Strawberry Sale
My mother texts me a link to a local news story: “8-year-old boy dies after eating strawberries from school fundraiser.” I sit on the toilet, bleeding, as I read this headline. I am 6 weeks postpartum, and my period has already returned. Not just some spotting – a full, heavy period. My body, ready to go. My almost-8-year-old boy just… Read more →
Iced Out Hell
All humans have the right to magic, brujas y brujos. The spells important in the late night fadings of consciousness, trying to go to sleep by taking the position of a sleeping body. The theme of the class is Trouble. I’ve been in it, I’ve tried to get into it. The waitlist was too long. In the night, in a… Read more →
Memories of a Mexican Boy from El Paso: Crossing Over into White America
Part 1: Trying to Become White My mother emigrated from Mexico with her parents around the Mexican Revolution, and my father was born in Valentine, Texas in 1913 soon after his parents had also emigrated from Mexico. I was born in El Paso just across the Rio Grande, learning later I was a Chicano or first-generation Mexican American. The white… Read more →
It’s Just Sparkling Anxiety
I am terrified that B— will die, and that his mother will not think to call me when he does, not knowing that we are partnered because he doesn’t talk about me at the dinner table. He is an intensely private person. She wouldn’t even tell my grandmother, he tells me, over Zoom, one night, when I express this fear…. Read more →
What the English Teacher Learns
The new girl asked for scissors How was I to know? Someone reported a pool of blood Coming from the bathroom stall *** The American Psychological Association tells us more people self-injure than we think. The white teen female is the face of deliberate self-inflicted injury, but almost half of all cutters are male. Race, economic status, and culture… Read more →
How To Change The Past
Nine Lives: A Story of My Father, My Cat, and of Us All
The day before my father passed away recently, one of my two cats disappeared. I adopted her and her brother from the humane society last August, when both were about three months old. They were homeless but fortunate animals, their cuteness, eliciting human kindness. The sister and brother came in different colors, not birds of the same feather. One would… Read more →
morphemic segment as synovial joint
Body Count
Body Count is a heavy metal band fronted by Ice-T. Twenty-one years after their founding they received a Grammy Award for the song “Bum Rush” which features lyrics such as “It’s all twisted, the game is bent / Still no clean water in Flint.” Between 1986-98 there were four Hollywood movies named Body Count. The highest audience score on Rotten… Read more →