a lake is still a lake
The rice and chicken are still in the fridge. The mold has sprouted butterfly wings. It has mapped out a continent. The dark underbelly is dotted with white eyes. I caress the soft sponginess and make sure I put back the napkin over the last meal my grandfather sent me. …
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talisman and bubble
Between November 1938 and the start of World War II in September 1939, a rescue effort known as the Kindertransport organized the evacuation of 9,354 children from Nazi Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia to safety in Great Britain. They were sent alone, without their parents, and were forbidden from bringing anything …
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toilet & stool
It is commonly believed that the sitting toilet was invented by the English plumber Thomas Crapper in the 1860s. But the modern chair-like water closet is correctly attributed to English plumber John Harrington, who built one for himself and his godmother, Elizabeth I. Inside throne a queen could call …
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Eat Good for Me: An Essay on Your Late Mother’s Birthday
Cue that time you remember your mother is dead and it’s her birthday weekend, and you’re in a city where you don’t belong and you realize you did this on purpose and decide to take dead ma out to a brunch buffet like she used to take you. You think, …
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The Hybridity of Fear: A Lyric Essay
Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson 1. This morning Madam Marie Curie tells me nothing in life is to be feared, only understood. Her radioactive words in my email claim: Now is the time to understand more, so that …
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Bystander
Third grade. R. For years, he was just a boy on my bus, a boy other boys teased, a whiny boy. R—who lived less than a mile from my house, on a farm—was a boy I avoided. Then one afternoon, my mother offered to give him a ride home from …
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The French Pimp
My grandfather collected antique clocks, so there were several in every room of the house. My favorite was a graceful, black marble mantel clock that lived over the living-room fireplace. Other clocks rang the half, or even the quarter-hour, with a Westminster chime heard all around the house. But the …
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Scripted History (Rx Hx)
Lithium I was nine when I began reading prescription labels. My mother kept the lithium in a slender cabinet beside the refrigerator. Either of my two brothers or I could have grabbed the bottle when reaching for the salt. I appreciated the cadence of the word, lithium. I repeated it with …
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The Red Dot That Ends the Sentence
(a micro memoir moon cycle) When you get your period, says my dad at his house across the drafty, finished attic, let me know if you need to purchase Kotex or something. I stare at the floor, the southern sun shining through a four-pane window. I am 12. I am …
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All the Binding I Can Offer
for Tania Here’s the thick paste some kids used to taste in kindergarten. Here’s the glue we later spread over our fingers and peeled off like a second skin. Here are Sesame Street band-aids, ace bandages, arm slings, and Sharpie-signed casts. Here’s some tape: Scotch, double-sided, masking, blue. Here’s the …
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