My lover from the future says I am dead in his time. My lover from the future also says the present me is of “lower energy density.” He shoots lasers in wind tunnels for a living: dissociates naturally occurring nitrogen, watches the atoms recombine in an artificial fluorescence, measures the movement under a high-speed camera. A contrived reunion of tiny things, I think. I …
The children are, at last, asleep. Like bright brass plates we’ve stamped them with new names: Peter, Rachel, Levi, Esther, Aaron, Ruth. Each day’s lesson is how to forget a bend of river, word for willow, your grandmother’s hands. We cut your hair. Release it easily as smoke. I promise sadness doesn’t last if you let it go. Learn this new word heaven, a better life that awaits you it is this one. Jory Mickelson is the author of WILDERNESS//KINGDOM, the inaugural winner of the …
yesterday, grace & i drank white wine in bed. it tasted light, like new friendship. we counted good songs & epiphanies on our fingers but the next morning when i smelt the bed stains, the night was already of the past. my aunt is famous for saying life is a series of souvenirs so pack wisely, but my pockets already feel heavy. i cannot bear leaving anything behind. my memory box is kept at arm’s reach – this note from my best friend in grade six, this my freshman essay on world war …
Under the artificial but highly industrialized canopy that was the D-train running directly over our heads, we stood outside for our first heart-to-heart conversation. It was summer in New York City, distinct in humidity and activity from summers anywhere else in the world, and the workshop process for your Black queer theater group with its five playwrights under fellowship had begun. Monumental was the fact that we were Black writers commissioned for actual pay, read: real money; …
We aren’t supposed to go near the pit on burning days, but it’s never hard to figure out. Last week, for example. David Finster wasn’t at the bi-monthly beautification meeting to petition, yet again, for replacing grass with decomposed granite in public spaces, Christina Hotchkiss didn’t show up at the neighborhood potluck after promising to bring the “world’s best salad,” and Melanie Birch started coming out of her house alone in the morning, no longer needing to carpool with her …
“The bottom of the sea is less cruel than you’d think,” she tells me, four drinks deep at The Schooner Hannah (the dive bar, not the boat), leaning in to play with the links of my secondhand crucifix. She’s the great-great-grand daughter of shipwrecked Cape Verdean whalers who didn’t drown, somehow, but instead built, from wet sand, tidewrack, driftwood & clamshell, houses at the sea’s nadir. They fell for subaquatic fiancées & interbred, she tells me, making a life in which …