When I turned twelve, my family moved to the edge of state game land. I walked its paths or made my own while listening to the wind hushing treetops, my stride shushing ferns. As I walked, my throat emptied, and a buried sound forced its way out of my face. I walked into being something […]
As a Gemini, my astrological profile tells me that my best physical feature is my shoulders, blades and all. This feels like a joke or a euphemism, how you’d compliment an ugly woman. After my divorce, when a new boyfriend told me I had beautiful feet, I thought so it’s come to this. Shoulders may […]
Disability Studies Quarterly 39.4, 2019 This index is a memoir of dyslexia, which distills, palimpsests, or perhaps kills the real and unreadable primary text. What’s re(a)d pools and beams here. This index leaks and stains your hands as you hold it in mind; it stutters, sounds out, backtracks and questions itself as it attempts […]
Glance #1 If looks could kill, goes the expression, and in fact they can and do. To glance means to glide off a struck thing, to strike obliquely. We are talking about weapons now: to dart, to shoot, and about light: a blinding shine. Men have a way of glancing at women that lets us […]
I will never forget where I was when the Senate voted to confirm a twisted, white, rapist to the highest court in our nation. On October 6, 2018, my “#MeToo as Literary Form” panel at the &Now Festival of Innovative Writing assembled to address the very brand of predation epitomized on the national stage.
I don’t think of it as I’m driving my 12-year-old to her first sleep-away camp, two and a half hours north of our home in Michigan. It comes to me that night as I’m falling asleep, in the dreamy limbo just before sleep, in the enchanted hour of exhaustion effortlessly turning to panic, in the […]