Prose, Poetry, and Art since 1956
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…
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 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…
55% Cotton A tight weave, but a natural fiber for the air to flow through. You can scrub along the grain line and hang me to dry. A summer breeze will release the wrinkles. I’m the nine patch quilt top, pieced by your nana’s bridge partner and you keep it for those nights when the heater doesn’t turn on. Your go-to button up for Thursday’s…
When my sister leaves, she leaves me with a toad. She makes good on a childhood threat. When we were little, she, a round-cheeked angel, and I, older and mean, used to say that when she grew up she would join the army. “No.” I was controlling, even then, fiercely unkind but fiercely protective. “Yes.” she’d insist, and to me this implied she would go…