English Homework on stories about other

 Complete the homework that is detailed in the document, using the short stories that are in another document. 

REVIEW THE INFO WORD DOCUMENT BEFORE COMPLETING THE ASSIGNMENT!

DUE DATE: TODAY @5 PM!

HW 1

HW_ “OTHER” ESSAYS

DIRECTIONS

Complete the responses below in a Word or Google document and then copy and paste your answers in a new thread on the
discussion board:

– Make sure that number and format your answers to match the questions below. 5

– Please copy and paste your answers in the actual post (do not attach them as files; this makes

it much easier to read).

– Post your answer to #2 as a reply to that student’s original post.

1. SELECTED “OTHER” ESSAYS 10

Briefly scan through the selected essays on “other” and then choose three (3) pieces that you might like to use as models for
your own piece of flash nonfiction about a topic not directly related to place, family, or work and then complete the
following:

Note that for our nonfiction project we will be using model essays just as we did for the poetry

project. 15

Note that for this project, we will be reading selected essays about place, family, work, and

style; you will need to choose two different models on different themes to develop your

nonfiction project.

“[INSERT TITLE of FIRST SELECTED “OTHER” ESSAY]” BY [INSERT AUTHOR’S NAME] 20

What makes the style of this short essay stand out from the others you have read?

1a. Line [#]: “[Insert passage from that best illustrates the essay’s style: 50-75 words]”

1b. Line [#]: “[Insert passage from that best illustrates the essay’s style: 50-75 words]”

1c. What stands out to you about the style of this piece and why would this make for interesting

style to model for your own “other” essay? 50-75 words. 25

“[INSERT TITLE of SECOND SELECTED “OTHER” ESSAY]” BY [INSERT AUTHOR’S NAME]

1d. Line [#]: “[Insert passage from that best illustrates the essay’s style: 50-75 words]”

1e. Line [#]: “[Insert passage from that best illustrates the essay’s style: 50-75 words]”

1f. What stands out to you about the style of this piece and why would this make for interesting 30

style to model for your own “other” essay? 50-75 words.

“[INSERT TITLE of THIRD SELECTED “OTHER” ESSAY]” BY [INSERT AUTHOR’S NAME]

1g. Line [#]: “[Insert passage from that best illustrates the essay’s style: 50-75 words]” 35

1h. Line [#]: “[Insert passage from that best illustrates the essay’s style: 50-75 words]”

1e. What stands out to you about the style of this piece and why would this make for interesting

style to model for your own “other” essay? 50-75 words.

40

HW 2

2. MODELING

Choose one (1) of the three essays you selected above and use it as a model to start a brief draft of your own essay about
work (either your own work or the work of someone or multiple people you have observed closely for an extended period). 45

2a. “Title of Selected Essay to Model”

2b. “Tentative Title for Your Own Essay”

2c. Develop 100-200 words of a draft of CNF about a topic that is not directly related to place,

family, or work (though it may address one of those topics indirectly).

50

3. RESPONDING

Scan through the students with other posts and reply to a student who had an especially strong piece of micro-nonfiction and
post the following: 55

3a. “Insert most compelling line from the student’s piece.” (nouns & verbs in bold)

3b. “Insert second most compelling line from the student’s piece.” (nouns & verbs in bold)

3b. Explain why the student’s piece of micro-nonfiction effectively models the style of the work

essay they selected. 50-75 words.

60

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 1

SELECTED ESSAYS: THE CREATIVE NONFICTION PROJECT

ESSAYS ABOUT PLACE ESSAYS ABOUT WORK (continued)

Boat People Michael Perry 2

All The Forces At Work Here

Joe Wilkins 17

In Wyoming Mark Spragg 2 Things Are Meted Out to People and Then They Leave Tory M. Taylor 18

In Nebraska Ted Kooser 3

A Black Hairstory Lesson

Niya Marie 18

Moving Water, Tucson Peggy Shumaker 3 The Deck Yusef Komunyakaa 19

If I Wanted to Write About the South Daisuke Shen 4 Mown Lawn Lydia Davis 20

Hochzeit Debra Marquart 5 Fish Nicole Walker 21

Duck, North Carolina Christina Olson 6 ESSAYS ABOUT OTHER

Genderfuck Madison Hoffman 22

Meditation on a Morning Commute Aram Mrjoian 7

Neurod(i)verse Sounds Like Universe Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach 23

Becoming a Sanvicenteña: Five Stages Kate Hopper 8

Women These Days Amy Butcher 24

Variations on a Home Depot Paint Sample David Andrews 9

The Quantum Theory of Suffering Natalie Diaz 24

ESSAYS ABOUT FAMILY

Fun For Everyone Involved Heather Sellers 10 Joyas Voladoras Brian Doyle 25

On The Elliptical Machine, You Ask Your Mom Rachael Peckham 10 A Brief Atmospheric Future Matthew Gavin Frank 26

Photograph Michael Ondaatje 11 S__ __T (A Dialogue) Janis Butler Holm 27

Clean Slate Joanna McNaney 11

Hill Street Blues Brian Fry 12

A Thing of Air Andrea Rinard 12

I hoisted them, two drug dealers Dianne Seuss 13

We’ve Waited For Vaccines Rebecca Entel 13

The Memory of My Disappearance Meg Rains 13

ESSAYS ABOUT WORK

Work Lessons Lizz Huerta 15

Partition Nic Anstett 16

On Fire Larry Brown 16

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 2

ESSAYS ABOUT PLACE

Boat People 5

By Michael Perry

The women here put on their makeup like rust-proofing. Preschoolers toddle through the trailer park mud puddles, splashing and pimp-

cussing. Teenage girls in sweat pants and ratty NASCAR t-shirts smoke over parked strollers, hips set at a permanent baby-propping cant. The

afternoons oxidize like trailer tin. Still, there are boyfriends, and emotions worth screaming over, fistfuls of affections rained down behind

closed doors. At the bar up the block, the closing-time domestics wind up on Main Street, playing out beneath the one streetlight, the fuck 10

you/fuck you execrations concluding with a door slam and squealing tires, the roar of the engine pocked by a missing cylinder.

The clan living next door to me is not easily sorted. Many children, several women, two men. The fighting frequently spills out into the yard,

which has steadily disappeared under a welter of absurd possessions: a tangle of thirty unworkable bicycles; a mossy camper; a selection of

detached automobile seats; an inoperative ride-on lawnmower wrapped—Christo-like—in a blue tarp; a huge rotting speedboat. The village

board sent someone around to recite nuisance ordinances chapter and verse, but beyond rearranging the bikes and aligning the camper with 15

the speedboat, nothing has changed. You take what you can get in this life. Someone calls you white trash, you go with it, and fight like hell to

keep your trash. You understand it is only a matter of distinctions: Yuppies with their shiny trash, church ladies with their hand-stitched trash,

solid citizens with their secret trash. In a yard just outside town, a spray-painted piece of frayed plywood leans against a tree and says, “Trans

Ams—2 for $2000.” It has been there for two years.

The old man and his adult son tinker on the speedboat now and then. It has never left the yard. The slipcover is mildewed and undone, and 20

the deck is layered with decaying leaves. Traffic by the house is never more than desultory, but it does pick up a little on the weekends,

minivans and SUVS cutting through town on the way to summer cottages and lake properties to the north. The old man and the kid will work

a while, then disappear into the house for days, but they’re in there with their beer, with their feet up and one thumb hooked in a belt loop,

and they’re assuring each other that life is shit, but By God, we’ve got a speedboat, and one of these days we’ll get that son-of-a-tatcher

runnin’, and we’ll go out some Sunday-fuckin’-afternoon, and we’ll blow them Illinois tourist bastards right outta the water. 25

In Wyoming

By Mark Spragg

This place is violent, and it is raw. Wyoming is not a land that lends itself to nakedness, or leniency. There is an edge here, living is

accomplished on that edge. Most birds migrate. Hibernation is viewed as necessary, not stolid. The crippled, old, the inattentive perish. And 30

there is the wind.

The wind blows through most every day unchoreographed with the spontaneous inelegance of a brawl. There are tracts where the currents

draw so relentlessly that the trees that surround a home, or line an irrigation ditch, all lean east, grown permanently east, as though mere

columns of submissive filings bowed toward some fickle pole. Little is decorative. There are few orchards. Fruit enters by interstate, truck-

ripened, not tree-ripened. Wyoming boasts coal, oil, gas, uranium, widely scattered herds of sheep and cattle, and once, several million 35

bison. The winds have worked the bison skeletons pink, white, finally to dust. The carboniferous forests rose up and fell and moldered under

the winds, layer upon layer, pressed finally into coal. The winds predate the coal. The winds wail a hymn of transience.

On the windward sides of homes, trees are planted in a descending weave of cottonwood, spruce, Russian olive, finished with something

thorny, stiff, and fast-growing—a hem of caragana: a windbreak; utilitarian first, ornamental by accident. Shade is a random luxury. There is

nearly always at least a breeze. Like death and taxes, it can be counted on. Almost one hundred thousand square miles and a half million 40

residents; there aren’t that many homes. Towns grip the banks of watercourses, tenaciously. Ghost towns list, finally tumbling to the east.

Gone the way of the buffalo bones. To dust.

There are precious few songbirds. Raptors ride the updrafts. The hares, voles, mice, skunks, squirrels, rats, shrews, and rabbits exist

squinting into the sun and wind, their eyes water, their hearts spike in terror when swept by the inevitable shadow of predators. The

meadowlark is the state’s bird, but I think of them as hors d’oeuvres, their song a dinner bell. Eagle, falcon, hawk, owl live here year-round. 45

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 3

The true residents. The natives. The gourmands. Their land-bound relatives work the middle ground. Lynx, lion, fox circle the table.

Coyotes make their living where they can: as gypsies do.

Much of the landscape is classified as subarctic steppe. In Laramie a winter’s evening entertainment consists of watching the gauges on the

local weather channel. Thirty-below-zero, sixty-mile-an-hour winds, are standard fare. From early fall to late spring Wyoming’s odor is that

of a whetted stone; the tang of mineral slipping endlessly against mineral. There is no tulip festival in Wyoming. The smell of sap risen in 50

cottonwood and pine is remembered, and cherished.

And then the winds quit. It happens on five or six days every season, more often in the summer and autumn. The sky settles as the dome of a

perfect bell settles—blue, uninterrupted, moistureless. It is nothing in Wyoming to look twenty miles in every direction, the horizons

scribbled in sharp contrast at the peripheries. “No wind,” we shout in wonder. We speak too loudly. We’re accustomed to screaming over the

yowl of air. We quiet to a whisper. “No wind,” we whisper. We smile and slump. Think of the slouch that survivors effect at the end of crisis. 55

That is our posture.

We emerge from our shelters. If it is summer we expose our soft bellies to the sun, gaining confidence, we breathe deeply, glut ourselves

with the scent of sage, a stimulating and narcotic perfume. We tend our yards. Paint our homes. Wash cars. My neighbor burns back

overgrowths of dried weed, heaps of tumbleweed. He mends his fence. “Nice day,” he says. I’ve heard him say as much when it is thirteen

degrees above zero. What he means is that the wind is not blowing. 60

The foolish become bold. They start construction projects that will require more than forty-eight hours to complete. The rest of us work

tentatively. We remember we’re serfs. We know the lord is only absent, not dethroned. I pass through bouts of giddiness; I cannot help

myself, but like the mice and voles, I remain alert. In Wyoming the price of innocence is high. There is a big wind out there, on its way home

to our high plains.

65

In Nebraska

By Ted Kooser

This prairie is polished by clouds, damp wads of fabric torn from the hem of the mountains, but every scratch shows, from the ruts the wagons

made in the 1850s, to the line on an auctioneer’s forehead when he takes off his hat. No grass, not even six-foot bluestem, can cover the

weather’s hard wear on these stretches of light or these people. But though this is a country shaped by storms—a cedar board planed smooth 70

with the red shavings curled in the west when the sun sets—everywhere you see the work of hands, that patina which comes from having been

weighed in the fingers and smoothed with a thumb—houses, sheds, machinery, fences—then left behind, pushed off a wagon to lighten the

load, a landscape of litter: the boarded-up grocery store with leaves blown in behind the door screen, its blue tin handle reading RAINBO

BREAD, the sidewalk heaved and broken; the horseshoe pits like graves grown over with crabgrass and marked by lengths of rusty pipe; the

square brick BANK with its windows gone, even the frames of the windows, its back wall broken down and the rubble shoveled out of the 75

way to make room for a pickup with no engine.

