The post The Cancer Is Calling From Inside the House appeared first on Electric Literature.

Once upon a time, I had a terrible marriage. We couldn’t stop fighting. We fought all night. We fought so loudly the neighbors complained. We threw things and called each other “prick” and “cunt.”

Of course it was a very lonely time. The shame was unbearable and black and continuous. We agonized constantly about how to stop it, and the life we could have if we could just get along. But anything we tried would start a fight. Then we’d be screaming like children, throwing things, terrified, in the filthy kitchen that never got cleaned—when you fight like that, there isn’t time for cleaning. Everything’s dirty like your life.

At the tail end of one of these fights, in the little hours, both of us exhausted and sick on adrenalin, fuck you, it’s you who, cunt, prick, idiot—I suddenly saw how absurd it was and said: “Well, you’re a skoo! And whatever you say, you’ll never be anything but a dirty skoo!”—skoo being a word I’d made up on the spot.

My husband got the joke and rolled with it, saying, “Well, you’re a ca! You’re a low-down ca, and that’s all you’ll ever be! A ca!”

We went on for a little while—you skoos are all, you’re like every other ca—both laughing, grateful, all rancor gone. We even believed we’d turned a corner. We’d had an insight that could stop the fights, and we just had to cling to that knowledge.

In the months that followed, we elaborated skoo and ca into a game. The skoo, we decided, was a weasel-like creature. We imagined a whole folk culture of skoos, where skoos told tales of a trickster figure called the Mandrake Skoo. The ca, meanwhile, was a monotheistic bird that worshipped the Great Ca on the mountain. I called my husband “Skoo.” He called me “Ca.” They were the nicknames we used when we were alone, which no one else was supposed to know.

Most of all, we made their cries to each other. The skoo’s cry was, “Skoo!” delivered with a honking plaintiveness. We skooed to each other as if across a distance, a cold swamp in which a skoo could be imagined to be stranded in a rowboat slowly taking on water. He skooed and I skooed back. We also ca-ed, which was higher in pitch, and had a falling note. One might imagine a ca to be plaintively crying from a mangrove tree in that same swamp, where she’s woken alone, confused, bird-brained, and can’t grasp where her mate has gone. My husband would skoo from the other room. I would ca back. Or we would skoo back and forth. Skoo! Ca! Skoo! Ca! It was amazing how it made us feel better; like singing.

But if we spoke in English, we would fight.

We broke up at last and became good friends. We never fought again, as if a spell had been broken. But we also never said “skoo” or “ca.” His name still came up as “Skoo” on my phone, but I never called him “Skoo.” We had other lovers and eventually spouses. That particular closeness had to come to an end.

Then it felt as if “skoo” was a magic that grew more potent with not being used. Our friendship was sacred and powerful because of it. Our friendship was not like anything else.

Here’s another story to explain what I mean. A few days after 9/11, my friend Michael was dancing in a gay club when the power went out. From one second to the next, the room went black. The music cut out and the only sounds were stumbling and muttering and nervous laughter. Soon even these died away. Michael couldn’t stop waiting for the bomb to hit. He had the irrational feeling that the world outside was gone.

Then out of the void, a frail voice sang: “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide . . . no escape from reality . . . .”

Another voice joined in, and another. Everyone there knew “Bohemian Rhapsody;” soon the whole club was singing along. They sang the song through to its end. Then they filed out together into the night, gently bumping into each other and laughing, and found the city still there, its lights still shining, as if their song had conjured it back.

We reach to each other across the abyss. We try. We skoo. We call across the abyss.

So, essentially, this is a happy life. The worst things happen, but we stand by each other. At bottom, humanity is good, not bad. The ca flies out to the skoo in its rowboat and the two of them paddle together to shore. There are other voices singing in the dark.

My skoo husband died a few years ago. The last time I saw him, we were in a restaurant, and he said to me, “Looking back on our lives, what regrets do we have?” and then he told me his regrets.

