“You ready?” the phlebotomist asks, holding out two vials. I nod and joke, “Sure, I’ve got enough.” He laughs. This is his kind of humor, “Of course you do—twelve gallons’ worth inside. And as soon as I draw this blood,” he tightens the elastic tourniquet around my upper arm, “your brain sends a signal to …
Listen to Natalie Villacorta read “Letting Go”: Section titles from Journey into Power: How to Sculpt Your Ideal Body, Free Your True Self, and Transform Your Life with Yoga by Baron Baptiste 1. Integration Series: Presence Patty, the owner of the yoga studio, paced at the front of the room. She was in her sixties, …
Listen to Myle Yan Tay read “Good to Be Busy”: We do not bury our dead in Singapore. We store them—in urns, in stacks, stacks too high to reach. We drop them in the ocean, little vessels sinking to the seafloor. My grandfather on my father’s side, who I call Kong Kong, is in a …
Compact Jazz recording, 1989Nina Simone, accompanying herself on piano Every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer.—Gaston Bachelard In 1980, my mother lay dying. Her death that July guided me north to a high Victorian mansion in upstate New York and, within just three days, to my beloved. He too was mourning—his marriage …
1 On the morning of December 24, 1979, a woman walking her dog near the Blue Ridge Parkway outside Boone, North Carolina, discovered my grandfather’s near-naked body lying in a ditch, one bullet in his head, nine bullets in his chest. He was sixty-eight; I was twelve. In the spring of the following year, on …
I needed money after the move. That was my excuse. But really I couldn’t bear to live in another house with it, knowing it was in the side table, in the drawer above my vibrator. Unfired for years—so much potential. The inheritance came with a small box of bullets, the cardboard foxed but nearly full, …
As a child I loved all things related to travel. Watching my mother study an open suitcase at home as she puzzled over how to fit an extra pair of walking shoes. The smell of my father’s small leather carry-on. The shiny floors of airports. The taste of Goldfish crackers while waiting to board. And …
A great many orchids, the endangered lady’s slipper for one, expend a portion of their energy creating pseudobulbs where they host ant colonies, because the formic acid ants spit at intruders gives the soil a pleasingly bitter pH. This is an example of myrmecophilia, a way of being in a love relationship with ants. Though …
This day ends in the kind of holiday where I feel knotted up in—remind me again who is the parasite and who the host? Hell-bind, strangleweed, beggarweed. A lot of people, no plants, no sky, in a small room where we tell each other how we are happy to be together. Hairweed, goldthread, devil’s-guts. A …
Maybe a skylight above this hospital bed? I could watch the moonrise and wish I did more of that sort of passive reckoning with the three kids, arriving mutually at our sacred nothingness. We’re always going, one thing to the next, mincing hours into minutes, minutes into seconds; if I sketched the effect, it’d be …