The guest-room wallpaper has a muted shine like expensive gift wrapping. The bed—which has been pushed to the back wall—is covered with bulging white pillows and a hand-hooked cotton coverlet. It is a feminine room, nicely appointed with dried flowers in pottery vases, vague and colorful prints on the wall, psychology books on a low shelf. Everything is as it…
It wasn’t until the bachelorette partiers were on their third round of Never Have I Ever that Violet, sitting under the Cactus Cove’s pulsating array of strobe lights, looked around and realized she couldn’t find any hot guys anywhere. “Lemme see here,” said the bride-to-be Olivia, her eyes droopy. She’d already had a couple shots and some passion fruit rum…
I stood at the threshold of my daughter Eliza’s studio apartment, staring at a nude statue with enormous breasts and a giraffe-like neck that held open the apartment door. I tried not to study the statue, turning instead towards my daughter’s side of the room: a painting on the wall with zigzagging gray lines that wasn’t Eliza’s style, dresser…
I wanted to show my daughter something wild and free before it was too late. But I’m a shit mother, and that’s an inescapable fact. It’s in my bones, passed down in my family over hundreds of years, like other families pass down their sourdough starters. Rae was remarkably quiet on the drive south from Santa Cruz. I’d expected her…
Trigger Warning: Domestic Violence I’ve been a bird since Tuesday. That’s the day Lucy usually comes over. She couldn’t make it this week and at first, I was glad. I didn’t want her to see me like this, even though it was all her idea. Now it’s Friday and I’m enjoying myself.…
The winter of 1989, it snowed on our yearly pilgrimage to Dotty’s. My grandmother, Dorothy, had asked me to call her Dotty years ago. “I am too young to be a grandmother,” she said in her smoker’s drawl. “No one would believe you. You may as well call me Dotty so as not to confuse anyone.” My mother and father…
It is Easter morning, one year after Brianna’s life-saving neurosurgery. We are standing in a pew at the congregational church in our hometown, to which we had walked that morning. Long banners hang from the vaulted ceiling of the sanctuary proclaiming Alleluia, and pots of tall lilies surround the communion table. The choir and congregation are mid-song, a big, glorious…
HOW TO MEDITATE drift your skull to lilacs crest your brow with pineapple sage dream rose into your nostrils wake crying butterfly pea and cornflower fill your lungs herbaceous inhale parsley exhale mint rinse your hair with rice water let the dark of your insides deepen plum and charcoal where light won’t reach fade your bruises with buttercup whiten your…
I’m tired how murder follows us how we’re an all too accessible play area for anger’s russian roulette merry go round and how this, patronizing, cautionary life of smiles and apathy for our death waits freer than we ever were sweeping us vagrantly in riptides complacency in a glass of tap water poison in flint from slave patrol city minders…
We go together like loofah and linen— compostable, antimicrobial— soil cake in the gut house, nice parasites with stylet quips, sealing lips from disease. Mutuals suggest we left our dust to mingle— skin cells, hair shed— without banter laughter balm, and yogic twister lip calms. Or maybe you’re the night sun and I’m the fun jungle, mistaking fungal for lunar—…