He didn’t tell me his heart had gone into tachycardia. He just picked at the terrible pasta dish the restaurant served him, for which they will burn in hell, then went home and told his wife he needed to go to the hospital.

They put him on a ventilator immediately. He never spoke or ate again.

His regrets were not having children and having stayed in academia. I had already known these regrets, of course, because we’d known each other such a long time. I don’t remember what my regrets were. My main regret now is not saving his life, though there isn’t any way I could have saved his life. Still it’s hard not to have this regret.

I’ve recently been in the part of town where this happened, so I went on a pilgrimage to the place and looked at the subway station where I watched him go down the stairs alone.

I can’t believe you can’t save people. I can’t believe you ever hate or harm them. I don’t know how it could really have happened. I want to say it’s not true.

The post You Look Like a Skoo and You Smell Like One, Too appeared first on Electric Literature.

My America is skin. Hide. The red
hair periodically in my mustache.
The sun’s inability to burn me
past the color of bread,
whole wheat. My America
is Guatemala. El salvador.
My America is Chile. My America
is unsure whether to pronounce
Chile like the country
or the admonishment you give
the child misbehaving
on the front porch. Chile. The Texas home
my great-great-grandfather built
to be burned down
in my lifetime. The cemetery where
he is buried with all the others
with Mexican last names
in that flea bite of a town.
My America is living almost
every day of my life with a sea of white
& yellow lights called Tijuana, a crack
in my bedroom window. My America
is the hard stone my grandmother
wrapped in a baby blanket
& hid in a Phoenix
basement. My America is the glowing
black waters beside Detroit’s midnight
lights: paradoxical beauty, tide, swift
current. My America is any place
where someone docked their boat
in the sand saying, This
is mine now. Minha. Mijne. Mine.

Once

We will love each other only once. The word for this is cathecting, but we’re young still & high on our own diction, leaving those words sharp with meaning back in the classrooms we were grateful to escape. Lucky. My arm around you, asleep, I imagine what our stories would be like 100 years ago. 100 years ago two people like us would never be in the same city, same province, separated by oceans. Our parents & parents' parents savor these secrets like hard candy clinking against the backs of their teeth, the silent hiss of their mouths refusing to open for the fear of losing something. Their accents something we must summon for certain stories. Would we still share the same tongues? My hair underneath your fingernails, your hair in between my fingers. Our breaths stink of skin, sunlight in dusty blinds. What would we have done to be with one another, then? Would it have been worth it for one night—the coal-fueled train, relentless desert heat, a sailboat passing Greece to a larger vessel ready to cross the Atlantic? The months it would take. The pain of leaving the rivers where your family story started, the pain of the rivers redirected from a homestead where my ancestors live in the form of blue asters. The horses I would have in the burning dust. The horses I would have buried in the ground. The horses we wouldn’t own, either way, together. Touching each other’s faces would risk a necklace made of rope, the judgment of gravity from a tree. Touching each other’s faces always risks something, even now. Together, hours in bed dissolve like sugar in water. There’s more clean water in the kitchen than we can ask for. How many nights did our parents' parents snuff out the light worrying for such things to stay alive, to stay hydrated while outrunning hate? Even still none of us, as children, could imagine having a palm with a blue glow & so much power we could fit the world into our fist, much less them. For once I wish I could explain this to you, to us, to everyone wondering why we’re like this loving someone we know is gone before the body has left the bed, no matter how much our mouths thirsted for each other, sharing stiff drinks & making loose plans to nowhere. No, this isn’t what they imagined for us. Neither did they imagine our chiseled faces, the glow we’ve made of these skins that would surprise them with their smoothness, their color in the dark. Let every night like this be a toast to the names of those before us whose names we don’t know & didn’t have the chance to be this free, committed to finding a future of our own making, even if it’s only once.

The post In America, I Am Whole Wheat Bread appeared first on Electric Literature.

