Like Lewis and Clark, I learned it’s okay To be gay When you’re stuck on a boat. Like Lewis and Clark, I went out with my friend. Like Lewis and Clark I looked at a map. Like Lewis and Clark, I discovered something, Ass. Raechel Segal is a poet, playwright, actor, and improviser. Playwriting credits include "Dykes on Wheels" (The Tank, NYC), "We Can Be Queeros" (Hudson Guild Theatre, NYC), "Moon Juice" (Manhattan Repertory Theatre, NYC), "The Best of Bushwick" (Manhattan Repertory …
How awful, I say in tweet and reply. How terrible. Disgusting! Enraging. Why? What a monster. How awful. My heart. Round face, single tear emoji. What is even happening? Who are we? I heart the posts that share my mood, I heart the posts that implicate me. I put my phone down and take out the chicken that has been defrosting on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator for nearly three days. I begin to ease out of my worry. I begin to reach for the salt, white pepper, without thinking of …
Let's say I throw the pebble and the pebble is you gray and irregular slightly more jagged at one end than the other the ripples then in the pond are also you or you-shaped somewhat anyway let's say you-influenced at least at first that first one that pushes out the rest shoulders out the rest of the ripples surprising the face of the pond confusing the sky's calm reflection startling the fish beneath the surface just there topsy-turvying perhaps the water …
“When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city.” —Italo Calvino Desires, according to Calvino, are already memories. This is a way of saying that language is a fist of snakes, that it is too late for remorse if you are watching another invisible city burn. My throat is a thing of contradiction: too many unoiled syllables collecting into sharpness. The autumn of my birth, my mother tells me, You must know this— your name means harvest. And so another city is …
whitening the water till everything began to glow a scattering of pearls and pieces of beauty crunching between molars studded on the table of their broken dreams and voice of utter solitude flashed from the reddened teeth of their dying home where every jot and tittle of pain has turned into sorrow and wrath as the last gusts of sinking air drifted through the hole-punched painkiller pill mill sifting, hand-milled scarlet dust over the ravine of the wild crystal stair David …
bring me sleep in builders’ buckets used for wet cement- pour it over my bed, my back. bring me sleep on a measuring spoon, a gleaming elixir tipped & drooled into my mouth, my ears. bring sleep in sheets of foil wrapped around my feet like two plucked birds prepared for roasting. bring me sleep in the first birthday card you ever wrote me; its brash expletives of love making an abuse of me. bring sleep from under your car hood. funnel its fume in one long gauze of grey gas. bring …