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 […]
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.
An Artist of the Floating World
Bradford is careful with metaphors, and as with kinds of space, she is partial to those that can tip. To be at sea is an adventure.
The Wyrd Ones
“I’ve always thought that ancient stories unlock something about what is happening now and can be a map to interpreting strange situations. “
Two Stories
Chekhov’s Trust Can’t you ever trust anything? I don’t know but my dad used to wear a hat that said Question Everything in the last decade of his life. Then he withered up and lost his mind. Can’t you never trust nothing? I want to tell you that it’s okay. I only mean that in […]
No Sell
We think every word we speak is a sales word. We’re selling our reputation our self-worth our special skills our us. But I’m of the school of no sell.None of our sentences actually attempt to sell anything.They are shot out of an economic cannon one cannot see.They are confetti dancing over the void like those old pop gun party […]
Two Poems
“The rattle of ice in a glass
is a happy sound / that reminds me of my father
fixing a triple vodka martini.” – Elaine Equi
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