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Your Son’s Good at Times Tables

I’m sorry, I really am. I know my general demeanor isn’t threatening (sad eyes, nose in book, phone that I neurotically check placed on the tray-table ), but still, I know I can’t look approachable. You’re traveling with your son, but you don’t look like a mum. There’re no lines …

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Transitory

Dad comes home early from work, says he’s taking us out to dinner—not to our usual spot, but to one of those places where they bring you a box of tissues and a bottle of mineral water without asking—to celebrate his visa to America. His friend from Damascus will find …

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Serotiny

Sheila, my upstairs neighbor, sat on the roof deck and flicked her cigarette lighter. Our old brick building has five floors, two units per floor—left, right. I’m 2L. She’s 3R. She wore her bathrobe over a T-shirt and shorts and had on rubber slide sandals with thick knee-high socks. The …

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Hey You

                     Translated from Nima Yushij, 1941 Hey you, sitting on the shore, laughing in joy, someone is dying in the waves. Someone is constantly beating with his hands and legs. On this agitated, dark, heavy sea you see when you’re drunk …

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First Crush

                                               for the monks Father Constantine returns from Mount Athos with ashes. They are magic, he says, it’s a mystery. I am thirteen, ready to marry, pledge my …

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Sataneen Lumen Määrä

I knew a short story writer who’d get furious if anyone ever wrote about rain, as if she owns raindrops—and she does. And I’m like that with snow—memories of walking off of our roof onto the snowbank without any falling, digging a tunnel to get to our mailbox and how …

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After After After

I don’t know how I will save every one of my friends each queer stitch to the blanket, unraveling I am afraid of the world          I shouldn’t be afraid of the world I don’t want to be drunk and monstrous, but no one will take me …

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In Praise of Boring Sex

Sing to the body mouth-breathing beside you, a body so obvious that you are the last person to notice the thinning hair, the weary lines, the pale marked flesh. Sing to the sleeping hand that reaches out, in autonomic comfort, to knead your sagging breasts. Sing to the sharp hipbones …

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The Lightning Monster

I think I was still grounded for breaking the A.C. unit while climbing onto the roof last spring, but I might have been grounded for stealing Tanner’s jersey at soccer practice last week, or I might not even be grounded at all. I never knew my freedom status at any …

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