mouth. ‘There’s nothing to fear,’ Dr. K said. ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’ Dr. K positioned the tool near Nell’s eye. It gleamed like a horrible tooth. One last time, Nell tried to speak, not with words but with movement.”
The Vigilance of Kristy Baker
“So she tried to chalk the hairs up to the Philz Coffee barista that he raved about at the new location near his office. But Kristy couldn’t stop seeing Carrie Bradshaw as the barista.”
White Chocolate
“At night, when she is sleeping in the bed beside me, I pretend to sleep. When she wakes, it takes her a while to realize her lips and nose are gone.”
i dream my dad dies and no one finds him
“worms inch
his nostrils and build
homes eggs hatch behind
glass eyes mother tells
me to pull the meat
off the bones it’ll
freeze well i puke”
Crying at the Eras Tour
“That’s the face of someone with a broken heart. One teenager peeks over her shoulder at the women behind her. But she can’t be heartbroken, the teenager says, pointing towards the stage. Look at the way she glows.”
Hot Tick Summer
“They avoid the family-friendly path, brush past the hikers beware sign and into the tallgrass Fire Loop where anything can happen from the waist down.”
Chicken Husbandry
“You decided at the age of nine when your mom left your dad in Chicago and moved back in with her parents in Hawaii, giving you a dozen chicks in his place, that if you couldn’t do this you had no business eating meat, or raising animals, and should probably leave the island altogether.”