Steeped in my English major but flirting with medicine, I sat on my dorm room floor and listened through the phone to my father’s cynical perspective on being a doctor.
The chill seeps into my flesh, prickles at the skin revealed by too-short sleeves and chills the layer of sweat just beneath.
I peer off the deck at the swimming pool far below, its underwater light illuminated purple.
"Marital status, single," I say, shaking my head and smiling coyly at my lover in the other armchair.
Sitting on the cliffside bench, I watch the sun slide below the horizon.
I watch him sit lotus-legged on the thin carpet that hides the stained marble as he breathes in air . . .
I was only nineteen when, every Friday, you would stop by Jacque Michelle’s, the chic boutique where I worked on the Hill, to deliver curated music cassette tapes.
The judges of the contest praised my drawing.
My husband and I lounged on the couch watching YouTube highlights from Stanley Kubrick’s movie The Shining.
With powdered sugar dusting our faces and fingers from the half-moon cookies we spent half the day baking, we turn on Channel 22.
I remember, for my first 18 years, I couldn’t fathom kissing.
Mom blow-dries my hair into straw.
They call me The Dunce, but I know the answer.
As I approached my parents’ tailgate, I spotted him immediately: my prodigal brother, fresh from eight months in rehab.
Four upper teeth, three lower, You bounce, smiling, leaning on the red Arabian armrest passed down from three families.
"Why always give me the chicken leg?" my five-year-old asked as I placed it in her bowl.
“Lisa,” I yelled as I toweled dry, fresh from the shower.
Trisha Yearwood’s “She’s in Love with the Boy” plays and suddenly it’s 1996 and I’m in the grocery store with chill bumps on my sunburnt legs.
I streamed a new NBC show about a neurodivergent doctor.
Pink and black dots constellate the toilet bowl.