I loved you, and when you left, you left a Space. And I fell in love with that Space. Not right away, I mean, but over time. At first I hated the Space. It was just always there! But then I somehow got used to the Space. Then I started to appreciate it, and then I missed it when it was gone. 

Before I knew it, the Space and I had become friends. I started really enjoying hanging out with the Space; I liked talking to it, and listening to it too—to its opinions, hopes, doubts and worst fears. This might sound strange, but the Space and I even sort of had our own secret language.

One night, the Space and I ran into some old friends of mine, David and Iris—I don’t think you know them—walking out of the movie theater. “David!” I said. “Iris!” I hugged them both. “I want you to meet someone.” I gestured to the Space. “This is the Space.” 

David and Iris looked at me, and then at each other, and then at the Space. 

“And this,” I said to the Space, “is David and Iris.” 

The Space smiled. 

“I’m sorry,” said Iris. “What?”  

“Iris,” said David. 

“This is the Space,” I said.

The Space waved.

We went our separate ways, but a few hours later I texted David: So what did you think?

Of the movie? he responded. Yeah good.

No of the Space! I wrote. We’re just friends now but I think there might be a real connection here?

And I was right about that. The following week, the Space and I went for a walk behind the college when it started to downpour. I took the Space’s hand and we ran for cover under a nearby tree, where I stopped abruptly against the trunk and the Space sort of stumbled into me. Before I knew it, the Space was looking into my eyes and I was looking into the Space’s eyes. Then the Space put its arms around me and kissed me, and I kissed back. 

The weeks that followed might have been the best weeks of my life. Some nights the Space and I went on proper dates—skating hand-in-hand at the university ice rink; hiking up Mt. Geryk—and other nights we just spent hours on my couch talking to each other and kissing. It really didn’t matter what we did as long as we were together. One night that summer, I told the Space I was falling in love with it, and the Space said it loved me too. That was our first night together; I fell asleep in the Space’s warm embrace.

Soon the Space and I were basically living together; it kept its own place, but it was at my apartment all the time. We got used to each other’s daily rhythms and habits; we ate our meals together, exercised together, watched TV or read together every night. I grew accustomed to falling asleep next to the Space, and waking up to find the Space still there beside me.

Admittedly, sometimes the Space would get quiet—distant. At times I felt like the Space was right there with me, focused and present, but at others it seemed vacant and removed. In those moments, as strange as it sounds, I almost felt lonely—despite the presence of the Space.

One night that fall, the Space and I were watching a science fiction movie when my phone rang. It was you. I was taken aback; I hadn’t talked to you in months. “Hold on a second, will you?” I said to the Space, and I took the phone into the other room. 

You asked if we could meet and talk. “Yeah, sure we can,” I said. “But I should tell you that I’m seeing someone.” 

“Oh,” you said. “You are?” 

“Do you remember the Space that you left when we broke up?” 

“The—what?” 

“There was a Space—a really significant one,” I said. “And while we didn’t get along at first, we eventually became friends, and—” 

“You and—who now?” 

“But the relationship, you know, evolved,” I said. “And now things with the Space are going really well.” 

“Oh-kay,” you said. “Well, I—OK.” 

“But listen—how are you?” I said. “Is everything OK?”  

“Yeah,” you said. “I’m fine.” 

“Good—I’m really glad to hear that,” I said. “It’s really nice to talk to you,” I added, because it was. I’d missed you—maybe even more than I’d realized.

When I got off the phone, though, the Space sat me down and said it needed some time apart. I was flabbergasted. “I don’t understand,” I told it. “I thought things were going great.”

But the Space said it needed space. I asked the Space how long it had felt this way, but the Space wouldn’t elaborate; it just sat there silently, an empty expression on its face.

“We’ve built a life together,” I told the Space.

The Space didn’t even reply.

“How can you not have anything to say to that?” I said. 

The Space left my place that very night. I was so bereft I couldn’t sleep. I called you early the next morning and you came right over to console me. “I just miss the Space so much,” I sobbed into your shoulder. 