You read how the upright piano was left upright by the trail, the soundboard ticking in the heat, how the young mother was buried and left in

a grave marked only by the seat of a broken chair, with her name, Sophora, and the date scratched into the varnish, and only a lock of her hair

to go west. There are hundreds of graves like that left in the deep grass, on low rises overlooking the ruts that lead on. I tell you that

everything here—the auto lot spread in the sun, the twelve-story bank with its pigeons, the new elementary school, flat as a box lid blown off 80

the back of something going farther on, the insurance agent with his briefcase, the beautiful Pakistani surgeon, all these and more, for some

reason, have been too burdensome, too big or too small or too awkward, to make it the rest of the way.

Moving Water, Tucson

By Peggy Shumaker 85

Thunderclouds gathered every afternoon during the monsoons. Warm rain felt good on faces lifted to lick water from the sky. We played

outside, having sense enough to go out and revel in the rain. We savored the first cool hours since summer hit.

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 4

The arroyo behind our house trickled with moving water. Kids gathered to see what it might bring. Tumbleweed, spears of ocotillo, creosote,

a doll’s arm, some kid’s fort. Broken bottles, a red sweater. Whatever was nailed down, torn loose.

We stood on edges of sand, waiting for brown walls of water. We could hear it, massive water, not far off. The whole desert might come 90

apart at once, might send horny toads and Gila monsters swirling, wet nightmares clawing both banks of the worst they could imagine and

then some.

Under sheet lightning cracking the sky, somebody’s teenaged brother decided to ride the flash flood. He stood on wood in the bottom of the

ditch, straddling the puny stream. “Get out, it’s coming,” kids yelled. “GET OUT,” we yelled. The kid bent his knees, held out his arms.

Land turned liquid that fast, water yanked our feet, stole our thongs, pulled in the edges of the arroyo, dragged whole trees root wads and all 95

along, battering rams thrust downstream, anything you left there gone, anything you meant to go back and get, history, water so high you

couldn’t touch bottom, water so fast you couldn’t get out of it, water so huge the earth couldn’t take it, water. We couldn’t step back. We

had to be there, to see for ourselves. Water in a place where water’s always holy. Water remaking the world.

That kid on plywood, that kid waiting for the flood. He stood and the water lifted him. He stood, his eyes not seeing us. For a moment, we all

wanted to be him, to be part of something so wet, so fast, so powerful, so much bigger than ourselves. That kid rode the flash flood inside us, 100

the flash flood outside us. Artist unglued on a scrap of glued wood. For a few drenched seconds, he rode. The water took him, faster than you

can believe. He kept his head up. Water you couldn’t see through, water half dirt, water whirling hard. Heavy rain weighed down our

clothes. We stepped closer to the crumbling shore, saw him downstream smash against the footbridge at the end of the block. Water held him

there, rushing on.

105

If I Wanted to Write About the South

By Daisuke Shen

It would go like this:

Sometimes in youth group they would ask us to confess our greatest sins, in more or less words. Phil would said okay if you need us to pray

over you come up to the stage and everything would fall quiet like shut up—God’s about to do some shit. so one day terra went up on that 110

little stool and said sometimes she liked girls and started crying. and so then we all laid hands on terra and prayed over her like “god we want

to love you more than we love thinking about pussy.” And afterward Jamie mentioned she didn’t want to change in front of terra any more. I

didn’t know how to tell anyone that I thought a lot about naked women kissing each other and would ask God to forgive me after I came. I

cried a lot because I knew my mom wouldn’t love me anymore and definitely not my grandma. I stopped believing in god when I went to

college and after that whenever I was forced to go to church I went high because I felt scared and shaken in ways I couldn’t name, so I smoked 115

cigarettes in the parking lot during big service, stoned out of my mind.

It would also be like this:

My mom has a southern accent that’s really heavy, and everyone always says it. “Your mom has a really thick accent.” Then they laugh. I think

they think it’s funny because we’re not supposed to sound like that but my grandma married someone who was stationed in Japan during the

occupation after WWII and the bomb and my grandma’s brother dying from the bomb. my grandpa was from a place called Spartanburg, 120

South Carolina, and so my grandmother learned how to cook fried green tomatoes and hash browns and gravy and biscuits and green bean

casserole and broccoli casserole and served them with canned peaches and canned beets and canned carrots all swimming in the same sweet

syrupy juice. and I ate it with rice and fried potatoes and I ate it with chopsticks. and I went to Japanese school and American school and boys

were mean to me because I was fat and uncomely, but this isn’t a story about not belonging or belonging somewhere. It’s about how I

belonged everywhere all at once. 125

It could sound like this too:

I think that living in the south means that you can live anywhere. you can go to any diner and it’s going to taste pretty good even if it’s bad,

because there’s always going to be something fried or buttered or toasted or salted that settles down into your gut all firm.

https://neutralspaces.co/blog/author.php?user=daisukejigoku

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 5

I can tell you about good barbeque verses bad barbeque. I can tell you about all the stories I didn’t hear from my family, all the secrets we’ve

kept from each other, and I can tell you about the stories and folktales and songs I stole from other people, their families, to keep me warm at 130

night. I can tell you that I’ve learned how to make friends and treat people nicer and I’ve tried to stop saying yes ma’am and no sir to older

people and I have some authority issues anyway.

I can tell you that it’s really warm down here during the summers and I’m going to miss that if I move somewhere else. I’m going to miss the

familiarity of people knowing you even if they don’t know you, and how I know that if I needed a place to stay I would know where to ask,

and how nice it feels to be on the other side of things. 135

Mostly, it sounds like this:

This is a story about how my mother remarried a white guy who was also a police officer who died when I was ten. this is also a story about

how he was very poor and from a place called Marietta where my cousins lived in trailers and my stepcousin who played Eminem for me when

I was nine years old sitting in her mom’s house, just the two of us on that green couch, and how years later I heard that she had her baby taken

away due to fleas. it’s about how class traitors become class traitors. 140

It’s a story about Greenville, South Carolina, where I grew up, and liberalism and religion and mental hospitals and finding catharsis in online

spaces. it’s about Marietta, South Carolina, where we barbequed a turkey for Christmas, and Aunt Billie who stayed in her bed a lot and how I

never felt like I didn’t belong in the family. it’s about Wilmington, North Carolina, where I finally came to terms about how I was cruel to my

loved ones to figure out if they still loved me and was capable of great harm but also great healing. it’s about the time Uncle Everett and I

caught a frog in the lake, and how Everett had a face that looked like a knotted fist, and how later on the frog died, and Sam died, and how at 145

twenty-four I tried to die but didn’t.

It’s about how one night I got super drunk and was on Xanax and stumbling over the cobblestone downtown with Jonny, and we left the bar

to get him a hot dog. and it’s about how while he was standing eating the hot dog I asked him how he knew him and Phil were supposed to be

together and Jonny said “it just made sense, we made sense together” and I thought about me and I thought about you and I thought of us being

careful because it felt good to be careful with each other. and later, after it was all over, I was glad that at least I could be sure that I really had 150

loved and even liked this person who I had gotten to know for a short while. and I really wished I could have been better, smarter, more

beautiful, less anxious, less needy, more anything but myself. I realized that the future only held more uncertainty and pain and that the

eternal maybe of our parting terrified me, and I resigned myself to feeling it all, unshowered and petrified in Charleston.

It’s about how the south feels like a damp, heavy hand I can’t let go of twenty years later, and how shitty it feels sometimes, like when my

grandma used to walk me around the mall wearing a child leash. everything feels like a ticket out and then I realized that I could never leave, 155

even if I want to. even when it’s time to go.

Hochzeit

by Debra Marquart

I remember circles—the swirling cuff of my father’s pant leg, the layered hem of my mother’s skirt. A neighbor lady polkas by, the one who 160

yells so loud at her kids every night when she walks to the barn that we can hear her across the still fields. She has a delicious smile on her face

tonight, and the creamy half moon of her slip shows under her long, tight dress.

The dance hall is an octagon, eight sides squaring off in subtle shades to a circle. The Ray Schmidt Orchestra is on the bandstand, a family of

musicians. The two young daughters wear patent leather shoes, chiffon dresses and white tights as they patter away at the drums and bass. 165

Their mother, her lips a wild smear of red, stomps and claws chords on the jangled, dusty upright.

The father and the son take turns playing the accordion, the bellowing wheeze of notes, the squeeze, the oom-paa-paa. Years later, this son

will become minorly famous—wildly famous in this county—when he makes it onto the Lawrence Welk show. He’ll be groomed as the new

accordion maestro, the heir apparent to Lawrence Welk, a North Dakotan who grew up thirty miles from here. This is polka country. The 170

accordion is our most soulful, ancestral instrument.

Someone is getting married, a cousin? Who knows. Everyone is a cousin in this town. I have a new dress with a flared skirt and a matching

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 6

ribbon; I get to stay up late. This has been going on for hours and promises to go on for more. Old ladies in shawls, looking like everyone’s

Grandma, sit around the edges of the dance hall, smiling with sad eyes at the children. 175

A man who looks like everyone’s Grandpa makes the rounds with a tray of shot glasses, spinning gold pools of wedding whiskey. The recipe is

one cup burnt sugar, one cup Everclear, one cup warm water. The old man bends low with the tray—three sips for everybody, no matter

how small. Sweet burning warmth down my throat, sweet, swirling dizziness. This is Hochzeit, the wedding celebration.

180

Someone lifts me up. An uncle, an older cousin? I have no idea. He dances me around the circle in the air, my short legs dangling beneath me,

then returns me to my seat. The old women are there to receive me. They laugh and pat my shoulders, straighten my skirt.

The music speeds up, the accordion pumping chords like a steam engine. My father clasps my mother’s hand and pulls her tight. The dance

floor flexes and heaves like a trampoline. Women swing by in the arms of their partners. High whoops and yips emit from their ample 185

bosoms. They kick their big, heavy legs and throw back their bouffants. The building sweats, the accordion breathes.

My father secures his arm around my mother’s waist. They spin and reel as they polka circles around the room. If left to itself, gravity could

take over, centrifugal force could spin them out, away from each other. My mother smiles behind her cateye glasses, confident of her partner.

They hold tight, their young, slim bodies enjoying the thrill of almost spinning out while being held in. My parents. Everyone says they are the 190

best dancers on the floor.

Duck, North Carolina

By Christina Olson

Once, walking, I found on the sand not a butterflied clam but a small tooth. 195

~

We have been coming here so long that we can point out where the road used to end, though we differ: some say the fish hut, others the

rental shack. Pretty soon there will be a baby, eating great fistfuls of sand.

~

Nag’s Head, to the south, is where the pirates hobbled a horse, hung a lantern from its neck and walked the shore: those at sea steered near, 200

mistaking the bob of light for a safely harbored ship. I have always admired the ingenuity of criminals.

~

Everyone on this beach is successful in their real lives, you can tell: they wear sunblock, they are early-morning runners.

~

This is the first year in three that we have not begun our vacation with a funeral: first my father’s mother. Then his father. This year, the only 205

stop on the way down is at Hardee’s, for cinnamon-raisin biscuits.

~

They are burning the grass on the mainland, so in the morning smoke hangs. I walk to the beach, where it smells only of salt, and see the

jellyfish have washed up and died during the night.

~ 210

This year, there is a Jack Russell that I watch—he runs into the surf after his owner, waves nearly knocking him sideways. But as soon as she

dives under and he realizes where he stands, he is afraid, runs back out.

~

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 7

I live for the skittle of lizard under the boardwalk.

~ 215

One night: twelve-thirty. I sat out on the back steps and watched the shadows cross the dunes ten feet in front of my knees: coyotes. For ten

minutes, my problems were not my own.

~

One year we went to the Poconos, but there was no ocean, only a river, bright and lazy. In the evenings we would close the cupboards tightly

and in the morning find them wide open: my cousins thought the place haunted. I realize now it was trying to endear itself to us, get us to 220

stay. Of course we could not. We are not those type of people.

~

This morning, on the beach: a star of orange peel. Less peel than explosion from the flesh. Campbell McGrath, are you listening?

~

There are twenty of us. Every year the same two houses, the same game of catch-up over gin. Right now, all news is good: an acceptance to 225

Michigan, a promotion, a first job with Boeing. Soon everything will change: second wives, retirement, health threats someone will finally not

come back from. There is smoke in the wind. But now: perfect.

~

The Atlantic Ocean must be the least forgiving thing on the planet, which is of course why we come back every year.

