Oculus giving up Andromeda, pulse of variegated phlox, fog-drenched, a virginal shepherd on lamb watch, terrine of fowl and gilled chanterelles, cold enmeshment of mare and filly, ecocide laws, unforgiving blistered forests of a once- divided country, impasse o’er a holiday, Isle of Man or the Canaries, ah from Freud’s Viennese clinic, opening seam of teenaged wallpaper, ultra-ambient tiger prawns, a third martini, Tiger Lily jealous in first edition luster.
The North, which faces north, is stern and blunt like a flash. Seemingly harsh, silent and swift, aggressive and white, seemingly full of magnesium, a waterfall in a vacuum, I say. It weaves and weaves, I give. In the middle of the process my thoughts wander to cigarettes, which I forgot break the membrane and hurt concentration. They push off their backs on their own, push off my shoulders on...
It wasn’t early retirement, it was a layoff late in life, and now that jobs were about to open up somewhere else, in some other division, the man kept being told not to make himself a stranger. Some days he could make himself feel just a stone’s throw from his old life. On other days he became known as the perfect guest. One host was a woman whose face kept...
I drove onto the road from the Goodwill parking lot without a mishap. I wondered whether that was the same as driving out with a hap. I could see that my route was exceedingly simple, one road, Interstate 95 all the way to Washington. I was not driving south because I had been instructed to drive south, though I had been, but because I, contrary to my nature, was concerned...
The war in Afghanistan was ruining my sex life. All month, I’d been trying to avoid that annoying question from Martin. “But, wait, where is your family from?” he asked over the shower steam the second time we had sex. I laughed and tweaked the ends of his sensitive little nipples with suds. A week later, he tried again. “Sorry, I didn’t catch it the first time, I know you...
When I felt particularly bad about the night before, I chugged a glass of saltwater, to flush out the toxins. If I timed it right, I could dial in to our Monday call and say hello before situating myself over the toilet, my insides liquefying into painful sludge as my coworkers said their good mornings and asked about the weather in Seattle or Houston or Tampa or wherever it was...
In May of 1985, following the Sandinista National Liberation Front’s final defeat of the Somoza regime, the Reagan administration imposed an embargo on Nicaragua. The White House paired this open economic aggression with more covert forms, channeling money and weapons to counterrevolutionary forces — Contra groups who counted industrial terrorism among their tactics, burning literal tons of product in raids on government-allied coffee cooperatives. This multifront attack made the Nicaraguan...
When news broke in June that the Supreme Court had struck down Roe v. Wade, we were not the only ones who thought back to Barbara Kruger’s iconic silkscreen “Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground).” Originally created in 1989, the piece, for better or worse, remains timely — like much of Kruger’s other work. Her immediately recognizable and frequently imitated style has resulted in some of the most indelible images...
It is easy to discount most new entries in the canon of conservative cinema, on account of the fact that they tend to be bad. By conservative cinema I mean overtly partisan agitprop, not the Clint Eastwood kind, and by bad I mean their dialogue is sermonic, their symbolism is obvious, their edits waffle between awkward and uncanny, and their casts represent a collection of Hollywood afterthoughts who ascribe their...
Let me tell you a story. I was living in New York and going on dates with people I met on the internet. I was looking for love and was mostly getting sex, for which I was grateful, even if I was a little lonely. I went on a date. It was a third date, and on our second we’d slept together. It was good, the sort of gasping, grasping...