“I know,” you said. 

“I honestly don’t know how I’m going to live without it.”

“I know it seems impossible,” you told me. “But tomorrow, you’re going to realize that you don’t need the Space as much as you thought. And there’ll be less of the Space in your mind the day after that, and the day after that. Until one day you realize you’ve forgotten the Space completely.”

I nodded as if I understood, but inside I knew I’d never get over the Space. I vowed right then and there to keep its memory close, and to hold a place for the Space in my heart.

The post I’m in Love with My Ex’s Absence appeared first on Electric Literature.

For my grandmother, Estelle

My Name Is Not in Existence (1975/1983)

After CooXooEii Black

The post Grandmother Knows All the Devil’s Pressure Points appeared first on Electric Literature.

When I wake up, Kai has a hump jutting out of his back. Except, when I wipe the sleep from my face, I see the hump is a McDonald’s restaurant about the size of a backpack. He’s bent over in the snail position, naked except for a pair of boxers, inspecting himself in the mirror door, his face creased with concentration.

I love McDonald’s. I love it so much, in fact, I use it as an emotional measuring stick. For example, I do this thing where I say I’d rather have McDonald’s than X, where X is a variable, which stands for someone or something unpleasant. Usually, the X is also someone or something of considerable importance. Last night, the X was Kai. 

He got home two hours late from the video game night with his friends and, to top it off, he forgot it was his turn to pick up dinner.

“We were stuck on the final boss,” he said. “The guys get weird when I bail.” 

Recently he’s been pulling these stunts a lot. So I threw the TV remote across the room and stormed off to fill my wine glass in the kitchen. There, propped against the counter, I fed him my favorite line, implied a McRib and order for French fries would offer more emotional fulfillment than him. 

“Anybody in there?” he asks, neck craned at the building in the mirror.

I slump off the mattress and crawl over beside him. My fingernail taps one of the tiny glass windows. Inside, there are booths, ivory plants, a pair of soda fountains, trash cans with plastic trays stacked on top, a counter, and overhead menus.

“I didn’t mean what I said last night. About the McDonald’s and McRib. I didn’t think my wish would come true.”

“What are you talking about?” Kai asks. “What wish? I got out of bed and this growth was coming out of my back, but I think it’s starting to look like a building.”

“Do you want me to call for help?” I ask. “This seems serious.”

“Saw is in the garage. We can cut it off.”

Of course, in this instance, “we” means “you,” as in me.

“Let me move you to the backyard,” I say, grabbing his foot. “Weather’s beautiful this afternoon.” I drag him outside into the grass. He grunts and wheezes, but he doesn’t protest.

Despite my apprehension, Kai seems unperturbed by me playing surgeon. I pour beer in a glass and set it beside his arms. I’ve brought out some of his favorite comics, so he can distract himself while I work. He wiggles his arms and tells me not to worry.

He smells like cheeseburgers and dollar-menu apple pies; much better than the cologne he wears. He’s radiating familiar warmth, which reminds me of what it feels like inside a busy kitchen. Unlike his usual aroma, it’s comforting.

I nurse him some beer and torture the jagged blade across the building’s base. Metal grinds against brick and he yelps like an injured dog. My breathing grows labored. This goes on for twenty minutes and I don’t make a scratch.

“Coming along great,” I lie.

He’s started to stretch like he’s a bear skin rug with a coffee table in the center, except the coffee table is a McDonald’s. Little ceiling lights have illuminated the restaurant’s interior and I see uniformed employees at the registers. Their faces are too small to discern, but they wave like they want me to open the door. 

Kai grunts my name and tips over the beer glass. He looks up to meet my face, but his head has gone pancake flat like it’s sinking into the lawn.

“I’m almost out of beer,” he says.

I want to say I love you, but the lie pushes beyond the bounds of my comfort zone.

