The journalist and biographer Jason McBride and I have some confusion about how we first met—definitely before we were in Germany together for a symposium. The marathon reading of Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School we both took part in? The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery? KGB Bar in New York’s […]
Mrs. Diet Coke
ELLA WIPES SUGAR OFF HER LAP, wrinkling her black mini dress from Vetements. With a half-empty bag of sour gummies on the adjacent seat, she hopes to ward off new passengers boarding the busy train. The candy and a Diet Coke are lunch on this bright Tuesday. It’s been a sunny afternoon, but on her […]
Three poems by Casey Jarrin
The Vampyropod waits in a drawer her ten tentacles unnoticed by paleontologists distracted by the flash of prehistoric sharks all those teeth grand aunt octopussat twelve centimeters across the size of a postcardthe length of your heart ten tiny limbs encased in Bear Gulch limestone under shifting Montana skies a lazy hawk a fast moving cloud before Rex and […]
Intermission
Instead of going to see an old movie,We go for a ride. You emit a feelingThat makes anyone in your companyCertain we are all loved by someone.I have several memories of each placeWe have been. There is no reason youShould remind me of my father’s longSilences, but I miss them now, and notBecause of you—which […]
Edmund White’s Year in Books
The author of the classic queer trilogy, A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony wonders if writers still care enough about originality.
At Home with Beckett Rosset
I’m on the couch with Beckett Rosset watching a Giants game. He’s gifted me, like the thousands of guests he’s had in his home this year, the pleasure of chain smoking indoors. This afternoon, Beckett is getting ready for a reading he’ll perform in a few hours at Andy Maillet’s Room 2 salon series. He […]
Emergency Contact
My brother’s eye was swollen shut. When he finally woke, opening the good one, he said sorry and thank you to everyone who checked his status. A nurse told me that after the ambulance had dropped him off, he wouldn’t stop yelling obscenities and taking swings at anyone who came near. Now the nursing staff […]
Bless the Perverts
If the artist Carlos Motta and the novelist Rabih Alameddine have a common purpose, it rests in their enthusiastic resistance to the overtures of dominant cultures. They revel in celebrating difference over assimilation, and lionizing the so-called pervert over the pure. Each places his talent at the service of counter-narratives, those stories that rarely make […]
Relative Time
Albert Einstein and Shakespeare’s Rosalind agree that time travels at divers paces with divers persons. Time, Rosalind says, trots with the young maid toward her wedding day but gallops with the thief to the gallows. I propose to show how time differs for persons waiting for someone with whom they have an appointment at an […]
The Perfect Length
We usually get takeout, so he looks puzzled when he comes into my studio and finds me a little tipsy from having had some of the vin in the coq au vin I made in my teal Le Creuset braiser, which I set on my CB2 bistro table and serve on vintage Wedgwood china.
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