The Mexican tetra fish is an anomaly. While some river-dwelling tetras are able to regenerate their heart tissue, cave-dwelling tetras only grow scar tissue over the damage. My heart goes out to the cave-dwelling fish. Some of us can only do our best to survive the damage.
You had never been taught why you had a belly button. Now you understand that your navel is the physical scar of your expulsion from your mother’s body.
There are no more blonde women with red lipstick left to walk slick cobblestones alone. The run in her stocking says that the wars have ended. An old man wipes a soiled handkerchief across his brow, smiles at nothing.
Teacher who sits through active shooter training in the auditorium and is told to examine her classroom for projectiles to throw at a shooter.
Teacher who practices throwing a stapler in her empty classroom.
Teacher who buys a new stapler because the old one broke after she threw it just one time.
Someday, she says, the light of other stars will be too far away to reach us. There won’t be enough time left in the universe. And the Earth will be gone then, long gone, but if it wasn’t you could watch. You could watch as each of those little pinpricks of light went out.
This dream is a teenaged revision of terrestrial bodies /
that do not harm. Our eyelids like foldaway flowers. My heart like a
gosling I follow /
expecting your mouth pulling north.
Still, tomorrow the mud /
will evaporate dust back into the sky & the moon /
will be a pill & catch on the throat of the horizon, /
& this helps no one.
Now we realize. We’ve spent decades trying to undo our ecological handiwork, our scaling up, but at least we have the silk everything: silk blouse, silk pants, silk gloves, silk scarf, the prized silk slip cut on the bias.
When Ma burned herself feeding a needle into an open flame, she cursed in her mother tongue, the language of mountains: a lifeline I would choose to loosen.
"Mom says if I’m a dragon I’ve got fire enough in me to make the beaches here warm, so maybe I should share more. I haven’t thought of a good come back yet."
"(I’m trying to apologize to the trees.) (I’m trying not to let the rings be parenthetical to the story.) (The rings make the story.) (I’m here to study the story.)"
"One day, much later, I learned that life was just too plain for him. He had to squeeze and shape it like clay, until he felt it was something worth living."
For Chloé Cooper Jones, author of the memoir Easy Beauty, life is an endless experience of being studied by others. Peers debate the value of her life, strangers stop and stare, and doctors announced that she will never have a normal life.
"My mother would not rest in her grave if she knew I’d soon be drinking what they drink, but I’ve given up so much to move all the way here for a better future."
“‘Haste ye back,’ the children say to day-tripping families on their August holidays while the adults smile, nod and wave. ‘Join us in December for Crab Grab.’”
"The jealousy permeating our college quickly morphed into resentment, a simmering stew of indignant glances and stiff smiles, laid thicker than the summer the air conditioning leaked."
"How does someone process and grieve being separated from their entire biological family — by distance, language, and culture? What does that feel like?"
We live in a world with so many distractions, but syntax, getting the words to work together to form a new thing, pulls me out of the chaos and keeps me coming back.
"When we are on the receiving end of news, there is a lack of transparency, and that actually gives birth to indifference. How do I feel about someone when I don't even know their name?"
“There are poems that teach us how to read in such a manner as to eclipse our normal perceptions, our normal state of being. That's something that I think is really powerful about the hybrid form: you can portray things not just through words but through presentation.”
"But there is something particularly adorable about senior dogs. They look sad and tired yet tinged with delight, much like how I feel, tinged with how I always wish I felt."
"You doused your noodles in chili sauce to clear your clogged sinuses, and your ankle was hanging over the edge of the bed, careless and gentle, the tendons relaxed, the soft hollow of skin like stone smoothed out."
"I closed my eyes and caught a whiff of Aiko’s Dove anti-dandruff shampoo. For a second, the idea that my absence hurt her too filled me with a bestial joy, then faded to pain at the idea of her pain."
"This is what also delights: the stripe on the bottom of the pool, the stripes on the side of my suit, the snap of the rubber cap, my spine snapping into the turn, my feet snapping at the wall."
"On the desk pencils are scattered. A laptop rests half open, the current tab on the internet opened to a WikiHow article about resurrection ceremonies. An unopened envelope lays on the desk, addressed to you."
"Eventually, it became clear that this is really a love story — as much as what it means to love and accept oneself as it is about romantic love with another person."
"My number one ambition, always, is to create a community in which competition is banished (there shall be no "best") and personal growth is celebrated. Within such a trusting, open, can-I-say-loving environment, extraordinary things unfold."
"Hives become hidden, and we feel the sensation of endlessly tumbling through language, through its aural folds, its dimensional chronologies, and its perpetual limitations."
"Episodic yet easy on the eyes, Eating Lightbulbs could as easily be consumed slowly, steadily, and over a longer period of time as it could be read in one fell swoop . . . but perhaps that depends on one’s appetite for broken glass."
"I hope my work will inspire readers to think of how the mistreatment of nature leaks into our day-to-day lives. I want people to think of how patterns in our personal lives echo patterns that occur in the natural world."
"Environmental activism must, in my opinion, go hand-in-hand with social justice efforts; it must be integrated into the project of dismantling power structures and in service of creating more equitable societies."
"Sometimes it takes months to return to a piece because I need time to become the version of myself who knows how the piece ends. It might be a new life experience or friendship — or temporal distance from an experience or relationship ending — that helps contextualize the missing pieces, and I love the process of discovery that comes with writing."
"Protagonist Owen grows up hiding the most intimate, tender, and evolved relationship of his young life under his T-shirts: a talking java finch named Gail."
"A lot of times we writers create these beautiful pieces that highlight trauma, and then we share that work, and we live in those trauma-tinged words, and it feels immense."
I wish I could tell you exactly when they’ll appear. They used to come with the sunrise every morning, shouting their flourish into the skies, a salute like something you’d hear at an Olympic opening ceremony:
If I took all of them and placed them in a sifter, and shook, then tapped the sides to separate the smallest sources of pain from the largest, I don’t know what would fall and what would remain.
Beneath translucent lids, its eyes were purple hull peas. Directly above, the nearest branches were much too high to reach, so we filled the shoebox with grass and twigs.
i am lost in the daze of my grandfather’s friday fish and whipped cream on dessert. i’m not sure he recognizes me most days, but still he clutches my hand and tells me he loves me.
She hasn’t kissed anyone for seven years, and though with Diane she doesn’t feel the same electric desire coursing through her body that she had felt for the men she’d been with romantically in years past, she feels something. Something she didn’t know she could feel. Something she still hasn’t named.
I always thought she looked best, healthiest, happiest, when she was in a tank top and the
dirty baggy jeans we swapped back and forth until they fell completely apart, a joint in her
mouth and an axe in her hands, splitting firewood for a winter that she probably wouldn’t end up
sticking around for.
“You’re wrong,” he finally said. “There’s no hell. Today is all we have.” The man blinked twice, then walked away shaking his head, a small man carrying on his shoulder the weight of a world without redemption.
You take your son home to California with you for visits and one day your son peels you like the tangerines in your parents’ yard and you step out clean and open, nutritious, and your seeds can be planted to make new tangerines.
Something about Sally’s shadowy gait is familiar to the young woman’s dog and it seizes and yelps like a cut wire, emits unsettling dog-screams of deep yearning, runs in large loops to and from the window, my friend my friend it is my friend.
They had told each other they loved one another before, writing it in chicken scratch inside Valentine cards and muttering it before saying goodbye at school. This felt different.
Her dad’s old ‘55 Dodge Lancer sat beside Harold’s truck in the cinder block garage—cracked seats, mouse nests in the vents. It still reeked of unfiltered Camels.