So I grab him another beer. While he dozes, I prop his head atop his favorite comic book. “I’m sorry I wished for the McDonald’s,” I say, and as I say it, I wonder if it’s true.

Back inside the house, I call up my old work friend, Vanessa. She has an interest in manifestation, intention setting, wishes. She’s not full-blown new age, but she does tarot and astrology readings. She claims she manifested an ex’s orgasm from five hundred miles away. One time, when money was tight, she purchased a jacket containing a stack of one-hundred-dollar bills in the pocket, a wish she’d been making for weeks.

“Is it possible to manifest a person into something else by accident,” I ask. “Kai’s had a bad morning.”

Unfortunately, my question prompts an interrogation. Vanessa doesn’t believe in accidental manifestation. She volunteers to lend me some books from her library, let me do some independent research if I’d rather not go into detail, but without specifics, she can’t share insight. 

“I think my boyfriend is turning into a McDonald’s,” I say.

“Oh, I used to date a man like that. He went through an Arby’s phase. Couldn’t get him to eat anything else. Doubt it involves a wish or intention. Give it a month, and if he doesn’t change up his diet, consider an intervention. A lot of guys are resistant to therapy, but if he’s depressed, maybe you can talk him into group therapy. Remember to visualize him as the best version of himself, and when you visualize, express gratitude. Gratitude’s important.”

“Thanks, I’ll give it a shot.”

When I hang up, I try to visualize Kai, the wish, and taking back the wish, but I never ate breakfast, and lunch time has passed. My stomach gurgles and I visualize a McDonald’s quarter-pounder haloed by a golden glow. Each time I attempt to picture my boyfriend, the image sharpens, and the light intensifies.

Is it normal to get hungry during a crisis?

I Google the question, but I refresh the search page before the results can populate, because I don’t want to know the answer.

By the time I return to the backyard, the McDonald’s is as big as a shed. Kai’s feet stick out from the bottom, like the building fell on him, like he’s the dead witch in The Wizard of Oz. There’s a flowerbed, containing his favorite comic nestled inside some petunias, at the part of the building where his head used to rest. His limbs must’ve sunken into the gravel parking lot or fed into the grass medians around the perimeter. The Golden M sign grows out of the spot where his left hand had been placed and, beside it, the glass of beer I poured for him sits untouched.

I sniff around the restaurant’s dumpster, the hedges, and black-top oil slicks, searching for the scent of him, a clue he was here and I didn’t make it up, but the whole yard smells of grease and grilled meat, salty French fries. It smells like McDonald’s. I cup my hands around my mouth and call his name, ask him to let me know if he’s okay, though I don’t anticipate a response and, after an hour, my voice grows weak.

It takes a long time of sitting there brooding on the gravel to accept my situation. It takes me longer to stand and work up the nerve to pass through the glass doors. Sundown, and Kai is the same size as any McDonald’s across America.

“It’s the smell,” I say to the cashier, when she asks what brought me here this evening. She looks like Kai. All the employees look like Kai, or watered-down clones of Kai. Or I miss him. Or I love McDonald’s and he has become McDonald’s, so in a way I have come to love him and my memories of him too. 

“Are there any other customers?” I ask.

“No, but there will be other customers.”

“But what if I don’t want to share?”

“Then don’t. This is your McDonald’s.”

I don’t know if there’s any grief to eat my way out of, because right now, for the first time in a while, I feel content. I order a McRib, the extra-large fries I’ve been craving all day, a large fountain soda, and two of the dollar-menu apple pies. The restaurant is open twenty-four hours. It has reliable wifi, immaculate bathrooms. It will keep me fed and see to my needs regardless of circumstances. I wish I could speak to Kai over the intercom, hear his voice, but I take it back, because I know I’m better off longing after the possibility, letting it linger like an echo in my mind while I dine in the peace of a corner booth, feet kicked up on the table. I slurp through my straw, nibble on my pie, yawn like I have nowhere to go.

I figure this is good a place as any to stay the night.