230

Meditation on a Morning Commute

by Aram Mrjoian

I must tell you that in the thick of autumn on a sixty-mile stretch of Michigan highway between my cold apartment and my dark office I’ve lost

count of the number of mangled deer carcasses staining the concrete shoulder, whiplashed, eyes vacant, thin necks assuredly bent at some

horrendous angle, clumps of bones and fur scattered across the lanes, and the fallen leaves around the bodies as dark as dried blood, everything 235

eventually going brown, but the putrid mess is there and gone before I can bother to signal and veer toward the outskirts of the splatter,

something I should be more prepared for given the routine nature of this occurrence, even though perhaps there is nothing natural about this

scene at all, the machine proficiently cradling me, the cruise control set at seventy-five miles per hour, much too fast for animals to fully

comprehend; I nearly hit a deer myself the other morning, a mature doe clopping across an on-ramp before it leapt onto the median, my

brakes thankfully holding tight so that my white sedan was not smeared in red, and I fretted that as the doe moved along she would soon be 240

trapped, still needing to cross the other half of the road, likely to be unseen in the hazy minutes before sunrise, again this being Michigan in

late fall, but somewhere in the middle of this reflection I remember that this particular kind of survival is all up to chance, nothing more than

bad luck and consequential timing, any of us could make a fatal misstep at any moment, whereas far away from this otherwise mundane

section of roadway there are millions of civilians being intentionally bombed, thousands dead in the instant of a catastrophic blast or slow

under the weight of rubble, the tons of murderous explosives manufactured and purchased with the taxes I pay to fill this very vehicle with 245

harmful fossil fuel, so that I can commute to my job, so that I can occasionally shop at the fancy grocery store, the whole of my weak existence

complicit in so many atrocities, and I should never forgive myself (and I never will), but this is not even to mention the mass displacement and

forced starvation, the homes abandoned and the keepsakes left behind, the brutality of erasure occurring in real time, violence begetting more

violence with nothing learned, and by the time I’ve tried to process my guilt and grief, emotions that do nothing for anyone but me, my

sadness yet another cowardly method to trick myself out of taking meaningful action, the sun has risen high enough in the rearview to hurt my 250

vision, and the traffic has worsened, and the precarity of my commute has fallen away to brightly lit comfort, for I will arrive at the office and

lose the day to emails and meetings, convinced the forthcoming evening will finally be the one where I stay up late and solve my

inconsistencies, that I will land on how I can make a demonstrable difference beyond shaking my head at the newspaper, but in truth I realize

this pattern of passivity could sum up my entire life, for I’ve been doing everything in my power to hold the steering wheel steady, alert and

terrified that the tiniest mistake will prevent me from reaching my destination safely and on time. 255

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 8

Becoming a Sanvicenteña: Five Stages

by Kate Hopper

Stage 1: Fear

The old highway to San Vicente is nothing more than a dirt road. At the height of the dry season the landscape is leached of color, the road 260

pale as bone. We bump in and out of potholes, my American advisor filling the Peugeot with 400 years of Costa Rican history: the

Chorotegan Indians, the Spanish conquistadors, ceramic arts, tourism. Dust billows through the open windows, and I cough, struggle to catch

my breath. Against the vinyl seat, my legs are slick with sweat.

Stage 2: Uncertainty

I stare into the smiling faces of my host family and laugh when I don’t understand their rapid Spanish. “¿Cómo?” I ask, again and again. The 265

youngest boy is thirteen. He watches me eat my rice and beans on the front porch, his dark eyes amused. “What?” I ask, but he shakes his

head. After two weeks he finally he tells me: “You are as white as a milk worm.”

Stage 3: Enthusiasm

Behind the house, Betty fills the mouth of the metal grinder with kernels of wet corn, and I turn the handle, my arm pumping in circles.

Strings of dough spill into the wide bowl below, but Betty says, “Más rápido, hija.” Faster, daughter. I smile and crank the handle as fast as I can. 270

When I’m finished, I sit in the cracked rocking chair, my shoulder aching, and watch as Betty kneads the dough smooth, spinning a handful

between her palms until it’s a disk. She rearranges the burning logs until flames engulf the lip of the comal, and when she drops the tortilla into

the concave plate, it sizzles loudly. She motions to it with her lips. “Do you want to flip it?” I nod, eager for an opportunity to earn the

name hija. But the fire is hot on my face and arms, and I pause too long. Smoke begins to curl from the comal. Betty gently pushes me aside

and flips the burning tortilla with her fingertips. 275

Stage 4: Withdrawal

In the late afternoon, I sit on the front porch with a cup of sweetened coffee, hoping for a breeze as I wait for the cañero truck to mark the end

of another day. Before I see it, I hear it: the rumble of its diesel engine, the clatter of wood and metal bouncing over pot holes, jostling the

men in the tarp-covered cajón. As it drives by, I can’t make out the men’s faces; all I see are hands and arms, disembodied, jutting into the

still-hot sun. These appendages are dark and muscled from twelve hours a day slashing tall stalks of sugar cane to the ground. Sometimes as the 280

truck passes, someone raises a finger or two, and I raise my hand in response. But mostly their hands stay where they are, holding tight to the

wooden planks, steady against the bucking of the truck.

Stage 5: Understanding

In the semi-darkness of the dance hall, I sit next to Sara, my host sister. The band has finished its set, and for the next fifteen minutes, the

stereo will blare music: salsa, merengue, and piratiado, my favorite. I take a sip of beer, and when I look up, the lead singer of the band is 285

standing before me, arm outstretched, palm open. I have watched this man dance with women between sets in San Lázaro, Guatíl, and Las

Pozas. I have watched the way he twirls his partners, floats them across cement dance floors. Tonight, no one else is dancing. I swallow hard

and resist the urge to shake my head. I take his hand, and when we step into the middle of the room, I hear a murmur: la gringa. I try to focus

on his palm against my lower back, his fingers clasping my own, the old-fashioned music. I have practiced. I am ready when he turns me, our

feet forward and back together. And as he spins me around and around, I catch Sara’s eye and smile. She raises her eyebrows and nods 290

approvingly. I recognize faces in the darkness outside, pressed against the chain-link fence. A thumb goes up. Someone yells, “Bravo, Katty!”

When I sit back down at the table, I’m beaming. “Now I’m a real sanvicenteña,” I say breathlessly. “Sí,” says Sara. “For now.”

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 9

Variations on a Home Depot Paint Sample 295

by David Andrews

Desert Sunrise, 230B-4

To mix Desert Sunrise 230B-4, combine equal parts vodka, orange juice, pineapple juice, and troposphere; add grenadine syrup to taste.

Throw in blender with ice cubes and a handful of red dirt. Blend. Next drive westward all night along I-80 until you reach Wyoming, and,

when you see in your rearview the faintest tincture of light bleeding into reddish bluffs, pull into the nearest rest stop. Wash your face in the 300

frigid tap water, and next note the uncanniness of your reflection in the warped wrought-iron mirror. Stumble back to your pickup, and sit

down on the hood with your back against the windshield. The morning air may still be cool, but the breeze will be warm, and the diesel-

engine thrum of a parked semi nearby will lull you into a sequence of short naps, and each time you open your eyes the sky will open up

gradually more, a budding flower in stop-motion. Repeat, until you feel suffused with a sublime Godlike loneliness.

Indian Paint Brush, 230B-5 305

To mix Indian Paint Brush 230B-5, first ascertain which species of the Castilleja genus (otherwise known as Indian Paint Brush) are indigenous

to your area. For instance, in the Pacific Northwest where your family is from, there is a wide assortment: you’ll find the Wavyleaf and

Cobwebby and Cream Sacs; the Cutleaf, Splitleaf and Splithair; the Coast, Cliff, Mountain, and Vernal Pool; the Wyoming, Wenatchee and

Wallowa (also in both Pale and Yellow varieties); also, the Greentinge and the Golden, the Yellow and Stiff Yellow and Yellowhair, the Giant

Red and Little Reddish; the Obscure and the Fraternal; the Northwestern and the Mendocino Coast; the Lesser and the Pale and the 310

Attenuate; there are those named after people: of Chambers, of Cusick, those of Peck and Suksdorf and Thompson; there is Gland and

Frosted, Sulphur and Sticky, Harsh and Hairy; there is Johnny-Nip and Parrothead. If you are in Alabama, however, there is only one variety:

Scarlet. Next open up a map of Alabama and read aloud all the place names taken originally from the languages of the Native Americans who

once lived here, names that once made the place sound so colorful before you moved here: Alabama, Autaga, Chattanoochee, Chickasaw,

Choctaw, Chunchula, Conecuh, Coosa, Eutaw, Opelika, Selma, Syllacauga, Talladega, Tallapoosa, Tuscaloosa, Tuskegee, and so forth. 315

Become sidetracked in your thoughts and imagine that in some alternate and kinder history of the world the tribes and nations of Alabama

weren’t forcefully evicted westward, but just wandered off one day in search of brighter color, with Old Hickory Jackson himself riding out

on horseback to the head of the procession, pleading for them to return.

Orange Burst, 230B-6

To mix Orange Burst 230B-6, travel to some hot eastern nation and order a can of cold Fanta in a shady outdoor cafe looking out onto a hot 320

and bustling street. Though you never drink Fanta at home, in this foreign place it will be the best thing you ever tasted. Then, while you sit

there, write about this Fanta in a letter home you will never end up posting.

Kumquat, 230B-7

To mix Kumquat 230B-7, first grow a kumquat tree. You may find it helpful to observe your neighbor’s tree, which grows along the chain-

link fence adjacent to your driveway. In the fall, furtively pluck off one of these sour fruits every few days. Grimace as you chew. Think, Look 325

at me: I’m eating a kumquat. Your neighbor from Mobile will have transplanted this tree northward the previous spring, and won’t know how

it will fare in the relatively cooler climate of central Alabama. Next, wait until January, when a weather system locals assure you is abnormal

brings several weeks of below-freezing nights, and in the evenings listen to the rustle of your neighbor covering the tree with blue tarpaulin.

When the cold fails to let up after a few days, wake up one morning and observe the tarpaulin lit up from underneath with a gauzy array of

colored Christmas lights, each roughly the size of a plump kumquat, presumably to provide warmth. This will fail to keep the plant alive. 330

Months later, in the spring, take note of the little gelatinous blanched orbs that still litter your driveway, milky-white as the skin of fat that

settles at the top of a chilled stew.

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 10

ESSAYS ABOUT FAMILY 335

Fun For Everyone Involved

By Heather Sellers

I lived with my father in a pink duplex. I slept in a brown velour recliner on a jalousie-windowed porch. My father, Fred, slept in a king-size

bed that filled the bedroom, and I never went in that room, it was all mattress.

The pink duplex was on a dirt road, MacCleod. Interstate Highway 4 ran along the dirt road, and there was always a cloud of dust over the hot 340

lawn. The drainage ditch got fenced in over Christmas, and come spring, an alligator rose up, out of the emerald green muck, inside the

fence. My father and I named him L’il Fella. Come summer, we renamed him Big Fella. I saw my father feed him old chicken. Saw him throw

bread over the fence around the ditch. A kettle of scorched soup.

The gator lived in a cage, in essence. We named him to love him, but it did not feel right to know him this way. My father standing at the

chain link, a tumbler of gin in one hand, his face already off-sides, early afternoon. Banging on the fence, hollering, Want some what, Big Fella? 345

What do you want?

I thought maybe we had it all wrong. And not just the story we told ourselves about Big Fella. All of it.

For example, that gator could be a girl. Could have no name.

My father said we’d grill him, Fourth of July. He said that just to rile me, and it did rile me.

My father said I could not ever move out. 350

I slept in a brown velour chair that tilted back. Not a bed. I had to move out.

Boys who lived one trailer over told me Desmond threw a dog inside that fence. It was true I could see blood, black now, on the wire.

It was awesome.

Throw you in there, my father loved to say. Can you swim? How fast? Every time he said fast, he reached down and grabbed one of my thighs with

both his ice-wet hands, and leaned over, bit my shoulder. 355

Chomp, he liked to say. Chomp.

Oh come on. Don’t be that way. We’re just having fun.

On The Elliptical Machine, You Ask Your Mom How Her Week Went

By Rachael Peckham 360

She’ll consider it a good week if it ends without any of you getting influenza. It’s so bad, she says to you on the phone, all the schools have

closed.

Besides the flu, news has spread on the farm that one of your dad’s best employees, Brad (Traci’s husband, Brad—remember Traci? Traci who

cleans the house every week?) is having an affair with a girl they hired to work the sow barn.

