Browse Topics

My Sister’s First Boyfriend

Turning

Pulling down my pants was not enough. I had to let them fall below my knees and then carefully, so as not to lose my balance, turn as if on a vertical spit, heated by Tommy’s eyes.

How To Find Him

Listen to your mother’s story about playing baseball at fourteen and hearing her own mother say to a friend, I don’t know what I’ll do about Martha’s looks. Wonder if your mom’s speaking in code. Is she going to say that you’re pretty, or has she just told you why she never will?

The First Time

A Donny Osmond doll, an abortion, a clear-cut

Roommates

Sacred underclothes, a sheer negligee, a note pinned to a mattress

Virus

We hold our support-group meetings in a room with Oriental carpets and deep green easy chairs. I arrive a few minutes early to set out chips, cookies, a foil tray full of fried-chicken dinners, and a liter bottle of Coke. Food is a big draw. One by one, they drift in.

Ending It All

i called my brother a fag / and he ended it all / at fifteen he was peeled from the shiny red snow / fully nude / with his dick in his hand

The Telephone

When I was growing up in Magdaluna, a small Lebanese village in the terraced, rocky mountains east of Sidon, time didn’t mean much to anybody, except maybe to those who were dying, or those waiting to appear in court because they had tampered with the boundary markers on their land. In those days, there was no real need for a calendar or a watch to keep track of the hours, days, months, and years.

Crossing Borders

An Interview With Richard Rodriguez

My grandmother always told me that I was hers, that I was Mexican. That was her role. It was not my teacher’s role to tell me I was Mexican. It was my teacher’s role to tell me I was an American. The notion that you go to a public institution in order to learn private information about yourself is absurd. We used to understand that when students went to universities, they would become cosmopolitan. They were leaving their neighborhoods. Now we have this idea that, not only do you go to first grade to learn your family’s language, but you go to a university to learn about the person you were before you left home. So, rather than becoming multicultural, rather than becoming a person of several languages, rather than becoming confident in your knowledge of the world, you become just the opposite. You end up in college having to apologize for the fact that you no longer speak your native language.

My Block

Frolicking in DDT; learning the constellations, remembering a clubhouse initiation