Clair had a love-hate relationship with his Uncle Mike, who always took him along when he went hunting, shooting, or fishing with his drinking buddies. He taught Clair how to pluck birds, skin animals, and clean fish, but never how to shoot a gun, never how to drink a beer. It was all work and …
I didn’t have a lot of friends at college. I grew up on the Brooklyn–Queens border. When I was accepted to NYU, a 40-minute commute away, I had to decide: Do I rack up the student loan debt to live with a slew of hopeful, wide-eyed freshmen crammed into a Manhattan dorm building, choking down …
All summer long, mum dropped heavy hints, and made carefully crafted statements. Money did not grow on trees, she said. I had my life, and now I urgently needed to do something with it. Over our tea, as a tight-lipped aside, she wondered whether banks gave poets mortgages. Subtly, she vocalised worries about what would …
Your last name is Scully, like The X Files. And you’re a redhead. In third grade you move across the country to a new school. Two boys start picking on you. They call you “Scummy Scully.” One day in art class one of the boys turns to you and shouts “I Loathe You.” You hear …
I misuse the word. After bantering, you lug a fat dictionary from your desk, riffle the pages, offer me a stage whisper sigh, and begin reading the definition of ambivalence. “Oh,” I say. “Yes, oh,” you say. We laugh. We are a we. Me on the couch. You in the chair behind me. Thrice weekly, …
This is a love letter to a seven-hundred square foot apartment, to the bedroom with the bunk for you two and the full bed for me we called the dormitory, to waking up with two little bodies tucked into the curve of my stomach, just the way I once held each of you. This is …
To a Time I Thought Would Break Me by Lauren Woods Read More »
My grandpa whispered through life, puffs of conversation here, the scuff of a slipper there. During football season, he sank into the folds of his recliner, a battered transistor radio pressed to his ear and the TV on mute so he wouldn’t bother anyone. He cut the grass with an old-fashioned push mower lest he …
My six-year-old daughter wants a pet. No, she needs a pet –her words, not mine. As much as I love dogs, I’m not a pet person. Not at this point in my life. This almost-40, perpetually exhausted mother of two (including an extremely active toddler) has no energy left to take care of one more …
This boy feels for tumors along his neck. Fingers roaming, mapping, little-by-little, he stands before the bathroom mirror, yellow lights making heat crawl, making his skin falter on his bones. This boy believes he will die on a snow-covered hill, the sun brassy and loud overhead. A counterpoint. A turning. Slamming open. Shutting soft. So …
Sweaty, red-cheeked neighborhood boys tightly gripped their hockey sticks, as they ran up and down the middle of the street with abandon, chasing after the puck. Between two goalie nets, set a short distance apart, the boys smacked and scraped their sticks’ faces against the asphalt. Every ten minutes or so, one of them would …
This plan records your hopes for your labour and the birth of your child/ren. You can change your mind about these wishes at any time. Your name: You will answer to your given name until you give birth. From then on, you will be Mum or a variant of, or any other title in accordance …
When I tell people about it now, they ask me why I never saw the signs. Like those color blindness tests teachers would hand out in elementary school, my friends assume the red flags were obvious to everyone but me—a neon-colored glitch on the screen of my life that I could not, or would not, …