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Sexuality
Hold Everything Lightly And Nothing Will Hurt Us
I’m driving north on I-95. The asphalt rushes beneath my tires, and when the speedometer hits eighty, the steering wheel vibrates in my hands, this little sedan protesting. The trees along the interstate burn orange and gold, and the northern half of the East Coast stretches ahead of me. I’m driving north on I-95 in October, which means I feel like someone is dying.
January 2012
excerpted from
Women In Love
He climbed out of the valley, wondering if he were mad. But if so, he preferred his own madness, to the regular sanity. He rejoiced in his own madness, he was free.
July 2011You Are Not Pretty
On the drive back to the dorm I think more about her comment. Pretty. Even the word sounds delicate, the tongue fluttering against the roof of the mouth like a trapped butterfly when it’s spoken. Alone in my room I take a look at myself in the mirror. I could almost be pretty — I am tall and long limbed, with blond hair and blue eyes — but I’m not.
June 2011
Love Shack
The only room in the house we can heat properly becomes the only room where I’ll let you undress me.
March 2011The Way She Walks
There are those who like to look for girls in the subways. Once I knew a girl, a Barcelonian, who was good at it. Prodigiously good. Oh, that Spanish swagger. She liked very much the challenge, she said. It is so like being on the stage, she said.
March 2011
A Brother’s Keeper
My sister Asia loved to kick my ass. The violence began when she was ten and I was eight, after our mother started dating Freddy, a tall, bulky, dark-skinned man who chewed his tongue between sentences and had a booming laugh that sounded like it could topple buildings and crush small boys.
February 2011
Four Beds
I turn off the lamp and ease myself into the hand’s-breadth space between Rob and the wall. In the dark he places my fingers on the supple frets of his ribs, showing me simple chord changes. He murmurs throaty Gaelic into my ear, and I rub his stomach as if he were a sleepy child. We fold against each other like the pages of a letter.
October 2010
Telling Him
I wanted to ask how many Pall Malls he was smoking a day. Had he finally switched to filters? Instead I took a shaky breath and said, “I’m gay. I’ve always been gay. My boyfriend’s name is Steven, and we’ve been together for five years. I know you think being gay is a choice, but it isn’t. It isn’t a choice at all.”
October 2010
excerpted from
Break Of Day
Now that little by little I am beginning to age, and little by little taking on her likeness in the mirror, I wonder whether, if she were to return, she would recognize me for her daughter, in spite of the resemblance of our features. She might if she came back at break of day and found me up and alert in a sleeping world, awake as she used to be, and I often am, before everyone.
September 2010
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