When you were eight or nine, your father and uncle installed a computerized alarm system in the new sow barn programmed to call the 365

house if the inside temperature dipped too low or too high, rattling off stats in a robotic drone: Temperature: 89 degrees. Noise level: high. A

system that, had it existed ten years prior, would’ve spared a thousand sows from burning up in an electrical fire that your aunt Martha

only spotted out the kitchen window because she was up with a colicky baby. It took a week for the rendering company to haul it all

away.

What a mess. She feels for Traci and the kids. 370

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 11

You worked on the farm once, for exactly two weeks, painting a wooden ramp used to load hogs—that’s what it’s called, loading hogs—

from the barn to a tractor-trailer bound for the meat packing plant. It was either June or July, and paint flecks dotted your calves and

thighs (a few even landed inside your sports bra somehow) with every fresh coat of white paint. White paint, like it was a picket fence.

And that’s how it looked, too, right before a load of hogs moved through and coated it with shit the color of cornbread batter. The

teasing you took—not from Brad but from Jill, who worked the sow barn then. 375

It almost makes her wish Jill still worked the sow barn.

Jill—always said with a sigh—oh, Jill, the subject of your first feature story in Freshman English that began, Not a Woman Who Happens to

Be a Farmer, but a Farmer Who Happens to Be a Woman. As though you knew what it meant to be either one. As though you knew anything at

all about oh, Jill outside of farm lore—the time she overturned a wagon; the time she filled a diesel truck with gasoline; the time she lost

custody of her kids when her ex-husband and her parents testified she was unfit; the time she was moved to the sow barn, where she 380

couldn’t screw up too much, keeping the sows fed and healthy and safe—

—they’ll have to wash their hands of it, your mother warns. You can’t have something like that going around.

Photograph

By Michael Ondaatje 385

My aunt pulls out the album and there is the photograph I have been waiting for all my life. My father and mother together. May 193

2.

They are on their honeymoon and the two of them, very soberly dressed, have walked into a photographic studio. The photographer is used to

wedding pictures. He has probably seen every pose. My father sits facing the camera, my mother stands beside him and bends over so that her

face is in profile on a level with his. Then they both begin to make hideous faces

My father’s pupils droop to the southwest corner of his sockets. His jaw falls and resettles into a groan that is half idiot, half shock. (All this 390

emphasized by his dark suit and well-combed hair.) My mother in white has twisted her lovely features and stuck out her jaw and upper lip so

that her profile is in the posture of a monkey. The print is made into a postcard and sent through the mail to various friends. On the back my

father has written “What we think of married life.”

Everything is there, of course. Their good looks behind the tortured faces, their mutual humor, and the fact that both of them are hams of a

very superior sort. The evidence I wanted that they were absolutely perfect for each other. My father’s tanned skin, my mother’s milk 395

paleness, and this theatre of their own making.

It is the only photograph I have found of the two of them together.

Clean Slate

By Joanna McNaney 400

In the photo my parents nestle on a square blue couch that looks about as comfortable as plywood. They are not yet who they will be. There

are no rings on fingers, no wedding cake, no kids, no mess.

In a few months my father will be the valedictorian of their high school class, and, by the looks of him, belongs in the cast of Revenge of the

Nerds. His glasses are mason jars with thick black frames and his hair is parted halfway down the side of his head, by his ear. Luckily his

sideburns give him a dorky kind of charm. He wears a light blue shirt with a black necktie, vest, and jacket. His brown glasses’ case is tucked 405

into the jacket pocket. He is tall and extremely thin, with a long face, a crooked nose, and later in life his kids’ dentist will compare his chin to

Jay Leno’s.

But not yet.

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 12

My mother is far too beautiful for him and they both know it. She wears a short black skirt. Short enough to reveal the nude pantyhose lining

on her thigh. But like a good Catholic girl her arms are folded over each other and resting on her lap. Her brown hair is parted smack down 410

the middle, so long it covers both her breasts. Her legs are crossed and she smiles, facing in the direction of my father.

This is before anything crazy happens.

He doesn’t look capable of getting as angry as he will. But he will. And my mother. My mother is very beautiful, but her dark brown eyes

conceal a deep sadness. Her father has just died and her smile is flawless. It doesn’t seem as if she would spend her life passively smiling like

that. But even when things get bad, she will. 415

Hill Street Blues

By Bryan Fry

My first memory fails me. Brown shag carpet. I am in the living room. My mother is watching the end of Hill Street Blues on a color

television. She lights a cigarette. Smoke rises, spiraling toward the ceiling. When her show is over, an orange racecar with a Confederate 420

flag painted over the top jumps into the air. When it reaches the peak of its vertical climb, my mother turns off the television, stubs out her

cigarette. I cannot see my father, though I know that they are not yet divorced.

No. This is not my first memory. I’m in the back seat of my parents’ car. My father is driving my mother to work. We live in Seattle. It

must be raining. Yes, I can see it now. It is raining. Small beads of water stick to the glass of the windows. My father looks at me in the

rearview mirror. He is smiling. I see a sign for Pizza Hut. No, not tonight, they tell me. We drop off my mother. I imagine my father kisses 425

her before she takes the bus to work.

No. We are driving. I am sitting in the back seat. My mother is smoking. When she notices I am watching her, she blows out small rings

that rise toward the windshield. We live in Seattle. It is definitely raining. I hum a song while tracing the beads of water with my fingers,

trying to connect them. I make images. My father smiles at my mother when she asks me what I’m singing. Hill Street Blues.

We do not live in Seattle. My mother and father are fighting in their bedroom in Great Falls, Montana. My mother opens a package of 430

cigarettes, and the clear cellophane tears around the box and spills out over their bed. My father seems gentle. He is pleading with her. My

mother screams. She screams so loud my chest hurts. She leaves the room and I hear the front door slam. My father carries me in his arms.

We lie in bed watching television. The glow flashes a prism across our faces.

My father and I are alone. This cannot be my first memory, but I remember it clearly. The television is off. We kneel on the soft blue carpet

at the edge of his bed, praying for a mother. Not my mother, who I seem to have forgotten, but someone who will take care of my father. I 435

close my eyes as hard as I can while he asks God for the woman he works with at my grandparents’ department store. I notice the smell of my

father’s deodorant, feel the warmth of his body. His stubbled face grazes me. I close my eyes harder. My mother is gone. I imagine a

cigarette, smoke rings expanding as they rise higher and higher. Higher, I think, than I’ll ever be able to reach. I try to remember what she

looks like. I press my hands together. I pray. I’m afraid if I don’t concentrate, I’ll forget.

440

A Thing of Air

by Andrea Rinard

When your son is on a ventilator, you need someone to say it’s just a precaution. In the space those words would fill, I tuck his man-hand along

with the answers I didn’t have when I brought his limp body to this place. How much has he had to drink? Always too much. I stroke the long

fingers, trace the stubby lines on the palm, listen to the suck and pull of oxygen through the tube. In. Out. 445

I match my breaths to his just like when I taught him to swim, how to take enough breath to keep the lungs earth-bound. If you breathe

underwater, you must rise and choke out the interloping fluid until the body remembers where it was born to belong. Stay down too long,

and you might never come up. He was always slow to learn, gagging again and again and now again on everything I’ve begged him not to

swallow.

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 13

A nurse, the nice one, the one whose eyes don’t stab judgments about what kind of mother lets this happen, puts a hand on my shoulder on 450

her way out. I fold and refold his shirt, damp with its slurry of rum-vomit and loneliness. I straighten the sheet. I touch the bruise blooming

above his right eyebrow, fist-shaped and fury-purple. I keep breathing with him. I’m lightheaded because the rhythm is not mine, but I will

match our inhalations and exhalations, waiting for him to break the surface.

I hoisted them, two drug dealers, I guess that’s what they were, 455

By Diane Seuss

crackheads, I exiled them is what I did, from my son’s basement apartment, they’d come to feast off of what was left of him, his entrails I

guess, he’d moved into that apartment with such high hopes even though it was on the bottom floor, and no light, or very little light, there

was a girlfriend, she moved in with her two dogs and then they picked up a stray pit bull they named Svetlana, they were into all things

Russian, and the girlfriend didn’t believe in housetraining dogs, like making them go outside in the yard was hurting their feelings or 460

something, well she’d moved out, took the few things of value and left behind a concrete floor full of dog shit, and he, my son, I gave birth to

him in 1985, it was a hard labor in a small town hospital and they had to cut me open, don’t knock me out I yelled, after all this I want to be

awake when you lift out the kid, and I was, I was awake and they lifted him out, his skin painted with blood, his hands looked too large for his

body, and he spread them out, and his arms, well, all babies wail so he wailed, and I hoisted those two dealers, I excised them, I pulled them

like two bad teeth, and I didn’t have to use my hands, the smoke from the crack draped in their hair like cobwebs, I knocked on that black 465

metal door, I knocked and they answered like it was their house, half-smiling like I was selling Girl Scout cookies, but what the hell they were

fucked up, they didn’t know any better, and with my voice alone, with my eyes that I intentionally made keen like a hawk’s, I ordered them

out, I threw their stuff out in the yard, in the rain, dog shit was everywhere, like pinecones or apples in an abandoned orchard at the end of

summer, they rode away on bikes like children, like my sister and me when we were kids after a big storm and the drains were clogged on the

streets so the water was up to our knees, riding our bikes through that water which must have been full of shit, my son, he was nowhere to be 470

found, I didn’t see him until, what was it, later that night or the next day, he showed up at my house and put his hands on me, he didn’t hurt

me but it was moving in that direction, and something in me rose up, like a deer I once saw that stood up on its back legs and roared, I ex-

communicated him, hoisted him, my will by then was like a jackhammer or a God, or one of those queens who wears a dress made of stone,

so don’t ask for my touch is what I’m saying, don’t ask me to now walk among the people.

475

We’ve Waited For Vaccines

by Rebecca Entel

Of when my father had polio, I’ve heard disjointed details but no narrative. Scalding baths, quarantine, how many adults held him down for

the spinal tap, the iron lung, paralysis that one day disappeared.

In the world outside, my grandmother lengthened his Hebrew name with Chaim, Life, and my grandfather delivered bread through the night. 480

Under the covers, his sister plucked the braces from her teeth with scissors.

Each time visiting hours ended, my grandparents stood outside the hospital staring up at a window.

Polio came to him in 1954. The vaccine came to him in 1955.

We’ve spoken of 2020 itself as a golem. We’ve started posting pictures of injections or envious responses to others’ pictures of injections.

No social media archive exists indicating whether my grandparents dreamt of a vaccine/knew it was coming/raged it had come belatedly 485

for their kid/had never felt such relief when it came, even when they thought they could feel no more relief than three of them leaving the

hospital, six legs walking.

There’s one photograph of the bicycle bought for him after, with pooled money, and in it my father’s blurry with motion.

We’ve let words into our hourly vocabulary: quarantine, distancing, strains, herd, cases. Daily math problems so vast we can’t see each

individual number. We’ve said/meant we, but we’ve been mostly wrong. 490

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 14

Both of my parents remember waiting their turn at school for the shot. When I ask them for memories of receiving the vaccine, that’s the only

one: standing in line.

My mother tells me I had the Sabin oral vaccine—drops on my tongue—rather than the Salk injection. She tells me to google, just for

curiosity’s sake, the sugar cube version. My mind conjures an image of children not chewing or sucking but letting the cube slowly, slowly

dissolve. Thinking of it, I can feel it. A year of sheltering has been something like this: mouth, tongue, et cetera, holding still but activating in 495

anticipation of the sweet.

We’ve reached for metaphors.

Salivating sounds bestial, carnal, silly. I mean more like a waiting that demands all focus. I mean more like a wanting that can’t be helped.

The Memory of My Disappearance 500

by Meg Rains

The last time I saw Mother was that day in the yard when she snipped off the heads of perfectly pretty flowers—snipped them right off with

the same orange shears she used to meticulously make my dresses, mostly smocked and embroidered with rose buds or tulips or sheep. Do not

come after me with your tiny darting steps, she mumbled to those petals. Or did I mumble that to her? Memory is more feeling than fact. For

instance: Once you pull out a single thread, the whole thing falls apart is something she said as she stitched a frayed seam over my heart. Thankfully, 505

there was nothing careless about her. In some ways this is true and not true.

*

Mothers leave. These things happen. As it goes in fairy tales, the parent is mostly absent.

*

How shall I tell you the strange incident? Some days, it goes like this: Once upon my 25th year, Mother said, “What use is there in daylight?” then 510

blurred into a photograph of a woman made invisible by the snow. Other days, this is all I can muster: Beat your chest. The stories here are wordless ones.

