June 22, 2021
I transform any unexpected tragedy, with worry, into the expected. I sap its narrative potential.
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June 08, 2021
The problem with Love, Carla likes to pronounce at random intervals, slicing the otherwise long silence of the sessions, is that it is the domain of science, of We can build you into Love.
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June 01, 2021
They'll tell you, go to college, but mostly, they don't mean to study; they mean for the M.R.S. degree. They'll tell you, what—you thought it was free?
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May 25, 2021
I have learned that in order to “fall” in love, I must be ready to no longer live in the perfect balance of self-absorption in which falling does not include the outcomes of actual failing.
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May 18, 2021
I have never said to my own mother, I wish you lost me in a wild place, but it is true.
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May 11, 2021
This is my morning task now, to sweep the stars out of my tent before the others awake. I must be careful, or the stars might cut my feet, too.
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May 04, 2021
At every sleepover birthday party, we take turns lying on the shag rug, spread our fingers under Julie-Diana-Deanna’s head/shoulders/hips/arms/legs/feet, and recite little-girl mumbo jumbo, trying to levitate each other.
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May 04, 2021
When I first learn Hebrew at Temple Beth Abraham Sunday school in Oakland, California circa ‘73, we memorize basic words, including ice cream—glida—which I mistake for God, both hard G’s and stressed D’s.
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April 27, 2021
She drew still lifes. Still lifes on the verge of putrefying.
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April 20, 2021
A thick black line appears in the distance, stretching six feet across. As the shadow grows bigger, it starts to undulate. It has wings.
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April 13, 2021
I never dream and when I wake up I don’t feel like I’ve even been asleep. Sometimes I wake up thinking I’ve been awake. It’s nothing.
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April 06, 2021
“The first few years of my life were original, then I kept replaying the same scenes with new actors,” I said, trying to explain myself, to make some kind of amends.
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March 30, 2021
I was sitting on my friend's balcony, drinking her family's homemade wine, when I realized for the hundredth time that I loved her.
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March 23, 2021
That February begins with Groundhog’s Day seems like a cruel joke.
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March 16, 2021
“Honey.” Her voice is still gentle. “A man can’t move into another man’s house.”
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March 02, 2021
Back in these past eras, some of us talked about white supremacy like an iceberg, with the bulk of its mass below the surface, but this articulation was limited: there was nothing natural or inherent about whiteness, or capitalism and colonialism, machines finely-honed after centuries of cruel operation.
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February 23, 2021
I said it was like being an altar boy all over again, only with a cheaper kind of thrill.
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February 20, 2021
She drags me to each room, to each shadow: the witch, the devil, her own figure at the space where a closet meets the wall.
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February 20, 2021
It was also a good thing I had no idea what Papa was saying because every morning he thanked God he was not born a woman.
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February 20, 2021
The cold in the laundromat is specific. It is a broken-radiator cold, Buffalo, New York cold, the rotten-side-of-the-holidays cold, the cold you feel when a spirit is close.
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February 19, 2021
Saul’s father sits down next to him, lights Saul’s candle and pats his leg. He’s always more affectionate in church, like he’s forgotten his normal behaviors. Distracted by the possibility of God, he remembers Saul.
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February 18, 2021
Robin Gow's poem "8oz of water" appears in Issue No. 52: In Transit.
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February 17, 2021
"To be honest, half my life I’ve wanted to hide in a cupboard."
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February 16, 2021
Have you come to the part of your life in which you contemplate your mother’s bones?
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February 15, 2021
When we write about people of our own creation, when we write fiction, there’s different work to do. We aren’t just noticing and deciding how to tell what we’ve noticed or experienced...We’re painting in those faint images and sensations ourselves, layering them onto more concrete descriptions of place and reality.
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February 09, 2021
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February 09, 2021
As the sun soars, heat blots out birdsong, the scratchy call of insects, and soon there’s nothing but the tramp of our boots across the parched earth.
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February 08, 2021
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February 03, 2021
Ruminate Happenings Spotlight on Anne McGrath.
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January 26, 2021
All of which is to say when you remember Baker now it’s best to remember him with the wolf mask on, and if you remember the weeks you spent dating his older sister, remember only the good parts and the parts that make you look good.
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January 19, 2021
I might spend five minutes yelling into the phone, "It's me, Mamina! Your Granddaughter!" And I will hear, "Who? Who?" And I'll try and try again to no avail and think she can't hear me anymore, she can't see me anymore.
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January 12, 2021
We drank hot black Turkish coffee, quashing our grimaces, pretending our tastes had changed.
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January 05, 2021
I left after fifteen years. It was decades before I wore white, again.
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December 15, 2020
In December, it is the season of Advent in the church calendar, and in the sanctuary, large-scale artwork of a pregnant belly adorns the stage. I wonder at the quiet fury and joy of Mary, her declaration in the Magnificat that God has “filled the hungry and sent the rich away empty.”
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December 01, 2020
I understand the urge to do it up, up up and away, until you get so far gone and high the only place to come back down is on some open stretch of highway.
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