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Gender
Boy
When my brother was twelve, I found six mice nailed to the wall of the abandoned tree house in the woods near our apartment. He spent a lot of time there. It seemed to me the little mouse faces were frozen in agony. As though they’d been alive when he’d hammered the nails through them.
August 2018
All The While The Women
Days & nights I carried two weapons everywhere. / I wore pockets of bullets / across my chest. I wasn’t / of age.
July 2018The Feminist Club
We experience two kinds of violence: the violence done to us by others, and the violence we do to ourselves. The latter hurts more, because it’s of our own making.
June 2018
What I Heard
You do not have cramps. That’s invented by women who want attention. We don’t go in for that kind of malingering — that’s what it is. You have cramps because you eat too fast. You don’t chew.
June 2018
My Sister Blazed Through Her Life
When she was young, she had a small part in a play, but everyone looked at her. Dull her down, the director said, throw an old coat over her. They did, but everyone still looked at her.
May 2018People Are Starving
We didn’t know what it was to be desired. We didn’t know what girls’ bodies were supposed to look like. We just knew it was better for us if nothing stuck out too far.
May 2018
Goodbye, Patriarchy!
It’s like the French Revolution. One by one, prominent men are wheeled out to the guillotine and dispatched. Of course, the present-day “deaths” are metaphorical. Garrison Keillor is still alive, just out of sight. But “Garrison Keillor,” the charming, folksy, self-deprecating Midwestern humorist, is dead.
March 2018
See You At The Impeachment
We may survive Trump, as we did Ronald Reagan, or we may not. My first goal, now that the election is over, is to renew my expired passport under the lame-duck Obama presidency. If Trump really is Mussolini, I may finally fulfill my longtime dream of living in coastal Sri Lanka.
August 2017
Knockers Up
We Edwards women are proud of our bodies. My mother has a lovely ass. My aunt has champion ankles. My cousin has long, thick hair worth climbing. And Mae Edwards, my eighty-seven-year-old grandmother, still has the world’s most magnificent breasts.
July 2017
Scotty
The story begins with a message on Facebook: “I’m looking for Wayne Scott from the Baltimore area. A Navy veteran, about seventy-two or seventy-three. A relative of yours by any chance?” A phone call to my mother confirms that my father, whose name I inherited and who was close-lipped about his past, had dropped out of high school and joined the Navy when he was seventeen.
January 2017
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