*

The last time I saw Mother she was transcribing the Lord’s Prayer with Alpha-Bits cereal and glue. She asked if I wanted to help, and also how

was my day at school. I said sure and fine, respectively, then straddled a kitchen chair. Here, sort through these broken parts, she said. I need several

more H’s and T’s. She was inviting in all of her strangeness, traced a smiley face over the crumbs. We listened to Bach on the radio, and she’d 515

sporadically sound a small hum. But when I noticed her lips start to quiver, I was glad she didn’t say what she thought: Go look at that haze by

the chimney! There are demons all over the roof! Although memory’s a tiny wrecking ball, this story’s a song of salvage. Cast out. Cast out. Cast out.

*

Though the dictionary’s full of the wrong kind of meanings, I sought the obvious. Schizophrenia (Latin), literally “a splitting of the mind,” is

rooted in skhizein (Greek), “to split,” which is understandable. But then there’s phren, “mind,” and its genitive phrenos, “diaphragm, heart, 520

mind,” which is of unknown origin / is the last time I saw Mother / is the anatomy of fear, which presents as racing heart, difficulty breathing,

dry mouth, or hyperventilation, most likely on the kitchen or bathroom floor. My therapist recommends diaphragmatic breathing before

Clonazepam; however, dosage may be doubled in acute cases, such as doubling over. Such as double from the Latin duplus is rooted in duo or

“two.” Such as: there are two or several faces for every one / everyone. For instance, bi- (“two”), as in polar, was also noted in Mother’s

chart, along with Schizoaffective, which leads me to affectus, from the Latin “state of mind,” which is something I’ve neglected during my 525

circular search for the origin of one single moment of loss; as if meaning is history / is memory / is unfinished the way the past is unfinished

*

We should stop worrying what to call things.

*

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 15

The last time I saw Mother she was reclining on the divan, beneath a portrait of herself as a girl, painted on what must’ve been the saddest day 530

of the year: her eyes born downward, the color of a dull, gray building. When I sat at her feet, she offered to braid my hair, and I fell into a

trance. You aren’t really so pretty, she thought or said. My hands curled into fists; memory sketched in at the edge. I could swear her eyes were

green.

535

ESSAYS ABOUT WORK

Work Lessons

by Lizz Huerta

There’s a posture your body learns when you’re always on ladders. Your thighs stay clenched, tailbone forward, hips up-thrust to keep you on

balance. You keep your feet wide, quads pressed against the rung they’re closest to, arms steady overhead, brush in hand. 540

You learn micro-seasons invisible to most: the April weeks of spiked black widow eggs; crows stripping bark from palm trees when they go

from roosting to nesting mid-June. September is hell on paintbrush bristles, the smear of paint you’ve perfected goes gummy when the Santa

Anas blow. November is either another summer or a Guns N’ Roses ballad, there is no in-between. Decembers when you get to the jobsite at

seven, the sun is barely risen and the iron too cold to paint but the sideways light on iceberg roses is a special kind of trippy. No one spends in

January; it’s your season of doubt. 545

You learn humans a different way. You’re brown, a worker on doorsteps, with a ladder, a bucket of paint, your long hair up in a bandana,

eyelash extensions. You speak to the maid who answers the door in the language you both learned to love in. You speak to the woman whose

house she cleans in language that throws her for a moment because she wasn’t expecting that. You speak the words of privilege and knowing:

say powder room, comment on the Tromp L’oeil, compliment the granite. You drop your drop cloths and voice, keeping it modulated while

you patiently explain to the client why the Art Deco finish she wants will throw off the composition of the Tuscan-inspired foyer. You’re an 550

artist, you say, you know. What you really know is that artists can charge more than painters.

At lunch you kick it with the landscapers around the tiny hot plate they set to heat their tortillas. You know how to make plumbers laugh and

how to navigate the white supremacist contractors you carry a charm against. You stay kind and present, with just enough fuck around and

find out in your eye. You pick up on a client’s values by how often they have the portable toilets serviced and if they allow lunch trucks on the

property. Do they trust the workers or are they watchers? You can read a house for status and speak it back to the client in a way that’ll have 555

their checkbook out. You see what they want to show the world.

You learn the stories of the security guards who patrol the gated communities you’ve been allowed in to beautify. The Pasifika femme who

loves talking about her wife, the Black Mason who gets fake mad when you call him Illuminati, D who’s never been the same since his kid died

some years back on his way home late from the casino. And there are ones you’re careful with: the NRA blonde you think modeled herself on

Twin Towers from Police Academy and that one brown man who loves his uniform a little too much. Sometimes you hang with security in 560

the shack, and they show you footage of drunk drivers who’ll never be prosecuted, spinning out and totaling their third Ferrari that year.

Those cars are so light you should never slam on the brakes, but rich drunks man, rich drunks.

Once in a while a client will ask you questions, invite you to sit at the counter and offer a Perrier. You have to gauge whether they’re in

white-savior mode, Christian, or genuinely curious. If you feel safe, you talk about books, the ones that have changed you, the ones you’re

writing. You tell them that painting pays the bills but you have plans. They know and you know you’re good, the only one around who 565

specializes in these faux finishes. You could make a lot of money but scrape by just enough because when you’re not on a ladder, you’re on a

page, creating. If they ask, you say yeah, you’ve published. This is when you get nervous. You pick at the dried paint on your right hip where

you always wipe your brush. You say a little more if they ask a little more. You watch their face for the micro-season of surprise. You always

see it, the moment you become human.

570

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 16

Partition

by Nic Anstett

The customer pulls away the thin changing room curtain and emerges with her bright blue, almost neon, bra exposed. She asks me why the

faded denim jacket won’t close across her chest, but I am no longer there. I am in the red scrape of razor burn on my neck and chin, the too-575

deep almost-butch cadence of my voice, the not-quite flattened bulge between my legs. This woman, who is asking my opinion on an

overpriced jacket stitched by displaced women in some factory posed as charity in Tennessee, bares her chest, perhaps assuming that I am like

her. In the racing anxious catastrophes that I invent on the spot, I feel exposed. I’m reminded of the usual accusations thrown at women like

me—deceiver, voyeur, pervert—and of the trans woman in LA who became the center of that week’s violent rhetoric for daring to go to a

women’s spa, and the many sloppy memes of beer-gutted, balding cis men declaring their womanhood while they piss in front of horrified 580

mothers and daughters.

When I took this job at a local boutique, I told myself it was because I needed cash to fill in the gaping holes of my adjunct salary. But I’m

here, really here, because here is where I get to be a girl among girls. I lie by omission in hiring interviews and small talk introductions with

my coworkers. I fabricate stories about why I’ve yet to pierce my ears or why I keep mistaking a clutch for a crossbody. I blush when a

coworker tells me that I look too young and hot to be in my late 20s. I scheme with the other girl on day shift about ways she could ask out the 585

cute guy who works at the artisanal olive oil shop across the street. I continue to play cis, even through my manager telling me about the “he-

she” she partied with in Brooklyn back in the 80s, and through the many knowing glances I share with the other trans girls who wander

through our doors.

Going stealth five times a week to play “normal girl” becomes my favorite game, but I spoil it all in the final hours of a late November shift

when the other girl behind the counter tells me about coming out to her boyfriend as bi, and I’m momentarily coaxed out of hiding by the 590

promise of queer friendship. She takes it well, says the right things, but it’s less than a week before she drops her first accidental he. She

corrects herself immediately and later apologizes to me in private, but it’s too late—the game has been ruined. Once the shadow of a man is

noticed, my womanhood is granted an asterisk, the extended hands of sisterhood only offered out of social obligation or infantilizing pity. But

through some cruel irony, I understand other women’s nervousness.

Now, I too can no longer walk the streets at night without turning my car keys into claws. Now, I also catch the too-obvious stares from 595

husbands and fathers over the flash of my thigh or exposed stomach as I pass. Now, I know my body is quite literally up for grabs, my tits and

ass toys for men to paw at. In time, their roving hands and eyes, their shouted demands and catcalls, wear you down and transform you into

prey, an animal with her ears always perked for the first sounds of male footsteps in the underbrush.

Now, I cannot stop searching for that same instinctual discomfort in my best friend as we sit toe-touching-close through a late-night movie, or

in the eyes of the other women writers in the support group that I joined just a few weeks into my MFA. I would like to say that the rhetoric 600

of British TERFs and red state legislators passes through me without seeping into the grooves of my brain, but that’s not true. I know when I

cross the gendered barriers that carve up our lives, it doesn’t matter to them if I’m a sheep, or a wolf wearing her pelt. For too many, after

the first hint of prickling black fur, a wolf is all they will see.

On Fire 605

By Larry Brown

You learn early to go in low, that heat and smoke rise into the ceiling, that cooler air is near the floor. You learn to button your collar tightly

around your neck, to pull the gauntlets of your gloves up over the cuffs of your coat, that embers can go anywhere skin is exposed. You learn

that you are only human flesh, not Superman, and that you can burn like a candle.

You try to go easy on the air that’s inside the tank on your back, try to be calm and not overly exert yourself, try and save some of your 610

strength. You learn about exhaustion and giving it all you’ve got, then having to reach back and pull up some more. Suck it up and go.

You learn eventually not to let your legs tremble when you’re pressing hard on the gas or the diesel pedal, when you’re driving into

something that is unknown.

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 17

One day if you make rank you will be promoted to driver or pump operator or lieutenant and you will discover what it feels like to roll up to

a burning structure, a house that somebody lives in, or a university dormitory where hundreds of people live, or a business upon whose 615

commerce somebody’s livelihood depends. You will change in that moment, stop being a nozzleman and become instead the operator of the

apparatus the nozzlemen are pulling lines from, and you will know then that the knowledge pushed into your head at dry training sessions in

the fire station must now be applied to practical use, quickly, with no mistakes, because there are men you know whose lives are going to

depend on a steady supply of water, at the right pressure, for as long as it takes to put the fire out.

And on that first time you’ll probably be like I was, scared shitless. But you can’t let that stop you from doing your job. 620

You learn the difficulty of raising a ladder and pulling the rope and raising the extensions up to a second-floor window, and the difficulty of

climbing that ladder with a charged inch-and-a-half line and then opening it and staying on the ladder without falling.

You learn of ropes and safety belts, insulated gloves to move downed high-voltage lines, nozzle pressure and friction loss and the rule of

thumb for a two-and-a-half-inch nozzle. You learn to check the flow pressure on a fire hydrant and what burning plastic tastes like, the way it

will make you gag and cough and puke when those fumes get into your lungs and you know that something very bad has come inside your 625

body. You see death and hear the sounds of the injured. Some days you look at the fire phone and have bad feeling, smoke more cigarettes,

glance at the phone, and sometimes it rings. Sometimes you’re wrong and the night passes without trouble.

You learn to love a job that is not like sacking groceries or working in a factory or painting houses, because everybody watches you when you

come down the street. You wear a blue uniform with silver or brass or gold, and you get free day-old doughnuts from the bakery shop down

the street. At Christmas people bring in pies, cakes, cookies, ham, smoked sausage, cheese, half-pints of whiskey. They thank you for your 630

work in a season of good cheer. One freezing December night the whole department gathers with eighty steaks and Wally parks his wheeled

cooker and dumps in sixty or seventy pounds of charcoal to cook them and you have drinks and play Bingo for prizes that businesses in your

town have donated, a rechargeable flashlight from the auto supply, a hot-air popcorn popper from a department store, a case of beer from the

grocery down the street.

You lay out hose in the deadly summer heat on a street with no shade, hook it all up, hundreds and hundreds of feet of it, put closed nozzles 635

on the end of the hose, and run the pressure up to three hundred psi and hold it for five minutes. If a piece bursts and creates a waterstorm on

the street, you remove that section from the line and throw it away. Then you shut it down and drain it and write down the identification

number of every piece of hose that survived the test and put it all back on the truck, thirteen hundred feet of it, and you make new bends and

turns so the rubber coating inside it won’t kink and start to dry-rot.

You learn the major arteries of the body and the names of the bones and how to splint a leg or an arm, how to tie off and cut an umbilical 640

cord. You learn to read blood pressure, administer oxygen. You see amounts of blood that are unbelievable, not realizing unti l it’s actually

spilled how much the human body holds. You crawl up under taxpayers’ houses for their dogs, go inside culverts where snakes may be hiding

for their cats. You learn to do whatever is called for.

