I wheeled into the Lufthansa check-in line two hours early behind a bald, sixty-something dude decked out entirely in Patagonia-wear.
When the garbage man rides by, I pull up my top.
On Valentine’s Day, a group of fifth grade girls wave at her in the library.
Can I touch your beard? I ask my best friend, and he says yes, but I’m shy suddenly, wondering if it will feel prickly under fingers that haven’t touched a man, any man, since coming out in 1989.
I can still smell the gasoline, feel the airbags deploy, and the crushing weight of the metal pinning me down.
PLOP. The wasp plunges from the heavens into Maria’s glass of cider, right in front of our eyes.
“I rolled a six.” “Okay,” says the GM, “you get a tent.”
I ease the pressure to coax the string to fuller resonance.
. . . zooming through Allahabad’s lawless traffic, my bicycle racing sixteen-wheeler trucks, I’m navigating Google Maps with one hand, readjusting my N95 dustmask with the other.
. . . we’re almost leg to leg, sipping cocktails in a candlelit lounge.
I take a hit and remember why D.A.R.E. exists.
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.