The post I Turned My Lover Into a McRib appeared first on Electric Literature.

Once, this stable hosted  
tens of thoroughbreds.

But this ranch has a history 
of lost riders

and now, there is
nothing else to ride.

Set free by forgetfulness 
rather than truth,

I am comfortable 
with my beliefs of the unseen.

Under the night sky, 
scars become spider veins—

like an atom
blurred for naked eyes.

There is migration 
anytime the sun coils 

into its cotton shell 
or when the ground cracks, 

because it thirsts for rain. 

Stalactites hang 
down the roof of a cave 

where shadows 
eclipsed the hieroglyphs.

Before the storm, 
sharks fled their nurseries  

for the abyssopelagic zone, where 
the moon has always been an alien.

Light

—	with a line from Kahf or the Cave
As the sea rises, it absorbs lights 
from the sky in packets.

A spider tents a web bridge 
across the well of oyster shells.

Inside the mirror are reflections 
of cities on water.

The window glasses in this house 
are old as toothed edges of cowries 

on the sea floor. A fisherman returned 
after a storm. In the past, disciples  

of this blue water sat on the beach 
with lungs filled with hot air, 

& thirsty for their wounds to be healed. 
Omi o ni ota, omi ni ìwòsàn ohun gbogbo.

Though we name what we can neither inherit 
nor mourn, man has never been most of anything.

The eye was cave enough to be a museum
for beams of wandering blue lights, 

until they vanished before it rained.  
The storm blew octopuses to the beach.

If the water breaks through, walk
into the fog until you touch the water, 

A smoke from a burnfire
dilates the cave’s entrances, 

hungered with grief, a new moon 
was sighted in a jar of salt water.

The post The Moon Has Always Been an Alien appeared first on Electric Literature.

Replying All on the Death Announcement Email

On New Year’s Day, I got an email from an old writer friend announcing plans to end her life. Her life was already ending. This expedited ending-of-life had been approved by a medical professional. She was electing to die with dignity. Her death was scheduled for the following day. Like a hair appointment or a visit to the dentist.

It wasn’t an email directly to me. I subscribe to her newsletter.

Farewell, the subject line read. That was her voice. Grand and direct. There was no beating around the bush. Happy New Year! the email began and then: I’m planning to end my life.

After I closed the email, I tried to stop thinking about her, but that night, on the eve of when I knew she was going to die, I couldn’t sleep. I googled her name, read every article that appeared on my screen. Read all the hits that weren’t actually about her. The ones with her name crossed out that the algorithm insisted were relevant. Maybe it knew something I didn’t.

I read about all the diseases I was probably suffering from that had nothing to do with her (or the disease that was killing her), I read about all the new diet trends that would shed my hips of love handles (I hadn’t seen her since she got sick, but in her last photo she was rail thin), I read about a minor celebrity cheating on another minor celebrity and then them reconciling and then them breaking up and then them getting back together again (she loved the thrill of gossip)—I read everything in the hopes of catching a glimpse of my soon-to-be dead old writer friend.

A week later, I got an email from a literary magazine announcing the death of its co-founder. I did not know its co-founder. I just subscribed to the newsletter.

I read the announcement from the literary magazine as if it were the announcement of the death of my old writer friend because after she died, I didn’t receive such an email. Because she was not here to write one. Or to send one. Though she could’ve scheduled one. Which is a thought I’ve had more than once since her death. Why didn’t she do that? That would’ve felt so like her. Not so fast, it might’ve read. I’m still here.

After the newsletter announcing the death of the literary magazine co-founder, my inbox was flooded.

I am so sorry to hear this. May you and yours find comfort. Keep him close to your heart.

I didn’t email anyone when my old writer friend died because it felt like I didn’t know her well enough. We met at a writing residency in Wyoming in 2016. We watched the presidential election together: I baked cookies, she bought liquor. We only inhabited the same space for a handful of weeks. So, how can I justify the vacuum suck of losing her?