No two days are ever the same and you’re thankful for that. You dread the winter and the advent of ice. On an August day you pray that the

city will behave and let you lie under the air conditioner and read a good book, draw easy money. 645

You learn that your muscles and bones and tendons get older and that you cannot remain young forever. You test the pump on the truck every

day when you come on duty, make sure it’s full of fuel, clean, full of water, that the extinguishers are up. You check that your turnouts are all

together, hanging on the hook that has your name written above it, and that both your gloves are in your coat pocket. You make sure your

flashlight works. You test the siren and the lights because everything has to be in readiness. You shut it all down and stand back and look at the

deep red Imron paint, the gold leafing and lettering, the chrome valves and caps, the shiny chains and levers, the fluid-filled pressure gauges, 650

the beds filled with woven nylon, the nozzles folded back into layers of hose, the hydrant wrenches snug in their holders, everything on this

magnificent machine. You learn every inch of your truck and you know which compartments hold the forcible entry tools, the exhaust fans for

removing smoke from a house, the power saws, the portable generator, the pike poles, the scoops, the salvage covers, the boltcutters, the

axes, the ropes, the rappelling gear. You look at all of it over and over again and then you go inside the fire station and get a cup of coffee, sit

down with a magazine or a newspaper, and once more, you wait for whatever comes your way. 655

All The Forces At Work Here

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 18

By Joe Wilkins

First thing in the morning Willie Murnion turns his welding rig onto our road and comes raising a rooster tail of dust fast down the gravel and

bangs on the screen door with his ham of a fist and announces to my mother that he’ll go ahead and fix the basketball hoop. 660

My mother, in her nightgown, nods and pulls the screen door closed. I pull on tennis shoes and deer-hide gloves and go out to help. While

Willie readies the welder, I haul out his tools. I grab a big rusty box and small rusty box; I tote over a five-gallon bucket and fill it with well

water. Willie lights a cigarette and rubs at his eyes, tells me the other welding helmet is in the cab, behind the seat. I hear it said around that

Willie drinks too much, and I know Willie used sit on the stool next to my father at the Sportsman bar, which is most likely why Willie

turned down our gravel road this morning: in his raging grief Willie came to do something for the wife and boy of the man he drank and 665

laughed with, the man who listened late into the night. I crank open the truck door and see a pillow of greasy clothes on the seat, a cardboard

suitcase, and a bottle of whiskey on the floor. I push the seat forward and grab the mask and consider that Willie has probably not been home

for days, has not seen his wife and daughters—who go to our church and live just up the road from us in a double-wide trailer near the

river—in a long, long time.

But I swallow this knowledge, look away from my frowning mother, who has come out to water her flowers, pale blue bathrobe tight around 670

her waist. It was a week ago, my mother at work, that I took the pickup keys without permission and backed over the cement pad and up to

the new hoop. I was thinking I could stand in the pickup bed and reach the screws to slip the hoop down the pole, then I could dunk, pretend

to be some big NBA player. But I slammed the wedge of the tailgate right into the pole, and it cracked and buckled. My mother just seemed

tired. She said as soon as I could pay for it, she’d call someone to fix it. I crunch across the gravel, set the welding masks together, and wait for

Willie’s word. 675

Once Willie has the welder in order, and the puckered metal scraped and brushed, we put our shoulders to the pole and bend it straight.

Willie gulps at the air, like some huge fish, his untucked shirt waving over the pearl curve of his stomach. He smells of smoke and ammonia.

He wipes his sweating forehead on his sleeve and motions to the masks, and I hand him one, screw the other onto my head and flip the visor

down. The day goes dark, until Willie sparks the torch. He lays, like I thought he would, a thick bead directly in the metal scar, but then,

opposite that, where the pole looks more or less straight and fine, he wields a long rectangle of tempered steel, the width of it sticking six 680

inches straight back.

I think a fin, a wing, maybe Willie’s signature or bit of artifice—but I’m so happy to have the evidence of my wrongdoing made right that I

don’t ask any questions. I don’t discover that this steel wing is a kind of truss and carries the whole weight of the hoop, keeps it from slowly

folding over on itself. Though I know some few things, I don’t understand all the forces at work here, the mechanics of tension, moment, and

node. 685

How twice the strength is needed to come straight at something. How what is still is charged and what is hastened is dead. How bread

becomes flesh, how flesh becomes dust, how the heart is bread and flesh and dust—the way with a rag Willie slops well water to cool the

weld and picks up his clanking tools, and I thank him then, and shake his heavy, trembling hand, and though in a few years Willie will abandon

his wife and daughters altogether and dedicate himself to liquor and other oblivions, I will think of him kindly and often.

690

Things Are Meted Out to People And Then They Leave

By Tory M. Taylor

At fourteen I got my first real job from a woman named Cia. When she spoke she lisped a little and gutted her words with curses; on breaks

she sat outside the kitchen on a milk crate, long legs planted far apart, bright mouth pulling on a cigarette like it was keeping her alive. Cia

called us baby, honey, sweetheart, flooded my veins with love. She said a blow job isn’t hard to do, then took a pickle in her lips to prove it. 695

The waitresses were a small army, uniformed in men’s white dress shirts, meeting in the toilet stalls to plot. They swallowed aspirin and

Xanax without any water and watched us clearing the tables and said under their breath to no one in particular, Jesus it’s nice to have buskids who

actually work.

The following year without any obvious provocation or intent, my sister and I started calling our mother by her first name – Jane, or

sometimes even Janie. By then we were working together at a different place, Annie’s, and if I said, “Mom…?,” every waitress in earshot 700

answered “What?” in a tone that differed from the others only in its momentary balance of distraction and affection. Anyway Jane either didn’t

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 19

mind or waited so long to object that she forgot why she might have wanted to, and once when someone asked, I heard her say simply, “I’ve

been called worse.” Which I knew was true.

The last time I worked in a restaurant was thirteen years ago at Mike Anderson’s on Bourbon Street. I was twenty years old and had just left

the second place I’d ever lived, the Berkshires, to come to New Orleans. The restaurant was in the two hundred block where every night 705

tourists on the balconies threw beads at tourists on the street like somebody forgot to tell them it wasn’t February yet. Three of us were

trained at the same time, and we had to take a test about the menu, dishes with names like Guitreau and Joliet Rouge. I got lots of things

wrong but they still gave me the job.

At Mike Anderson’s I worked with a woman named Lela who lived in New Orleans East. Odds are good she doesn’t live there anymore. Lela

said a woman should always smell nice, and that she liked sandalwood, herself. Her hair was so dark she didn’t look ridiculous in the hairnets 710

we had to wear for prep work. Lela had a little boy with her ex-girlfriend, and I asked if she’d been the one to give birth. She threw back her

head and laughed, reaching for her purse on the counter to pull out a picture of a woman in an NOPD uniform. Sure baby. This one, she’s his

daddy.

The worst manager, Gary, had eyes like buckshot in a porcine face. He used to fly into a rage if he saw Lela biting into a Saltine or half a baked

potato. I see you eat on the clock again and your shift’s over. It didn’t seem to matter as much if the rest of us did it. Lela really was sent home, 715

more than once, although I don’t think it was for eating during the shift. I can’t remember what it was for. Lela didn’t care, or didn’t seem to.

She’d say, I got my tips, y’all can have the sidework. Took her sweet time leaving the hot kitchen, and kissed my cheek as she passed.

I miss having a job that takes my whole body to do. That taxes it. One whose tasks are obvious, onerous, the opposite of profound and the

same every time, reflecting only the harmless fact of strangers eating together in a place that is no one’s home. Where things are meted out to

people and then they leave. A job whose little ceremonies I can love precisely for their pointlessness. Where people get nothing that I don’t 720

bring them. Another waitress I used to know ran after her customers once to toss back the pennies they’d left. Fistful of copper dropped on

black asphalt. Keep it.

A Black Hairstory Lesson

By Niya Marie

725

There was the year micro-braided, brokenhearted girls sang Ashanti in prayer circles, their sopranos trapped in their sinuses, the incantation

to be unfoolish neutralized by the next shape-up with a pair of Butters. Then the year triple-X-tee’d boys-will-be-boys broke down the name of

Osama bin Laden into call-and-response, pounding the battered faces of lockers to punctuate each syllable. Sometime in between all that, I

had my first and last boyfriend.

He was City Blue down to the socks. Cords of muscle coiled like concertina wire under his brick-brown skin. Irises like dollops of burnt sugar 730

would melt the size-2 Baby Phat right off my peekaboo hips. Whenever his mother worked a double at the hospital, I’d be in her kitchen

baking brownies in nothing but a wife beater, just to show her son I could be that girl, his girl, the girl latched onto a boy’s hip as if she’d

sprung from it. I wasn’t his first, but I was determined to be his last. I kept my straightened hair shiny as a new penny and swooped it over my

left eye like Aaliyah. I got a touch-up every six weeks to mirror the girls who’d come before me and keep pace with the ever eager next-ups.

I never needed to know which brand of relaxer to buy or how to apply it because I had Ms. Jackie. Both my mother and my grandmother had 735

sat in Ms. Jackie’s styling chair, its sleek vinyl as red as Red Hots. By the time I took my place on that throne, the candied cushions had

cracked. Ms. Jackie, on the other hand, had stopped aging back when New Jack Swing crackled out of Walkmans. She was shaped like an

hourglass that could measure a month of Sundays. The charms on her necklace would shimmy down between her girls and never come up for

air. I imagined that lucky silver was slick and warm as blood, and redolent of the baby powder that coated her chest when she opened up the

shop in the morning. By nightfall, that confectioners’ sugar would’ve dissolved and her bare, pastry-colored skin would glisten as if it’d been 740

painted with egg wash.

When it was time to work her Marcel magic on me, Ms. Jackie’s toughened fingertips would graze my nape, and I’d tilt my head downward,

on cue. The point of her rattail comb would needle my scalp as she cleaved through sheaves of my blown-out hair. I inhaled a flurry of scents:

the hair care aisle’s ethnic section uncorked; baby powder, Muslim smell-goods; the bitterness of he-ain’t-shit blues, the sweetness of he-put-it-

down arias; smoking metal heated just shy of incandescence; and the lingering pungency of relaxer. 745

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 20

Once pleased with the geometry of her parts, Ms. Jackie would relieve the stove of its iron. I’d hear the clink-clink-clank of catch and release,

and feel her cooling breath chasing the blackened barrel down the length of my hair. After an hour or three, my strands—lovingly cooked into

submission—would cascade over my shoulders like chiffon. Later, my boyfriend would finger-comb my ‘do as Sanaa Lathan dribbled out of a

Magnavox behemoth into both of our wet dreams.

One day, as if led by the bridle on my body and desire, I toddled out of the salon, across the cobblestone trolley-tracked avenue, through 750

Acme’s automatic doors, down the feminine hygiene aisle, until I reached a shelf of depilatories. I bought the one that claimed to perform 10-

minute miracles. Once home, I set the timer on my Nokia accordingly. My phone sat on the toilet seat lid, and I, on the tub’s porcelain lip,

splay-legged. I applied my purchase precisely where it instructed not to.

The blush-pink cream smelled of Saturdays that slid through fingers like Hot Six Oil. The burning sensation reminded me of that time my

silken crown concealed an island of active volcanoes oozing piss-colored pus. I watched as the stiff curlicues below my navel began to unwind 755

and bow down like palm trees in the wake of a nuclear blast. My cell chirped: time’s up. Finally! I rotated the showerhead’s dial to power rain

and drove all that familiarity down the drain. Now hairless and pimpled, my crimsoned skin straddled pubescence, and felt slippery as if I’d

doused it in bleach.

The Deck 760

By Yusef Komunyakaa

I have almost nailed my left thumb to the 2 x 4 brace that holds the deck together. This Saturday morning in June, I have sawed 2 x 6s, T-

squared and leveled everything with three bubbles sealed in green glass, and now the sweat on my tongue tastes like what I am. I know I’m

alone, using leverage to swing the long boards into place, but at times it seems as if there are two of us working side by side like old lovers

guessing each other’s moves. 765

This hammer is the only thing I own of yours, and it makes me feel I have carpentered for years. Even the crooked nails are going in straight.

The handsaw glides through grease. The toenailed stubs hold. The deck has risen up around me, and now it’s strong enough to support my

weight, to not sway with this old, silly, wrong-footed dance I’m about to throw my whole body into.

Plumbed from sky to ground, this morning’s work can take nearly anything! ~it~ so much uproar and punishment, footwork and euphoria,

I’m almost happy this Saturday. 770

I walk back inside and here you are. Plain and simple as the sunlight on the tools outside. Daddy, if you’d come back a week ago, or day before

yesterday I would have been ready to sit down and have a long talk with you. There were things I wanted to say. So many questions I wanted

to ask, but now they’ve been answered with as much salt and truth as we can expect from the living.

