Recent Publications

While I’ve intentionally started the year slowly in terms of writing, January has been a busy month for me from a publication standpoint.

I have three poems up at Corporeal Lit: When I Say I’m Fine; A House Near the Other Houses in the Middle of the Block; and another one from my One Good Thing series.

You can read them all here.

One Good Thing

is how fascia unwinds like a loosening vise. Hand to my belly, I know where the tissues want me to go and I follow; I wasn’t born to lead. I once answered a call from a man I thought was my dad’s friend, Brian. What are you wearing, Brian asked and I told him: denim shorts and a t-shirt. A ring of dolphins circling the Earth. SAVE THE PLANET printed on the back. Brian said that made him hard. Brian said now he’s touching himself. Brian said, no, he didn’t need to talk to my dad. I let these memories gather inside me—a thousand beginnings and middles in search of an end, winding like muscle fibers from a too-quickly turned head, a small knot where the neck meets the shoulder. Press it and a hot spark will travel down my spine. Press it and I’ll show you how to breathe through the pain. Didn’t you know I was born electric? A live wire. An old-fashioned fuse box. Someday I’ll be ash and you won’t know where to spread me. Save a bit for the man on the corner who likes to call me baby, a little pinch for the tip of his tongue—let him finally have a taste of me.

My story “Bulletproof” was also recently published at Ellipsis Zine. I wrote this story last summer, as my son was preparing to start Kindergarten and I was grappling with the anxiety of sending my kid off to school in a country that has had so many school shootings I can no longer keep track of all of them. So please be warned that this story addresses this topic.

I have a somewhat strange proximity to school shootings in that I share my birthday with the anniversary of the Columbine shooting. In 1999, this was a fairly unique trait, though at the rate we are going, it feels like it won’t be long until having a birthday that somehow miraculously does not share its date with a mass shooting will be the true rarity. I turned 14 on April 20, 1999, and spent much of the day in stunned horror. It is strange to have a day that is celebratory for you become inextricably linked with tragedy, though it obviously happens, as anyone born on September 11th could tell you. The way horror and joy are so often asked to share the same space has always intrigued me in part because I mark my years alongside this tragedy, each anniversary bringing the footage back to our screens and raising the question, “how has it been x years since Columbine and we still haven’t done anything to stop school shootings?”

Fear and excitement too must live side-by-side in so many of our experiences, as they did on my son’s first day of Kindergarten when I watched him walk through the school doors and felt both the thrill and terror of having reached this moment in his maturation. As they do every morning when I wave goodbye and shout “I love you too” as he hops on the back of our e-bike, and he and his dad take off for school. As they round the corner and disappear from sight, my mind can’t help but briefly flash to a small prayer that it won’t be the last time I see him alive.

You can read “Bulletproof” here.

And to help bring an end to gun violence, consider donating to Everytown.

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