When twelve, I spent two weeks of summer in Mexico with botanists—a grad student, Dad, maternal grandparents—a collecting trip of mosses, with an earthworm dissertation sideline.
When twelve, I spent two weeks of summer in Mexico with botanists—a grad student, Dad, maternal grandparents—a collecting trip of mosses, with an earthworm dissertation sideline.
I was staring at a dwindling campfire.
The sun was relentless and we were restless.
“I have to pee,” I said.
My apartment is full. Crudité and cheese platters clutter the coffee table, all available chairs sag with grief.
If I could, I’d ask you what it meant.
I have to go, but . . . . A fire, it could happen.
The binds of anxiety taut across my chest.
Before the shots were fired, I screamed.
Yesterday morning in our kitchen, my husband pushed his coffee aside.
Margaret Thatcher’s grip on the nation was coming to an end, or so claimed the editorial piece I was reading.
You held my hand all week, sober, through the streets of Lahaina, the sun burning my shoulders and my neck where my hair is short from when I shaved it last fall.
I stand burning my hands in the bathroom sink of the property management office where I’m employed.
“Shove that pig’s foot a little farther into the fire” someone suggested from across the room.
I pose for my fake ID.
Pedro Pascal is the hottest person ever, she says.
Each Saturday night in New York City, wasted before arriving, five of us, mid-twenties, would cluster behind the plum velvet rope.
She’s 11 but still begs me to stay until she falls asleep.
I was a skinny, gangly 12-year-old kid with a bad haircut, sporting glasses held together by a Band-Aid and hope.
I pressed a powder blue V-neck against my torso, eyeing the Banana Republic mirror to approximate the fit.