Mown Lawn 775

By Lydia Davis

Mom hated a mown lawn. Maybe that was because mow was the reverse of wom, the beginning of the name of what she was—a woman. A mown

lawn had a sad sound to it, like a long moan. From her, a mown lawn made a long moan. Lawn had some of the letters of man, though the reverse

of man would be Nam, a bad war. A raw war. Lawn also contained the letters of law. In fact, lawn was a contraction of lawman. Certainly

a lawman could and did mow a lawn. Law and order could be seen as starting from lawn order, valued by so many Americans. More lawn could be 780

made using a lawn mower. A lawn mower did make more lawn. More lawn was a contraction of more lawmen. Did more lawn in America make more

lawmen in America? Did more lawn make more Nam? More mown lawn made more long moan, from her. Or a lawn mourn. So often, she said,

Americans wanted more mown lawn. All of America might be one long mown lawn. A lawn not mown grows long, she said: better a long lawn.

Better a long lawn and a mole. Let the lawman have the mown lawn, she said. Or the moron, the lawn moron.

785

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 21

Fish

By Nicole Walker

1.

The fish jumped a ladder built of electricity and concrete. Swimming up the Columbia is a lesson in progress. Even before the dam, the 790

waterfalls would have battered her forefathers. The rocks would have packed a wallop, broken the skin, bruised the flesh. Now the flesh starts

bruised, already whaled on by 40-pounds-per-inch spray kept narrow and forceful by the steel holes boring through 200 feet of cement. The

water directs her toward the spillway. She directs her body against the current.

All the roe she had to hoe.

Eggs were flying out of her tubes like baseballs firing out of a pitching machine. Follicular. Funicular. She looked at the cables of fire streaming 795

above her. Follicles polishing those little apples.

Apple of her eye. Her silver skin turning apple-skin—ripening. Dying.

Water polishing the concrete to a smooth, slippery, no-holds, no-nook, no-rub step.

She flipped her body up the next.

Ten more flights to go. 800

Share a step with another salmon.

She had swum by him a while ago.

Now he swims in circles.

She has to jump over him as well as the stair.

Head over fin. 805

2.

I am 11 years old and holding on to a fishing pole, trolling for big fish in the deep water off Florida’s coast. I must have been beautiful then.

Three grown men stand around me. One with a stubbly beard lifts my feet and places them in the hold. To hold on. To get leverage. To bear

down. 810

The other man, with a pair of sunglasses on his face and another on a pair of Chums around his neck, holds my hand, folds it around the handle

of the reel.

My father stands to my left, cheering me on. Don’t let it go. It’s huge. Hold on tight.

Sunglass man pulls my hand toward my body, then out to sea. Following the turbines of the engine. Circling.

The fish, as it jumps out of the water, arches its back. It looks stubbly faced man in the eyes. 815

Sunglass man holds the fish. Stubbly man hits it over the head.

No one eats 48-inch barracuda.

They throw it in the cooler anyway.

3. 820

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 22

Cooking filets of fish is not complicated. Salt and pepper the fish. Press the water out of the skin with a knife. Slide it across at a 20-degree

angle. In the pan, in some oil, two minutes on the skin side, one minute on the flesh.

It’s the sauce that’s difficult.

First you need an herb rarely paired with food, like rue or lavender or chamomile.

Sometimes green tea. Or use demiglace. 825

Then you need an emulsion. One stick of butter per dinner party. OK, maybe two.

Reduce the green tea or lobster-body fish stock. Or warm the demiglace.

Strain through a chinois. Strain through cheesecloth. Strain one more time for good measure.

With a steel whip, turn in a cube of butter. Don’t let it melt. Emulsify means “to make one.” Make the reduction open up and hook elbows

with a molecule of the fat. Water and oil don’t mix, my ass. Water and oil are the same thing—if you whisk fast enough and if you add the 830

butter slowly.

Puddle the emulsion in the middle of the plate.

Pile under the fish some truffled risotto, some roasted potatoes, some chard wilted in wine.

For color, add citrus or tomatoes or little dices of carrot, strewn around the plate.

Let the fish rest for a minute or so. To redistribute the juices. To firm the flesh. Do not let the fish get cold. 835

ESSAYS ABOUT OTHER STUFF

Genderfuck

by Madison Hoffman

In the fifth grade, all the teachers divide you boy from girl and take you into separate classrooms. With the girls, you learn about periods and 840

cramps and tampons, and everyone giggles. Afterwards, you all rejoin the boys, who are holding complimentary sticks of deodorant and

laughing among themselves. You wonder what they learned, and why you couldn’t know.

At the library, there’s a book about a girl whose brother is really a sister.

People in middle school use the word ‘fag’ like punctuation. You know about homosexuality from books, but there’s something starkly

different from how this is in books than it is here, in the real world. Something begins to feel wrong with your body, like you’re an inch out of 845

your skin, leaving your muscles and organs exposed. There are girls who like girls, boys who like boys, and girls who like boys, you tell

yourself when you begin to question. You like boys. You are a girl who likes boys.

Facebook has 51 different options for gender.

Your sixth grade biology teacher liked to talk about ecological systems. Niches, she said, were the place of an animal in the system, the place

where it belonged. Predator or prey, herbivore or carnivore, each has its niche. You find your niche, haul yourself into it like a drowning 850

person escaping the water. Genderqueer. Androgyne. Transgender. You never say the words out loud, but you imagine how they would slide

from your tongue if you did, unfamiliar but oh so right.

The Barnes & Noble near your house has two tiny shelves labeled “LGBT Books,” hidden behind the massive “Christian Literature” section.

Most of the people at school don’t believe you, brush it off. Kayley nods along, confused, and forgets immediately after you tell her. Serena

laughs at you. Jason turns it into a joke, running up to you in between classes and asking Really? Are you serious? Andrew looks uneasy as you tell 855

him and never mentions it again. Both Melissa and your therapist take you at your word, believing easily and solemnly respecting your

pronouns.

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 23

Chelsea Manning is all over the news that year, though they keep using the wrong name for her.

Technically, you’re not gay, but you can’t help but wince every time they bring marriage equality up on the news, every time your dad feels

the need to remark on how unnatural it is. If people can’t accept this, something so blessedly simple, how will they ever accept you? It makes 860

you anxious, tension curling at the base of your spine. You build up your vocabulary like a fortress: agender, genderfluid, demigirl.

You learn a new statistic: 1 in 12. It sort of makes you want to die.

In high school, the teacher asks the class to split up into boy and girl teams for a review game. For a brief, wild moment, you want to stand up

and say something, but you can’t force the words from your throat. People move around you, laughing and talking, and very suddenly, you

feel eleven again. 865

Neurod(i)verse Sounds Like Universe

By Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

I am still adjusting. To prose. The endless line. Adjusting to nonfiction. To motherhood & writing mothering so my “I” has nothing to hide

behind. The lyric stripped of so much music & light. I used to turn to moon, then the stars. Now, my son turns to them too, & beyond them. 870

Satellites, gas giants, black holes. He says he wants to feel them, wants to be farthest from where his feet touch ground.

Neurodiverse sounds like universe. Neurodiverse. I repeat & hold it in my mouth. He holds it in the whole of him. Neuron-universe, a world

all his own. Fluttering neurons we cannot see or make sense of. I say neurodiverse sounds like universe versus—him against everything else—

verses, verses. I am still signing, writing what is & isn’t lyric to get closer. I don’t know to what. Every word takes me father away. The black

& white against the page is the negative, a counter image of countless stars—black glimmers against a white expanse. 875

I tell him he could land on the moon, on Saturn’s rings even. He could study black holes. He could know these celestial things. There is

something solid in such reaching.

No, he protests. He wants to touch the body of the planet, its hydrogen & helium, his hands outstretched towards black matter. He wants to

sink into something. To be consumed wholly. If only we could detach from sense, unbind from gravity, from our eyes, our senseless feet.

Unbound by our “I’s” too. How beautiful his longing. How distant. Maybe that’s why we both turn to the moon, to rock that is heft & 880

weightless, glow & shadow.

Why is the moon still here? he asks, when its ghost-halo stays white into the morning. I don’t know how to explain the science. The way the sun

reflects off stone. The way our sky hangs on longer than she should.

I tell him, Sometimes, the moon waits for you to wake, so she can go to sleep. I tell him it’s a game of hide ‘n’ seek, & he has won. I tell him whatever

is close enough to true to hold him, grounded to this earth. 885

Neurodiverse

is a universe

of black holes—

we do not know what it is made of or where it leads. We know it is wonder. Magic even. We know it is full of “I” & at once, completely

drained of it. We know, if we get too close, it will swallow us, & if we stay away, we will never feel the gravitational pull of something 890

greater than any god.

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 24

Women These Days

By Amy Butcher 895

[Compiled and arranged by searching “woman + [verb]” (walking) in national news outlets over the past twelve months]

An Ohio woman was shot dead while cooking Thanksgiving dinner; witnesses report that at the time of the shooting, she was standing at a

kitchen table, preparing macaroni and cheese. The body of a North Carolina woman was found in a shopping center parking lot at dawn. A

Texas woman was grabbed from behind and attacked in a “bear hug” after finishing several laps at the Austin High School track. A California

woman was found dead and stuffed in a trash bag on a sidewalk. A Pennsylvania woman was found dead in the suspect’s grandmother’s home. 900

A Michigan woman was groped and urinated on while shopping in Kohl’s; a breast cancer survivor who had recently undergone a double

mastectomy and reconstructive surgery, she was shopping for new bras when Troy Police say the assailant attacked her, urinating on her back

and into her incisions, which were still healing. An eighteen-year-old Pennsylvania teen was shot in the head several hours after her high

school graduation by a white male while merging into traffic ten miles from her home and mine. A Michigan woman walked into a hospital

and reported to nurses that she’d being sexually assaulted, beaten with brass knuckles, imprisoned for three days and transported to have sex 905

with a man for money; the woman reported that she thought the man was a friend. Police would later describe hers as some of the worst

bruising they’d ever seen.

A woman in her fifties was knocked to the ground, dragged into a field and raped in populated Rosental Park; during the assault, she was

kicked and punched so hard in her face that she had to undergo emergency surgery, and police responded to the crime by telling a local

newspaper that women should reduce their personal freedoms by jogging in pairs rather than assume they will be protected. A 63-year-old 910

woman was found dead in her bedroom at 11:00 a.m.; police report her head was bashed in and her husband, who had bite marks on his hand,

told a neighbor, “I know I’m going to jail.” A 33-year-old woman was on her way to work when a man pushed her into oncoming traffic,

sending her sprawling headfirst into the road as a bus was heading towards her; the driver, travelling at about 12mph, swerved at the last

second, narrowly missing the victim’s head as she lay inches from the bus’ wheels. A woman out for a walk was forced into a car by a man

with a Caribbean-sounding accent; he drove her to a secluded parking lot at gunpoint and then sexually assaulted her. A woman was thrown to 915

the ground and kicked by two men in a parking lot. A twenty-two-year-old girl from my hometown was murdered by strangulation and blunt

force trauma one week after transferring to Temple University; she was moved to three separate locations via Lyft first in a blue plastic

storage container and then a duffel bag before police identified her attacker, a 29-year-old male who was found cleaning blood from his

apartment, his cousin later testified.

Police are still searching for the suspected rapist. Police are still searching for the suspected murderer. Police are still searching for the 920

suspected assailants. The suspect is reported to be a tan, white male in his mid-50s with no facial hair. The suspect was last seen shirtless and

in work boots with shorts. The suspect is between 25 and 35 and was wearing grey knee-length trousers and a blue-green chequered shirt.

The suspect drives an older model small car that is dark green or maybe blue. The suspect denies ever seeing the victim before. The suspect

denies being at the bridge at the time of her murder. The suspect alleges he was at the mall at the time of the shooting. The suspect denies

being in the park that morning. The suspect reports he was grocery shopping at the time of the murder. The suspect remains at large. Police 925

ask for anyone with information about the suspect to come forward.

I hate feminists, he says to me. The love of my life. I hate that you count yourself among them. A bunch of angry women who hate men. You’re hurting an

entire gender.

The Quantum Theory of Suffering or Why I Look at the Moon 930

By Natalie Diaz

I have imagined the night when Einstein turned to astrophysicist Abraham Pais and asked, Do you really think the moon only exists when you are

looking at it? Pais immediately looked up into the corner of that blue sky, locating the satellite, holding with his eyes and mind that grand hole

of white light turning the night green at its edges. On that night, it hung like a bone above them as they walked along carrying their big brains.

