Sexuality

Standards of Care

Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:45 -0400

The reason Black women were used to develop the field of gynecology was because they were no more than property. They weren’t seen as people; they were just seen as things. The controlling of Black women’s bodies started with chattel slavery, but it continues today.

The Empty Room Inside Each of Us

Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:00 -0400

Crumb is always right, always the one telling the story, always the one who turns the drab, lonesome plains they call home into a world that’s dramatic and necessary.

The Feeding

Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:00 -0400

Some leeches have two jaws. Others have three. Some have teeth on their tongues. There are protective leeches who hover over their eggs, and leeches who carry their newborns in pouches like tiny kangaroos.

Rise

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400

I wasn’t about to tell Simon what happened. Buddy Sikes was one of the popular kids. Simon wouldn’t understand. Not because of his differences, but because he was still at the age where a clear line separated right from wrong.

Bars

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

On a playground, at a gymnastics meet, over an apartment window

Four of Cups

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

Maybe it was a mistake choosing such a solemn and contemplative place. Raising your voice above a whisper feels like an intrusion. The entrance branches into different rooms, leading you through multiple cultures and eras. You can move through time, follow the various paths available to you. You pick a direction and go.

The Trouble with Pillows

michaelmark3@gmail.com — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

She needs one medium / and a soft. He’s a soft.

Indecision

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0500

“Whether you go up the ladder or down it,” / says the Tao, “your position is shaky.”

Waterfall

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0500

Sex, to me, was like a solvent, cutting through layers of everyday grime. Without it, irritations accumulated with no way of wiping the slate clean; disappointment coagulated into distress. I felt forlorn, restless, and disconnected. Yet no matter how many times I sounded the alarm, my husband never seemed to hear me.

I Always Wanted a Wife

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0500

I didn’t mean to / eat your berries, he’d sing after eating / all the blackberries I’d been saving / for breakfast, and I couldn’t be mad then / because he’d made me laugh.

Tassajara

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0500

The abbot declared your beloved pit bull had Buddha nature, / so you carried her sixty muscled pounds to the mountain // monastery, where we sat sesshin and she ate wool socks, / a box of chocolates, and eight pages of Robert Aitken.

Don’t Be Alarmed

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0500

After her third glass of wine, Beatrice got up to look at Bert and Martin’s wedding photo, the one with the understated silver frame and the two of them making out like teenagers, Martin’s leg wrapped around Bert’s thigh. It was supposed to be a joke, but they ended up liking it. She stared at it and thought, This was the man I thought I was spending my life with.

The Cat Who Woke Me Up

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 12:00:00 -0400

The hierarchy that places humans above cats has broken down. I know, in a way I once didn’t, that cats and dogs and birds and bees and every living creature are conscious in a way that’s too hard for most of us to acknowledge. We’re all a bunch of narcissists who imagine that no life-form is quite as appealing as this one we call human. We’re unable to share the stage unless the animals are the supporting players.

Conversations With A Banana Spider

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

The smell of wild honeysuckle was everywhere, and the mango trees sagged with the weight of their fruit. I’d often hear the ripe ones fall to the street with a heavy, wet thud, or else bang off the metal roofs of outbuildings where homeless wanderers sometimes slept. This abundance of fruit made Loreto seem like an impossible place to starve, yet I saw a few souls who looked like they were trying their best to do just that. Was it legal, I wondered, to simply reach up and pull a ripe mango from someone else’s tree? Being a foreigner with money, I didn’t need to find out.

Walking Out

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0500

A peach-pickers’ strike, a crisis of faith, a paralyzing accident

Misunderstandings

Sat, 31 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Missed calls, misheard lyrics, mistaken identities

Transvestite Freak

briangresko@gmail.com — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Many confident, gorgeous men stare at me from the walls. They all seem to be wearing makeup. This is what a man can be too, I imagine them whispering. I’m nervous, but I want what they have.

Compare and Contrast

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:01:00 -0400

I just read The Diary of Anne Frank, about a girl who hid from the Nazis. There are many similarities but also differences between us: When she started the diary, she was thirteen, and I will be thirteen in August. We are both girls, and, like her, I have many secrets and depressed emotions. I never hated my mom the way Anne hated hers, but last spring I came close.

Dear Woman Who Tried to Pick Me Up at a Hollywood Club in 1998

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:05:00 -0400

What if I’d said yes? Imagine I go home with you that night, / when I’m twenty, and when we wake up in the morning, / you ask, You know you snore? You laugh at my / nighttime retainer, which I’ll wear for the rest of my life, and say, You look hot.

Sex in the In-Between

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:02:00 -0400

He looked hardy, and, God, I’m a sucker for hardiness. Show me a pocketknife and callused hands, and I’m ready to let you feel me up. His profile had a photo of him holding a giant golden eagle in Mongolia. Looking back, I can see it was partly the eagle I swiped right on.

Bridge Kid

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 00:05:00 -0400

As I was dabbing up cookie crumbs, the toddler appeared at the top of the stairs, sucking his thumb and crying. Only then did it occur to me that the boys had not been back up in some time. I patted his damp hair and went to check on his brothers.

Is This Desire?

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 05:00:00 -0500

Being honest or open about your Pornhub habits is not the same as telling someone, “I’ve just seen Call My Agent! on Netflix. I think you’d like it.” Part of the reason for that is that most people don’t spend terribly long on Pornhub.

Kissing Strangers in the Street

camerondezenhammon@gmail.com — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 05:00:00 -0500

Afterward I checked my phone. There were a dozen messages from three of my girlfriends who knew where I was. Like a chorus of Muses they asked, Are you alive? The dom was in the shower. I leaned against the glass-topped desk, my abandoned martini on the nightstand. I was very much alive.

Fantasy

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 05:00:00 -0500

Calling a 1-900 number, moving to the tropics, writing fan fiction

Sunbeams

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 05:00:00 -0500

From our earliest beginnings, we have been a nation obsessed with sex, titillated by it at the same time that we fear it, elaborating rules to contain it at the same time that we violate them.

Lillian Rubin

I Was Carrying a Velvet Wingback through the Streets of Houston

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 05:00:00 -0500

Who isn’t, at twenty-three, sexy? In never-been-kissed / cutoffs with buzzed hair. Did I even have a beard yet? / I looked like the virgin I was—was, at least, in all / the interesting ways. “Chicken,” they would’ve said / back then.

Basements

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 05:00:00 -0500

I was considered “good,” considered a “good influence.” It amazed me — like the cool feeling of Marshall’s tongue on my labia had amazed me — that I could possess all of these qualities; that I could be both warm and cold, virtuous and defiant; and that someone could love me for all of it.

Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 04:10:00 -0400

We are thirteen, my cousin Sally and me — girls on our own, on the roam, under the big skies of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. We’re here for the summer, living in a trailer that my aunt Helen has rented as part of a lengthy effort to seduce her law-school professor Phil, who lives next door.

The Portal

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 04:00:00 -0400

There had been no omens to suggest that, by going through the portal a second time, Amber would ruin the rest of her life: no bats circling the entrance nor enormous crows cawing ominously from nearby branches. Even if there had been bats and crows, I believe Amber would have gone anyway.

Portrait Of US

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 04:00:00 -0400

Monica Jane Frisell and Adam Scher have been traveling the U.S. in their “nomadic photo ark” . . . . attempting to find evidence of what we share by making large-format portraits of Americans from different states and recording short audio interviews with them.