The day after the election, we sat at a kitchen table and talked about our bodies. About who they belonged to. About culpability. I remember us disagreeing. The strangeness of feeling so connected to each other and then realizing, suddenly, that we may not actually know each other.  

I cannot keep the literary magazine co-founder close to my heart because I did not know him at all.

Life is eternal! Your memories are the tap that keeps him living!

I think my old writer friend would’ve liked the idea of tapping a memory, like a keg or a maple tree.

Peace and love!
(The sender included emojis of a peace sign and a yellow heart.)

I don’t think my old writer friend liked emojis. I’m not sure of this, but I just get a sense. She was whimsical, and danced wildly before she got sick, and very often swam naked, but I think emojis might’ve been beneath her.

After the residency, we wrote each other breathless emails. She was fond of exclamation points and caps lock. She didn’t need emojis to let you know how she felt.

Hah! You crack me up! YES, I miss you too! GET OVER IT! Enjoy the super-moon tonight! We won’t see it here. Too cloudy . . . Boo!

It was cloudy here last night too, but now the moon is beautiful.

Send me your essay about the election!!!

Please stay in touch often. What else am I forgetting?

Hello Everyone!
(This was the first sender who acknowledged they were emailing multiple people.)

I am sending my deepest sympathies and wish peace and warm memories for everyone whose lives he touched . . . .

The co-founder of the literary magazine did not touch my life, but my old writer friend who just ended her own life via death with dignity did. She is the person who told me to: Go for it with my now-spouse. We were hiking through the rolling grasslands of Wyoming at sunset. I don’t remember the words she used, but I remember her insistence. That night, I booked a plane ticket.

In her Farewell email, she said that she “had a feeling she’d be returning to haunt a number of people in a good way.” I’m certain I wouldn’t even make the longlist of hundreds or thousands of people who meant something to her, but a part of me wonders if that email chain might just be a hello from her.

Not a hello for me.  

Maybe someone who loved her—who she loved—is also on that mailing list.

I don’t deserve a hello because in that essay about the election, I mentioned a conversation she and I had. After it was published, she wrote me an email with the subject line: good job—all lowercase—then said the essay was lovely and impassioned, even if I made her sound kind of prim. I apologized once and then twice and then we exchanged email after email. The last one from her read: I felt a bit betrayed. That said, I love you anyway!, then she signed off: Xoc.

And I never stopped feeling guilty.

I didn’t invent anything for the essay. I wrote it as I remembered it. But that’s the thing about memory. What it means to me is not what it means to her. And she’s gone now, so I’ll never know which version is true.

If she were still here, she would probably say: GET OVER IT. But the thing is, I can’t.

In Wyoming, we were supposed to watch the first woman become president, but instead, we didn’t. My old writer friend was supposed to live into her 90s, but instead, she didn’t.

In the interest of not getting emails from everyone on this list (which is huge), I suggest going forward we refrain from replying all about this news.

Be blessed and please unsubscribe me from your mailing list.

My condolences. Unsubscribe! Thanks.

Please do not email me.

Stop replying all. If it has a double arrow don’t press it.

I also don’t want to be part of this list anymore. While waiting for you to delete me, I will declare all your emails as spam. So, act FAST! Warmly . . . .

This woman is grieving. Do you have no heart? This could’ve been a space for healing and instead you’re bringing nothing but negativity.

Please unsubscribe me these emails are becoming very stressful to read.

AGREED. Please take me off this chain. I have a newborn at home and I really don’t need my inbox filling up with emails about death.

I do not like death. Please unsubscribe me.

On the first day of the new year, I thought about responding to my old writer friend’s Farewell email. The email that announced that the next day she was dying. I didn’t want to burden her with an email on the last day of her life. But she’d written to me. Well not to me, but to her subscribers, and I wanted to say something. But I didn’t know what.

Maybe I wanted to say: You didn’t have to forgive me.

Maybe I wanted to say: I didn’t deserve you. 