It’s clear to me, too, that when Pais looked up at it, the moon grew fatter, rounder, and the grey maria on its surface pulsed and flickered into 935

focus in a way that seemed new, the way a moon seems new each time we catch it in our gaze.

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 25

I only know this small piece of quantum theory: a thing does not exist until it is looked at or measured. That is, the moon does not exist until we

look at it. Suffering, especially someone else’s suffering, does not exist until we measure it in a way that makes it quantifiable or

understandable to our own self.

Quantum theory: My brother and his suffering do not exist until I write it down, until I make it understandable through my own images of 940

suffering.

Or, quantum theory: If I do not look him in the eye, if I do not write him down, write myself down, then maybe his suffering does not exist,

or he is maybe-suffering, or he is both not suffering and suffering.

Maybe it is this simple: We have to look at the moon, acknowledge the moon so we know we are here beneath it, deserving of its light,

deserving of the oceans it pulls, the lovers we reach for, the smooth spin it gives our earth. 945

Maybe poems are hypotheses in the quantum theory of suffering.

I both believe in and doubt the quantum theory of suffering—whether the suffering of my brother, or the men on the streets in a mess of

cardboard and newspaper, or the moon as it becomes less and less night after night only to rebuild itself and be torn down again.

The quantum theory of suffering is also the quantum theory of tenderness: Yes, writing about my brother is acknowledgement of his suffering,

of his humanity. I am measuring his suffering on the page. I am proving my love for him. To acknowledge his existence is one type of 950

tenderness.

It is tenderness even for myself. Quantum theory is selfish—I quantify my own humanity by acknowledging his. If he is still my brother,

riddled and wracked as he might be, then I must still be a sister. There is hope in that.

Einstein’s question: Do you really think the moon only exists when you are looking at it?

Some nights, when the drugs have burned him down in a certain way, my brother thinks the moon is chasing him, hunting him. On those 955

nights, he goes home to my mother and my mother calls me while he is outside running circles around her house trying to escape the moon.

He hides beneath the porch, in the bed of my dad’s old work truck, in the shed, beneath the clothes on the line. On these nights, quantum

theory is mostly wrong, and my brother is most right and most like Einstein, and Einstein is most like a poet because he knew this: the moon,

like suffering, is there, it is always there.

My job, while it is not always easy, is simple: Look at it. 960

Joyas Voladoras

By Brian Doyle

Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird’s heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird’s heart is the size of a pencil

eraser. A hummingbird’s heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called 965

them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the

universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from

ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.

~

Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred 970

miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into

torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they

are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those

hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmet-crests and booted racket-tails, violet-

tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, 975

rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star-frontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 26

Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant’s

fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.

~

Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they 980

have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer

and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles—anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for

the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they

suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures than any other living creature. It’s expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine.

You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like 985

a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.

~

The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It’s as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers.

A child could walk around it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This

house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay 990

bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day, and when it is seven or

eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the

mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs and arts of the blue

whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest animal who ever lived we

know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating 995

moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.

~

Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two

chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as

eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side 1000

of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.

~

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not

mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the

heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will 1005

come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are

bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter

how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and

impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass

in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s 1010

papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is

making pancakes for his children.

A Brief Atmospheric Future

By Matthew Gavin Frank 1015

If we’re to believe the neuroscientist Professor Marcus Pembrey, from University College London, who concluded, “Behaviour can be

affected by events in previous generations which have been passed on through a form of genetic memory… phobias, anxiety and post-

traumatic stress disorders… [even] sensitivity to [a] cherry blossom scent…” then the pigeon knows of its ancestors’ lives as Genghis Khan’s

messengers, as carriers of Tipu Sultan’s poetry, silk plantation blueprints, and schematics for the advancement of rocket artillery.

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 27

The pigeon knows that it was once used to announce the winners of the Olympics, the beginnings and the ends of wars; that Paul Reuter, 1020

founder of the Reuters press agency, compelled its progenitors to transport information about stock prices from one telegraph line terminus

to another. That apothecaries depended on them for the delivery of medicine. That rival armies trained hawks to eviscerate the pigeons of

their enemies, causing a communication breakdown. That we’ve given to them our voices, that we’ve made of their bodies the earliest and

most organic of radio waves; that when we place our faith in the tenacity of the carrier pigeon, our lives and our loves and our heartaches and

our deaths can float above us, and the most important parts of our self-narratives are on-air. 1025

I nose deeply into the feathers of my pillow, know that a feather stripped of barbs is bone. The code of the body. The positioning system in the

synapses, the electric impulses, the capillaries, the heart. My wife takes another pain pill and says something about trying again in the new

year, that some couples—like her sister-in-law and brother—successfully conceive only after losing a half-dozen, and when they’re—like

us—in their low forties. Like all of us, the pigeon roosting in our eaves knows something but does not know how it knows it. The bird does

not even coo. The bird, in fact, shows no outward signs of pleasure, or affection, at all. 1030

The carrier pigeon’s life is one of servitude, and thereby, mutilation. Of flight girdled. Trainers have designed tiny backpacks, fitted to the

pigeon’s bodies, and filled with anything from confidential blueprints for spacecraft meant to land on Mars, to heroin meant for prison

inmates, to declarations of love and war, to blood samples, to heart tissue, to diamonds—anything we secretly desire, or desire to keep

secret. Our underbellies, our interior lives, our fetishes, our wishes—some clandestine network mapping, ethnographically, the diagrams and

fluctuations of our ids, tied to bird-backs and bird-feet, twining the air above us—the air we’re so busy trying to dominate, bring down to our 1035

level. Perhaps it’s not God or god who has the answers to our seemingly unanswerable questions about ourselves, but the loaded-up pigeons,

some of whom, in a crisis of weight, will randomly land, offer us a clue into the circulatory map of all the things we wish to hide from the rest

of our race.

The pigeons slither along shafts of air, shafts within shafts. Wormholes. They don’t eat worms so much as French fries, pretzel salt, hand-me-

down popcorn. Anatomy dictates: when the pigeon steps forward, its head, for just a moment, is briefly left behind. There’s something buried 1040

both in their little backpacks and their anatomy. Diamonds, blood samples, bloodlines, codes. They aim to deliver all of these things to our

waiting hands. My wife and I sit up in bed, stretch our hands out in front of us, fingers splayed. We do these exercises together to increase, as

the OB-GYN said, blood flow, to decrease the chance of her cramping in sleep. Our hands enjoying a brief atmospheric future, waiting for

rest of our bodies to catch up. Our hands are the empty nests, the eggless zeros, reddening only because our hearts are beating with so many

old sadnesses. We are ever circling our losses, trying to find the way into them, so we can find the way out. Always getting over, always 1045

recovering. We need salve. Medicine and diamonds. We need to convince ourselves that we are strong enough to carry the weight of a

pigeon—their soft 9.3 to 13.4-ounce bodies. They come to us as we’ve trained them to do. They have popcorn skins in their throats. Ketchup

in their feathers. We’ve trained them well, and they slither in the air above us, recalling their serpentine ancestors, counting the seconds until

they can land.

1050

S__ __T (A Dialogue)
by Janis Butler Holm

“She’s a bitch of the inauthentic; her ego’s in drag.”

Lisa Robertson, XEclogue

1055

S: Call me “spunky” or “feisty,” and I’ll cut off your arm. We made love in a corn field.

T: Are you content with your career? Cold-pressed olive oil from Palestine.

S: A fire-agate ring. I loathe swimming and jogging.

T: She didn’t need a script. The main move in fencing is the long thrust, or lunge.

S: By its very nature, writing is a lie. Do you recall pettipants? Anemia at six. 1060

T: Handsome abstract paintings in deep crimson hues. The sister’s a musician.

S: Honey, I’m home. A combination of approaches seemed to work well.

T: Your social role is changing. Hey, I’m making this up. Selective charisma.

SELECTED ESSAYS / pg. 28

S: Wear socks to bed. Six-burner island cooktops don’t appear in her dreams.

T: Where’d you get that accent? We have new monsters now. Passion makes me compelling. 1065

S: Line by line, page by page. Humanized through our repression–

T: And independent film. That girl’s wound more tightly than a rubber-band ball.

S: I wasn’t always naked. Our Buick’s hardly phat. Just remember to rehydrate.

T: Pick a place to be offstage. Are guilty pleasures pleasures if you take away the guilt?

S: A former beauty-queen contestant who’s crazy for Foucault. 1070

T: Lived trauma is permanent. Soy milk in the fridge.

S: At stationery stores she experienced jouissance. We like having deer for neighbors.

T: Polite and then not. The driving instructor had hands the size of hams.

S: Be sure to plan your journey before setting out. I studied Cuban drama.

T: Moody songs in minor tones. Champagne taste and beer credit. 1075

S: Granddad fished in the Gulf. She devised disgusting phrases like “supermodel snot.”

T: A protean capacity for multiple parts. Snuggle with your sweetie. Unorthodox stuff.

A Black Hairstory Lesson

By Niya Marie

You must follow and complete this assignment in the
exact format listed on the assignment!

Essays about other stuff start on
page 22!

NO AI!

DUE AT 5 PM

Here is another student’s response to this assignment. You must use to complete
section 3. Responding of the assignment.

Hope Harden 

Neurod(i)verse Sounds Like Universe” By Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

1a. Line [869-871]: “I am still adjusting. To prose. The endless line. Adjusting to nonfiction. To motherhood & writing mothering so my “I” has nothing to hide behind. The lyric stripped of so much music & light. I used to turn to moon, then the stars. Now, my son turns to them too, & beyond them. Satellites, gas giants, black holes. He says he wants to feel them, wants to be farthest from where his feet touch ground.” 

1b. Line [878-880]: “No, he protests. He wants to touch the body of the planet, its hydrogen & helium, his hands outstretched towards black matter. He wants to sink into something. To be consumed wholly. If only we could detach from sense, unbind from gravity, from our eyes, our senseless feet. Unbound by our “I’s” too” 

1c. What stands out to me is how the speaker compares her life to that of a prose that is endless, yet her sentence structure consists of short sentences and it has an end to it, giving a deeper meaning to the writing. The imagery that is in the short essay about the planets and how her son wants to physically touch them gives the readers the ability to find a deeper meaning.

 “Women These Days” By Amy Butcher 

1a. Line [897-899]: “An Ohio woman was shot dead while cooking Thanksgiving dinner; witnesses report that at the time of the shooting, she was standing at a kitchen table, preparing macaroni and cheese. The body of a North Carolina woman was found in a shopping center parking lot at dawn. A Texas woman was grabbed from behind and attacked in a “bear hug” after finishing several laps at the Austin High School track.” 

1b. Line [923-926]: “ The suspect denies ever seeing the victim before. The suspect denies being at the bridge at the time of her murder. The suspect alleges he was at the mall at the time of the shooting. The suspect denies being in the park that morning. The suspect reports he was grocery shopping at the time of the murder. The suspect remains at large. Police ask for anyone with information about the suspect to come forward.” 

1c. The thing that stands out to me about this piece is the brutal description of reality. There is nothing being compared, but rather it is the exact telling of what happened. From crimes that took place to telling that the suspect was let go. Everything was simplistically told, but it still held its strong theme/meaning.

 “Joyas Voladoras” By Brian Doyle 

1a. Line [964-967]: “Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird’s heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird’s heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird’s heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe,” 

1b. Line [1002-1005]: “So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart” 

1c. What stands out to me in this short essay is the fixation on one thing at the beginning (the hummingbird), then another thing (a whale), to which it leads to the deeper meaning. This gives the reader time to digest what is wanting to be discussed further and what the deeper meaning will be. 

2a. “Joyas Voladoras” 

2b. “Midwestern (Minnesota Specifically) Love” 

2c. Consider the Midwestern walk for a moment. The pace of a Midwestern walk can take your time to 12 minutes per mile. Long strides to get you where you need to go. It is a tedious process that will have you pouring sweat that will immediately freeze in the aching negative temperatures. If you are not from the Midwest, your calves will be on fire and that sweet treat after your walk will be that much more enjoyable. Past all the aches and pains, so much is held in that Midwestern walk. The heart-to-heart conversations that give you more knowledge and advice than you could imagine. The laughs and connections that can be made. Perhaps we take all of this for granted. Perhaps we think of a walk as a chore. Take this from those Midwestern walks; people think about you, they want to go on that walk with you, they don’t do it solely on exercise, they walk to show their love.