In Urdu, there exists a phrase—nala-e-bebak: an audacious sorrow. 2007: When my grandmother died, she turned into a parrot. An obscure ritual was performed to determine what type of body she would be reborn in after departing from this one. An earthen pot was filled with river mud and sand, lidded by a muslin cloth and left to sit untouched for a couple of days….
Ruins & Stage Three
Ruins A child, two sizes too small. An improvised bomb on loan from the city’s museum of modern art. A plagiarist on the street corner tapping veins for the aftermarket haiku. A chamber maid removed from the chamber. A dream where a naked groomsman asks for sour cream. The bruised grape of a borrowed afternoon. Another word for hard bread thickening in the mud. Stage…
Liminality, Organic Ambrosia
The lingua franca around here is produce. In the morning they arrive in droves, whole crops of apples drifting down the receiving ramp, packed breast to breast, these stubborn and hopeful things. Money and I unload the shipment silently, half under the thought fog of morning, half under the shy recoil of accented speech, but we speak in our own way: I offer the fruit…
Grapefruits, Melons, Cannonballs
All of my friends are cutting off their breasts. Top surgery. Breast reduction. The trans and the genderqueer and the top-heavy alike. It’s got me taking stock. Grapefruits, melons, cannonballs. Bazoongas, sweater puppies, jugs. Fun bags, wocka wockas—god knows, I don’t love them. But they define me. I’ve tried to weigh them. Laid myself face-down on the floor and tried to thrust one onto a…
The Shortest Short King & Tourist
The Shortest Short King is the same height as an Emperor Penguin, a clown car, a median fourth-grader on roller skates, and though his stature isn’t a punchline necessarily, he behaves like Grade-A dickhead, buys all the beer at the pub, drives his monster truck without a license and crashes into public buildings, so, of course, we think about his size a lot, because it…