Maybe I wanted to say: I will do better next time.

Then I began typing.

The post You Can’t Unsubscribe From Grief appeared first on Electric Literature.

We were raised on food stamps
that looked like British pounds

and dead-end jobs where bodies slung
over crates and cans and cam shafts

or pouches with pennies and coupons
and a giant magnet sign wearing the paint

off the car was just another insult.
This pepperoni’s here for you, America.

We wanna be poor. We wanna live off
the government, you say. Where in hell

does Mr. Government live, I say. Show me
the gated drive, let me buzz in a pizza

box filled with the greasy process that will take
his heart. That’s my message, America,

the poor don’t have to do a damn thing
to ruin your dreams. You’ll gnash the cheese

and constipate yourself. You’ll tell me
your work ethic deserves a Sandals vacation.

I hate to sweat. I hate humidity. We were raised
by swollen feet, the hemorrhages of little

numbers for the same hours on earth as you.
You think you’re traveling to an island getaway.

The palm trees fucking hate you. Remember that.
The sun will take your skin the same.

After Being Diagnosed With Celiac Disease

My wife must wash her lips
before kissing me: the poison

turns me into a balloon
on the couch for days:

a silhouette of wheat stalk
dangerous as the hammer

and sickle: disease
makes one melodramatic,

the weight grain adds to the blood:
I’ve been so heavy

with thoughts of death: the American
goldfinch perches on the window

sill, gazes at our family, asking
for water in this heatwave:

I’ve learned to complain frankly
to all the random experts:

family, friend, supposed foe: you
have no idea

what this body says to me
when I ignore it: I don’t understand

how one can mock pronouns
when we know so very little

of what happens within our own skin,
much less another’s.

The post This American Dream Tastes Like Government Cheese appeared first on Electric Literature.

I am sick
of not winning the National Poetry Series.
I am sick of waiting
for the mammogram, the ultrasound,
the appointment to discuss the results.
Tomorrow is the first day of school 
in the year of our Lord 10x the number 
of Covid cases as last fall
and no online options. 
In the part of my mind I like to call
The Spite Museum,
I put each of my manuscripts in a different fairly ugly
dress and make a meme: 40 times a bridesmaid,
never a bride. But I always hated that saying.
Mostly because Never a Bride sounded thrilling,
I was killing it there in the Spite Museum
as I made one manuscript unwilling
to wear a dress, and one breast
missing. It went hiking.
When I had a child I named her life
and when I had another he almost died
but then lived so I named him for the echo
that falls down where once a river carved
stone so the walls carry sound. A good place
for a wail. 
I am sick
possibly from the lump
but it may also be that this is the time my husband
of 22 years decided to tell me a string of lies.
I have been kind—his word—
and paying very close attention
like a wife or something
for a year and a half. 
I understand irony. I hate ironing. 
Once I, too, had other feelings. 
I have tried to tone it down.
To come clean.  
Yesterday I walked for two hours without stopping
and then I sat down in the water and cried. 
A heron could care less. 
An osprey stabbed a fish.

Ekphrasonnet Adding Gray Hair to the Cauldron

My whole childhood I was a skeleton wax castle. My plan: 
to marry Jake      the Alligator Man.

I floated my ghost self      down the boardwalks, growling at every tourist
in our angry coast town,

my father his pizza delivery box beer belly Camels cue stick —
my mother her darned socks Oh dear a rosary clicking 

her midwestern teeth &   when I was a calf 
I lived   in this thistle-filled pasture so no wonder my adult self is split in half.

When I was a girl      I lived in this stream
When I was a fish      I glid   my metal-sided dream
& borrowed my name from the middle of another country, hail or

cloud, they taught us not to mix metaphors, use sailor
mouth, or to miss meat, 

& they will differ——if they do——      as enough to drink from enough to eat

Ekphrasonnet With Contrapuntal Stumble

The post My Spite Could Fill a Museum appeared first on Electric Literature.