A Few Favorites

“Telo,” The Rumpus

Part of me believes I already sensed a slant sensuality to this placeless place, already associated my body with the hotel’s used cleanness. A public privateness that felt like invisibility. I will never see you again, I thought as my laughter echoed off the concrete. I will never be seen by you again.

“My High School’s Secret Fantasy Slut League,” Narratively

“The real question is, what type of environment creates this? No one wanted to talk about that.”

“Father as Natural Disaster,” CutBank (print only)

My early years smelled of eucalyptus. The trees enclosed my grade school in the Berkeley hills on all sides, and the products of their molting littered the cement schoolyard, pencil shavings of bark, slender leaves curved and tapered at the tips like goose feathers. 

“Boys Will Be,” Guernica

In the murky dark, the boys’ limbs had silver linings; there had to be a fluorescent bulb somewhere out of frame, I thought, the kind that casts more shadow than light.

“Domus,” Gulf Coast (print only)

It’s the first semester of my sophomore year of college, and I’m hunched over my logic textbook, wrestling language into a different shape—whole sentences into single variables, relative clauses into algebraic expressions, conditionalities into simple proofs.